Giovanni Battista Monti

“ Vincenzo Monti was born in Romagna, on the 19th of February, 1754. His father's simple, and even humble, but pretty and agreeable, house was situated among the vineyards and agricultural country which lies between Fusignano and the Alfonsine, in the Ravennese territory. The air is healthy and serene, the country fertile and diversified, and the style of life of his parents such as at once cultivated simplicity of taste and kindness of heart. Nothing can be more primitive and patriarchal than the mode of life of the smaller landholders in Italy ”

“ ITALIAN LITERATURE.
MONTI.
(From Sismondi's Litterature du Midi.)
Vincenzio Monti, a native of Ferrara, is acknowledged, by the unanimous consent of the Italians, as the greatest of their living Poets. Irritable, impassioned, variable to excess, he is always actuated by the impulse of the moment. Whatever he feels is felt with the most enthusiastic vehemence. He sees the objects of his thoughts, they are present and clothed with life before him, and a flexible and harmonious language is always at his command, to paint them with the richest colouring. ”

“ Amid all the changes of his various life, and all the trying vicissitudes of spirits—the wear and tear of mind which attend a poet by profession, tasked to almost constant exertion, Monti possessed two enviable treasures;—a lovely and devoted wife, with a soul which could appreciate his powers and talents, and exult in his fame; and a daughter equally amiable, and yet more beautiful and highly gifted. ”

“ There is something in the applause heaped on the conqueror that jars with our notions of real independence and patriotism.
Monti, at this time, entertained the idea of returning to republicanised Rome. But his friends dissuaded him; and his reputation, and probably his adulation of the victor, caused him soon after to be named commissary of the province of the Rubicon. But a poet makes a bad politician; and Monti's integrity stood in the way of his success, and he was obliged to give up his office. ”

“ So he became the secretary of the dominant feeling, the poet of success. Kindly, tolerant, sincere, a good friend, a courtier more from necessity and weakness than perversity or wickedness; if he could have retired into his own heart, he might have come out a poet.” Monti, in fact, was always an improvvisatore, and the subjects which events cast in his way were like the themes which the improvvisatore receives from his audience. ”

“ In the whole compass of literature there is perhaps no other instance of so close and successful a copy as Monti's of Dante, combined with so much impetuous vigour, and other qualities not usually associated with imitation. It revealed Monti as the most impressionable of poets in his equal subjugation by Dantesque influences and by the passions of the hour. Such a man must needs move with the times. ”

“ In 1802, Napoleon bestowed a republican constitution on Lombardy and the other provinces of Italy which had been united under the name of the Cisalpine Republic, and Milan became the capital of the new state. Thither at once turned all that was patriotic, hopeful, and ambitious in Italian life; and though one must not judge this phase of Italian civilization from Vincenzo Monti, it is an interesting comment on its effervescent, unstable, fictitious, and partial nature that he was its most conspicuous poet. Few men appear so base as Monti ”

“ Monti accepted the honors and emoluments due to long-suffering integrity and inalterable virtue, and continued in the enjoyment of them till the Austrians came back to Milan a second time, in 1815, when his chaste muse was stirred to a new passion by the charms of German despotism, and celebrated as “the wise, the just, the best of kings, Francis Augustus”, who, if one were to believe Monti, “in war was a whirlwind and in peace a zephyr.” ”

“ The commonplace Italians long continued to speak awfully of Monti as a great poet, because the commonplace mind regards everything established as great. He is a classic of those classics common to all languages—dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed to the air. ”

“ The "Basvilliana" at once raised Monti's reputation higher than that of any poet who had for centuries appeared in Italy; and he might have been considered the laureate of royalty, but that his character was not adorned by that sincere and exalted enthusiasm, without which no man can, with any success, advocate any cause which embraces the interests of human nature. ”

