BROWNING AND ITALY.

IT would be, perhaps, unwise to assert that Browning is not read in Italy at all. The interest in all things English is as keen in Italy at present as it ever was. But one may safely say that of all the great English poets he is the only one unacquaintance with whom educated Italians confess to with- out shame. Yet Italy never had a truer or a more high-souled lover. Compare the rapturous lines in " De Gustibus " with the patriotic lines of Filicaia and you will find that the love of Italy rings far truer in the Englishman's than in the verse of the Italian. The alleged obscurity and the unquestionable

difficulty of some of Browning's poetry cannot be accepted as the final causes of the present neglect, for if a reader's difficulties were to be the touchstone of foreign fame much of "Faust" and much of the "Divine Comedy" would remain unknown outside their native countries. Some of Browning's poems, moreover, which bear more directly on Italian subjects— "Andrea del Sarto," "De Gustibus," "The Italian in England," for instance—are amongst the simplest of his works. It is far more just to suppose that his strong personality, the dis- similarity between him and any other Italian poet, stand in the way of Italian appreciation. It has been often remarked that the ties which unite Italian to English literature are not less strong or deep than the political friendship between the two nations. Apart from the fact that the two greatest poets born since the Classical Age belong one to England and the other to Italy (Goethe, it might be suggested, has a strong claim to be considered third, but ho is too near our own time to be safely classed in the same category), most English poets find a more or less fitting counterpart in an Italian poet. To Milton the Italians oppose Tasso; to Spenser, Ariosto ; to Pope, Parini ; to Keats, Leopardi. But one searches the history of Italian letters in vain for a writer resembling, even remotely, Robert Browning, This very personality, which forms one at least of the obstacles of the Italian reader, enabled him to penetrate aspects of Italian life which but for hint would have been lost to us. The story of Sordello, the dramas on which Pippa's song works its magic, would have been bare, empty outlines of Italian stories without the life with which the poet's rich fancy breathed into them.

Most of the men who visited Italy before the unity found there neither more nor less than they expected to find. Byron expected the greatness of past ages, and he saw it oven in the fierceness of the Italian criminal. Berlioz, longing for the freedom of the lawless life in the mountains, found the brigands in the neighbourhood of Rome a stimulus to musical composi- tion. Italy, however, bad other men besides heroic criminals and brigands. There were men who knew the spur of a noble ambition without possessing the genius necessary to its accomplishment. There were others who could not trust the future and did not believe in the possibilities of the present, who doubted and held back ; others, again, who pressing too eagerly forward were destined to perish in useless sacrifice. There were country people, simple souls to whom any notion of a drastic change was abhorrent, who yet could, like the womanin "The Italian in England," understand devotion and become themselves noble with sublime simplicity. There were corrupt noblemen and Government officials. Browning seems to have entered Italy without any preconceived idea, without anticipations and without prejudice. During his long stay at Casa Guidi he let the soul of Italy slowly penetrate his own, and he left in the end some of the most vivid and original, if not complete, Pisa the B pictures of Italian life. After a short stay in rownings moved to Florence in 1847, and from the historic Ones Guidi they watched the struggle for national unity from the first concerted outbreak of the following year. There is no doubt that Browning's sympathies were from the first with the revolution. "' How long, 0 Lord, how long Robert kept saying." If the political events did not stir him as deeply as Mrs. Browning he could form a juster estimate of men and events, as his comment on Napoleon after the annexation of Nice and Savoy witnesses: " It was a great

action, but he has taken eighteenpence for it is a pity."

which "

y.

However deep his feelings in this respect, nationality was might seem to endanger.

But this is not patriotism per se. There is always a human interest which cannot be detached from it. His ghost wil. return to Italy, but it will crave society if only of a chattaring peasant girl. The Italian in England makes his appeal as an exile rather than as a sufferer in a specific cause ; and it is the relationship between the fugitive and the wor.-..au who succours him that forms the marrow of the poem.

We may regret that he has not left a more impo.lime monument of his devotion to a, groat national struggle, but it must be remembered that, after all, this aspect of the Italian life of the time has lacked neither poets nor historians, and that it is a vain labour to expect fruit from the mountain or flowers from the sea. If we wish to know how the Italian prisoners fared in the Spielberg we have Pellico's " Lo Mis Prigioni "; if our quest is the popular feeling we turn to Giusti and Fusinato. The Garibaldian epic which inspired Carducci and D'Annuuzio has found its historian in Mr. Trevelyan. Other things existed in Italy besides patriotism Browning found there nature and, even more completely, art and music.

He has painted the Italian landscape with a bola brush; the splendour of its colouring glows in his poems; but it is, nevertheless, only the setting for the drama. It is very rarely that it becomes itself an actor; though in at least one poem he admits nature as a " shadowy third " at the meeting of the lovers. The woods of an Alpine gorge mysteriously break down the barriers between lover and be- loved; but after a momentary intervention they retire int., their original passive state.

