Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
sure the rest is fair and sound. Both as physiological and psychical
histories, they are full of instruction. In Alfieri, especially, the
nervous disease generated in the frame by any uncongenial tension of the
brain, the periodical crises in his health, the manner in which his
accesses of passion came upon him, afford infinite suggestion to one who
has an eye for the circumstances which fashion the destiny of man. Let
the physician compare the furies of Alfieri with the silent rages of
Byron, and give the mother and pedagogue the light in which they are now
wholly wanting, showing how to treat such noble plants in the early
stages of growth. We think the "hated cap" would not be put a second
time on the head so easily diseased.
The biography of Cellini, it is commonly said, is more interesting than
any romance. It _is_ a romance, with the character of the hero fully
brought out. Cellini lived in all the fulness of inward vigor, all the
variety of outward adventure, and passed through all the signs of the
Zodiac, in his circling course, occasionally raising a little vapor from
the art magic. He was really the Orlando Furioso turned Goldsmith, and
Angelicas and all the Peers of France joined in the show. However, he
never lived deeply; he had not time; the creative energy turned outward
too easily, and took those forms that still enchant the mind of Europe.
Alfieri was very different in this. He was like the root of some
splendid southern plant, buried beneath a heap of rubbish. Above him was
a glorious sky, fit to develop his form and excite his colors; but he
was compelled to a long and terrible struggle to get up where he could
be free to receive its influence. Institutions, language, family, modes
of education,--all were unfit for him; and perhaps no man was ever
called to such efforts, after he had reached manly age, to unmake and
remake himself before he could become what his inward aspiration craved.
All this deepened his nature, and it _was_ deep. It is his great force
of will and the compression of Nature within its iron grasp, where
Nature was so powerful and impulsive, that constitutes the charm of his
writings. It is the man Alfieri who moves, nay, overpowers us, and not
his writings, which have no flow nor plastic beauty. But we feel the
vital dynamics, and imagine it all.
By us Americans, if ever such we really are to be, Alfieri should be
held sacred as a godfather and holy light. He was a harbinger of what
most gives this time its character and value. He was the friend of
liberty, the friend of man, in the sense that Burns was--of the native
nobleness of man. Soiled and degraded men he hated. He was, indeed, a
man of pitiless hatred as of boundless love, and he had bitter
prejudices too, but they were from antipathies too strongly intertwined
with his sympathies for any hand less powerful than that of Death to
rend them away.
But our space does not permit us to do any justice to such a life as
Alfieri's. Let others read it, not from their habitual, but an eternal
point of view, and they cannot mistake its purport. Some will be most
touched by the storms of his youth, others by the exploits and conquests
of his later years; but all will find him, in the words of his friend
Casella, "sculptured just as he was, lofty, strange, and extreme, not
only in his natural characteristics, but in every work that did not seem
to him unworthy of his generous affections. And where he went too far,
it is easy to perceive his excesses always flowed from some praiseworthy
sentiment."
Among a crowd of thoughts suggested to the mind by reperusal of this
book, to us a friend of many years standing, we hastily note the
following:--
Alfieri knew how to be a friend, and had friends such as his masculine
and uncompromising temper fitted him to endure and keep. He had even two
or three of those noble friends. He was a perfect lover in delicacy of
sentiment, in devotion, in a desire for constancy, in a high ideal,
growing always higher, and he was, at last, happy in love. Many geniuses
have spoken worthily of women in their works, but he speaks of woman as
she wishes to be spoken of, and declares that he met the desire of his
soul realized in life. This, almost alone, is an instance where a great
nature was permanently satisfied, and the claims of man and woman
equally met, where one of the parties had the impatient fire of genius.
His testimony on this subject is of so rare a sort, we must copy it:--
"My fourth and last passion, fortunately for me, showed itself by
symptoms entirely different from the three first. In the former, my
intellect had felt little of the fires of passion; but now my heart and
my genius were both equally kindled, and if my passion was less
impetuous, it became more profound and lasting. Such was the flame which
by degrees absorbed every affection and thought of my being, and it will
never fade away except with my life. Two months satisfied me that I had
now found the _true woman_; for, instead of encountering in her, as in
all common women, an obstacle to literary glory, a hinderance to useful
occupations, and a damper to thought, she proved a high stimulus, a pure
solace, and an alluring example to every beautiful work. Prizing a
treasure so rare, I gave myself away to her irrevocably. And I certainly
erred not. More than twelve years have passed, and while I am writing
this chit-chat, having reached that calm season when passion loses its
blandishments, I cherish her more tenderly than ever; and I love her
just in proportion as glide from her in the lapse of time those
little-esteemed toll-gatherers of departing beauty. In her my soul is
exalted, softened, and made better day by day; and I will dare to say
and believe she has found in me support and consolation."
We have spoken of the peculiarities in Alfieri's physical condition.