“ She, too, is a poetess. In her father's works may be found a little canzone written by her about a year after the death of her husband, and with equal tenderness and simplicity, alluding to her lonely state, deprived of him who once encouraged and cultivated her talents, and deserved her love. [94]
Vincenzo Monti died in October 1828:—his widow and his daughter reside, I believe, at Milan.
FOOTNOTES:
[89] Worn by the young men who are intended for the Church.
[90] Barry Cornwall. ”

“ It must be in the memory of all Italians, and all those strangers who visited Italy during his lifetime, how he was beloved by every one who knew him. No man was ever more popular, more universally pronounced the best of men; and this praise resulted from the goodness and singleness of his heart, the sweetness of his disposition, and his unpretending but attractive manners. Writing concerning this marriage to his friends, Monti speaks of it with pride and pleasure. He says, "Count Giulio Perticari, of Pesaro, is a young man well cultivated in literature. ”

“ Monti was right in throwing aside the classical shackles of the Della Crusca; but there is token in his letters that, in his heart, he at last acknowledged that there was more of the living spirit of true Italian abroad in the colloquial idiom of Tuscany, than in all the well-turned sentences and set phrases of the well educated of the rest of Italy.
We cannot help thinking that Monti must have been very happy during the prosecution of these labours. An active mind abhors repose, when it must "cream and mantle like a standing pool." ”

“ Vincenzo Monti (1754-1828) , born at Fusignano, near Ravenna, author of the Bassevilliana (1793) , directed against the French Revolution, and a number of other poems, tragedies and translations. Monti was Historiographer to the Court of Italy under Napoleon and a member of the Italian Institute.—T.
[166] Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) was a native of Sorrento, but his father, Bernardo Tasso, was a North Italian, having been born in Venice in 1493.—T.
[167] Melchiore Cesarotti (1730-1808) , born at Padua, a poet and miscellaneous writer. ”

“ All that Monti ever wrote is graced with such a happy flow, and with so much beauty of imagery and expression, that it is impossible not to admire as we read. He describes Italy as appearing to him in a vision; she is personified by a woman, wounded and drooping, the victim of grief and slavery. The poet, struck with compassion and horror, evokes the shades of mighty Romans from their tombs to assist the degraded queen of the world; but they turn in scorn from the fallen and lost one. ”

“ L' alma oppressa di piacer."
He does not forget the victor in this song of joy and triumph. Marengo is mentioned with exultation; and Bonaparte celebrated with enthusiasm, as liberating Italy from the barbarians, and again bestowing upon her the blessings of freedom.
On his arrival at Milan, Monti employed himself in correcting his poem, entitled the "Mascheroniana," which he had begun amidst the Alps, when overwhelmed by misery, an exile, weeping over the disasters of his country and his own wrongs. ”

“ Monti is, without question, the greatest Italian poet that has appeared since the golden days of its poetry: he alone emulates his predecessors in the higher flights of the imagination. It has been pronounced of Dryden, that if each of the princes of poetry surpassed him in their peculiar vein, yet his fire and originality give him a near place beside them. Thus Monti has not the sublimity of Dante, nor the tenderness of Petrarch ”

“ He might have been less refined in the farms of Romagna, but more useful as a moral and dignified asserter of truth and independence. Yet we must reflect that the germ of each man's character is born with him, to be checked or fostered by education, but still there to colour the tide of thought and influence the motives of conduct. And as independence and strength of principle never displayed themselves as a {Pg 310} part of Monti's character, temptation might have found him as willing a slave in the poverty of his farm as in the luxurious servitude of papal Rome. ”

“ The absence, however, of Bonaparte in Egypt, and the invasion of the Austrio-Russian army, put a sudden end to the existence of the new republic. At the same time that Monti fled across the Alps, and wandered, a famished exile, among the ravines and woods of Savoy, Foscolo, forced also to provide for his own safety, took refuge in Genoa, and joined the French garrison commanded by Massena. ”