"Their work was done, we might go or stay. They relapsed to their ancient mood."

Apart from their value as evidence of Browning's attitude towards music, the " Toccata " of Baldassare Galuppi has, with the songs of Pippa, a peculiar interest, as in these one seems to cateb an echo of the voice of an Italy which was then passing and ie now no longer. In the half-mocking and almost contemptuous lines of the " Toccata" there are suggestions of decay, of death, .whioh fit the Venice of Browning's day far better than the gay lines of Byron. The

Venice

". . . where the Doges Used to wed the sea with rings "

had set for ever, and the city had to pass through the ordeal of war and strife and famine before it could be born anew That Pippa has entirely disappeared it would be rash to affirm, though we hope that 0 ttima and her lover have gone for ever. But it is difficult to imagine Pippa and her song in the busy streets of, say, Bust° Arsizio or any of the other conglomeration of mills and houses so unpleasant but significant a feature of modern Italy. It is the penalty of material advance to lose such as Pippa. and Fortal. Not in England alone

"Mott meet 'gravely to-day and debate . . . not the subject most calculated to quicken his imagination. He had not that passion of .abstract patriotism which glows in Shelley or Foscolo. Love of the fitful and the grotesque, of whatever isat war with itself, was too integral a part of his nature for nationality to be to hint a

wholly congenial theme. The directness of the epic poet is not his. One cannot read " The Italian in England," "De Gustibus," or the third part of "Pippo. Passes " without

realizing the earnestness of his convictions or the depth of his sympathy. The theme brings out the full chivalry of. his heart and mind. Consider the tender painting of the peasant woman—

"But when I saw that woman's face,

Its calm simplicity of grace,

Our Italy's own attitude In which she walked thus far, and stood, Planting each naked foot so firm, To crush the snake and spare the worm,"

or that cry from the heart, "Italy, my Italy," and the last lines-

" Such lovers old are I and she, So it always was, so shall ever be "-

which close the poem on a note of seriousness which the whimsicality of the couplet

" When fortune's malice Lost her—Calais "

It were idle to complain of the progress of time and to speculate whether things are changed for better or for worse. These aspects of life were in Browning's day a very essential part of the nation. To-day, if they still exist, they have lost their significance. Another revolution has shaken Italy since the unity, a revolution which uprooted long-cherished ideals and habits of generations, turning an agricultural into an industrial people.

" Sordello " and "The Ring and the Book" suggest another

reason why Browning's fame is not as wide in Italy as that of other English poets of less merit. Truly translation cannot lead. It must follow in the wake of scholarship. But the follower can sometimes jostle the leader, and in any case translation can be a valuable handmaiden. "Bordello" and " The Ring and the Book " are impossible of translation because they are, in a sense, totally alien to the spirit of Italian poetry, though admirable and true pictures of Italian life, probably for the same reasons that the Italian literature, rich and valuable as it is, has never produced an essayist. The Italian character is too eager and too impatient to fall easily into the mood of quiet contemplation, into the coolly critical attitude of the essayist. The Italians are still—though less now than for- merly—partisans. In 1868, while Browning was occupied with the composition of "The Ring and the Book," the Milanese, who a few years previously had driven ignominiously the foreign invader from their gates, were fighting less glorious battles on the merits and demerits of an opera. The stage had played its not inglorious part in the national struggle, and was consequently looked upon as something of a national heritage, but the hand-to-hand contest which took place after the first performance of Boito's " Idefistofele" would have been impossible in a country in which reason held imagination in a firmer grip.

If proof were needed of Browning's insight into Italian character one need only point to the sonnet he wrote on the occasion of the unveiling of the monument to that most Italian of all Italian playwrights, Goldoni. No one was more shortsighted than Voltaire when he described Goldoni as Italy's Molibre ; for Goldoni's excellences lay in a widely different direction from Moli6re's. But Browning's "Sunniest of Souls " applies well to him who could see but innocent amusement and kindness in the French life at the close of the eighteenth century, and who never had a suspicion of the approach of that revolution which caused him to end his days in abject poverty.

In his last volume, " Asolando," the failing powers of the poet do not impair his interest in Italian subjects. The roguish " Pope and the Net" or the more gently humorous "Beanfeast" are episodes of clerical life handled in a manner only possible to a sympathetic outsider. The epilogue em- bodies in its robust idealism the very soul of Mazzini's teach- ing and the essence of the Italian revolution.

"Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph; Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better."

This is surely the spirit of that Italian who, when told to cease fighting because the gods were against him, cried out, " Cur non proelia contra Jovem? "