These naturally led him to seek solace in violent exercise; and as in
the case of Beckford and Byron, horses were his best friends in the hour
of danger. This sort of man is the modern Achilles, "the tamer of
horses." In what degree the health of Alfieri was improved, and his
sympathies awakened by the society and care of these noble animals, is
very evident. Almost all persons, perhaps all that are in a natural
state, need to stand in patriarchal relations with the animals most
correspondent with their character. We have the highest respect for this
instinct and sincere belief in the good it brings; if understood, it
would be cherished, not ridiculed.
ITALY.--CARY'S DANTE.
Translating Dante is indeed a labor of love. It is one in which even a
moderate degree of success is impossible. No great Poet can be well
translated. The form of his thought is inseparable from his thought. The
births of his genius are perfect beings: body and soul are in such
perfect harmony that you cannot at all alter the one without veiling the
other. The variation in cadence and modulation, even where the words are
exactly rendered, takes not only from the form of the thought, but from
the thought itself, its most delicate charm. Translations come to us as
a message to the lover from the lady of his love through the lips of a
confidante or menial--we are obliged to imagine what was most vital in
the utterance.
These difficulties, always insuperable, are accumulated a hundred-fold
in the case of Dante, both by the extraordinary depth and subtlety of
his thought, and his no less extraordinary power of concentrating its
expression, till every verse is like a blade of thoroughly tempered
steel. You might as well attempt to translate a glance of fire from the
human eye into any other language--even music cannot do that.
We think, then, that the use of Cary's translation, or any other, can
never be to diffuse a knowledge of Dante. This is not in its nature
diffusible; he is one of those to whom others must draw near; he cannot
be brought to them. He has no superficial charm to cheat the reader into
a belief that he knows him, without entrance into the same sphere.
These translations can be of use only to the translators, as a means of
deliberate study of the original, or to others who are studying the
original, and wish to compare their own version of doubtful passages
with that of an older disciple, highly qualified, both by devotion and
mental development, for the study.
We must say a few words as to the pedantic folly with which this study
has been prosecuted in this country, and, we believe, in England. Not
only the tragedies of Alfieri and the Faust of Goethe, but the Divina
Commedia of Dante,--a work which it is not probable there are upon
earth, at any one time, a hundred minds able to appreciate,--are turned
into school books for little girls who have just left their hoops and
dolls, and boys whose highest ambition it is to ride a horse that will
run away, and brave the tutor in a college frolic.
This is done from the idea that, in order to get acquainted with a
foreign language, the student must read books that have attained the
dignity of classics, and also which are "hard." Hard indeed it must be
for the Muses to see their lyres turned into gridirons for the
preparation of a school-girl's lunch; harder still for the younglings to
be called to chew and digest thunderbolts, in lieu of their natural
bread and butter.
Are there not "classics" enough which would not suffer by being put to
such uses? In Greek, Homer is a book for a boy; must you give him Plato
because it is harder? Is there no choice among the Latins? Are all who
wrote in the Latin tongue equally fit for the appreciation of sixteen
Yankee years? In Italian, have you not Tasso, Ariosto, and other writers
who have really a great deal that the immature mind can enjoy, without
choking it with the stern politics of Alfieri, or piling upon a brain
still soft the mountainous meanings of Dante? Indeed, they are saved
from suffering by the perfect ignorance of all meaning in which they
leave these great authors, fancying, to their life-long misfortune, that
they have read them. I have been reminded, by the remarks of my young
friends on these subjects, of the Irish peasant, who, having been
educated on a book prepared for his use, called "Reading made easy,"
blesses through life the kindness that taught him his "Radamadasy;" and
of the child who, hearing her father quote Horace, observed _she_
"thought Latin was even sillier than French."
No less pedantic is the style in which the grown-up, in stature at
least, undertakes to become acquainted with Dante. They get the best
Italian Dictionary, all the notes they can find, amounting in themselves
to a library, for his countrymen have not been less external and
benighted in their way of regarding him. Painfully they study through
the book, seeking with anxious attention to know who Signor This is, and
who was the cousin of Signora That, and whether any deep papal or
anti-papal meaning was couched by Dante under the remark that Such-a-one
wore a great-coat. A mind, whose small chambers look yet smaller by
being crowded with furniture from all parts of the world, bought by
labor, not received from inheritance or won by love, asserts that he
must understand Dante well, better than any other person probably,
because he has studied him through in this way thirty or forty times. As
well declare you have a better appreciation of Shakspeare than any one
else because you have identified the birthplace of Dame Quickly, or
ascertained the churchyard where the ghost of the royal Dane hid from
the sight of that far more celestial spirit, his son.
O, painstaking friends! Shut your books, clear your minds from
artificial nonsense, and feel that only by spirit can spirit be
discerned. Dante, like each other great one, took the stuff that lay