“ A second harvest is gathered in; though, growing on a spent soil, it has not the heart of the former. Thus, in the present age, Monti has successfully imitated the style of Dante; and something of the Elizabethan inspiration has been caught by several eminent countrymen of our own. But never will Italy produce another Inferno, or England another Hamlet. We look on the beauties of the modern imaginations with feelings similar to those with which we see flowers disposed in vases, to ornament the drawing-rooms of a capital. ”

“ His ambition was further excited by the emulation inspired by Alfieri. This great tragedian was now residing at Rome; and Monti was present when he read his "Virginia" in a society composed of the most celebrated literati of the day. Monti listened with transport, and, burning with a desire to rival this production, he instantly began his tragedy of "Aristodemo," founded on a story he had read a few days before in Pausanias. He was the more eager to accomplish his purpose, as lie perceived the faults of Alfieri's style, and hoped to avoid them. ”

“ Monti, the first great Italian writer whose career was powerfully affected by it, was neither a revolutionist nor an anti-revolutionist, but a straw in a whirlpool. When, however, the idea of Italian unity—Napoleon's legacy to his true native country—had had time to develop itself, and it had become manifest that the only path to it lay through a cordial adoption of revolutionary principles, the Revolution acquired more practical significance for Italy than for any other country in Europe. ”

“ The defects of monotonous dialogue and often repeated situations flow also from an observation of the unities, which, by confining the subject in narrow limits, permit no variety of action, and, except in peculiar instances, force the poet to repeat himself; making one scene frequently little else than a repetition of what had gone before.
Monti had begun his literary and poetic life by servitude, when he became secretary of the duke of Braschi. ”

“ A poet is ill calculated to play the part of a politician; and the praise and blame which have been so profusely and indiscriminately heaped on Monti while living, must be removed by time and dispassionate criticism, before justice can be done to him, either as a man or a poet. ”

“ The Cavalier Vincenzo Monti stands at the head of the modern poets of Italy. His stanzas on the Death of Uge Basville obtained for him the title of Dante Redivivo. His works, both in verse and prose, are numerous, and generally acknowledged to be noble models in their several styles. His tragedy of Aristodemo, takes the lead among the most admirable specimens of the Italian drama. He died at Milan in the year 1829.
[11] Monsignor Lodovico di Breme, son of the Marquis of the same name, a Piedmontese, an intimate friend of the celebrated Madame de Staël, of Mons. ”

“ Monti and Perticari both entered heart and soul into this dispute, which speedily roused every literary person in Italy to take one side or the other. The Tuscans, headed by the Della Crusca, were furious that their long-acknowledged supremacy should be questioned; while Monti, resting the merits of his opinion on the great authority of Dante, did not hesitate in his attack. Several letters to his friend Mustoxidi display his earnestness and sincerity in the cause. We extract passages from them, as explanatory of his ideas and characteristic of the man. ”

“ But all this was nothing to Monti's treatment of the shade of poor King Louis XVI. We have seen with how much ceremony the poet ushered that unhappy prince into eternal bliss, and in Mr. Boyd's translation of the Bassvilliana, we can read the portents with which Monti makes the heavens recognize the crime of his execution in Paris.
Then from their houses, like a billowy tide, Men rush enfrenzied, and, from every breast Banished shrinks Pity, weeping, terrified. Now the earth quivers, trampled and oppressed By wheels, by feet of horses and of men; The air in hollow moans speaks its unrest ”

“ At Rome he entered the Arcadian fold of course, and piped by rule there with extraordinary acceptance, and might have died a Shepherd but for the French Revolution, which broke out and gave him a chance to be a Man. The secretary of the French Legation at Naples, appearing in Rome with the tri-color of the Republic, was attacked by the foolish populace, and killed; and Monti, the petted and caressed of priests, the elegant and tuneful young poet in the train of Cardinal Borghesi, seized the event of Ugo Bassville's death, and turned it to epic account. ”