BEES.
THE BEAUTIFUL NEVER TO BE THANKED TOO MUCH, OR TO BE SUFFICIENTLY EXPRESSED.—BEES AND THEIR ELEGANCE.—THEIR ADVICE TO AN ITALIAN POET.—WAXEN TAPERS.—A BEE DRAMA.—MASSACRES OF DRONES.—HUMAN PROGRESSION.
THE BEAUTIFUL NEVER TO BE THANKED TOO MUCH, OR TO BE SUFFICIENTLY EXPRESSED.—BEES AND THEIR ELEGANCE.—THEIR ADVICE TO AN ITALIAN POET.—WAXEN TAPERS.—A BEE DRAMA.—MASSACRES OF DRONES.—HUMAN PROGRESSION.
Itwould be ungrateful and impossible, in the course of so sweet and generous a theme as our Jar of Honey has furnished us with, not to devote a portion of it to the cause of all its sweetness—the Bee. We are not going, however, to repeat more common-place in its eulogy than we can help. The grounds of the admiration of nature are without end; and as to those matters of fact orscience which appear to be settled—nay, even most settled—some new theory is coming up every day, in these extraordinary times, to compel us to think the points over again, and doubt whether we are quite so knowing as we supposed. Not only are bee-masters disputing the discoveries of Huber respecting the operations of the hive, but searchers into nature seem almost prepared to re-open the old question respecting the equivocal generation of the bee, and set the electrical experiments of Mr. Cross at issue with the conclusions of Redi.
How this may turn out, we know not; but sure we are, that it will be a long time indeed before the praise and glory of the bee can have exhausted its vocabulary—before people cry out to authors, “Say no more; you have said too much already of its wonderfulness—too much of the sweetness and beauty of its productions.” Too much, we are of opinion, cannot be said of any marvel in nature, unless it be trivial or false. The old prosaical charge against hyperbolical praises of the beautiful, we hold to be naught. Ask a lover, and he will say, and say truly, that no human terms can do justice to the sweetness in his mistress’s eyes—to the virgin bloom on her cheek. If words could equal them, Nature would hardly be our superior. Hear what is said on the point by Marlowe:—
If all the pens that ever poets heldHad fed the feelings of their masters’ thoughts,And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,Their minds, and muses on admired themes;If all the heavenly quintessence they ’stilFrom their immortal flowers of poesy,Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceiveThe highest reaches of a human wit:If these had made one poem’s period,And all combined in beauty’s worthiness,Yet should there hover in their restless headsOne thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,Which into words no virtue can digest.
Did any one ever sufficiently admire theentire eleganceof the habits and pursuits of bees? their extraction of nothing but the quintessence of the flowers; their preference of those that have the finest and least adulterated odour; their avoidance of everything squalid (so unlike flies); their eager ejection or exclusion of it from the hive, as in the instance of carcases of intruders, which, if they cannot drag away, they cover up and entomb; their love of clean, quiet, and delicate neighbourhoods, thymy places with brooks; their singularly clean management of so liquid and adhesive a thing as honey, from which they issue forth to their work as if they had had nothing to do with it; their combination with honey-making of the elegant manufacture of wax, of which they make their apartments, and which is usedby mankind for none but patrician or other choice purposes; their orderly policy; their delight in sunshine; their attention to one another; their apparent indifference to everything purely regarding themselves, apart from the common good? A writer of elegant Italian verse, who recast the book of Virgil on Bees, has taken occasion of their supposed dislike of places abounding inechoes, to begin his poem with a pretty conceit. He was one of the first of his countrymen who ventured to dispense with rhyme; and he makes the bees themselves send him a deputation, on purpose to admonish him not to use it:—
Mentre era per cantare i vostri doniCon alte rime, o verginette caste,Vaghe angelette de le erbose rive,Preso dal sonno in sul spuntar de l’ alba,M’ apparve un coro de la vostra gente,E da la lingua onde s’ accoglie il mele,Sciolsono in chiara voce este parole:—“O spirto amico, che dopo mill’ anniE cinquecento rinnovar ti piaceE le nostre fatiche e i nostri studi,Fuggi le rime e ’l rimbombar sonoro.“Tu sai pur che l’ immagin de la voce,Che risponde dai sassi ov’ Eco alberga,Sempre nimica fù del nostro regno:Non sai tu ch’ ella fù conversa in pietra,E fù inventrice de le prime rime?E dei saper, ch’ ove abita costei,Null’ ape abitar può per l’ importunoEd imperfetto suo parlar loquace.”Cosi diss’ egli: poi tra labbro e labbroMi pose un favo di soave mele,E lieto se n’ andò volando al cielo.Ond’ io, da tal divinità spirato,Non temerò cantare i vostri onoriCon verso Etrusco da le rime sciolto.E canterò, come il soave mele,Celeste don, sopra i fioretti e l’ erbaL’ aere distilla liquido e sereno;E come l’ api industriose e casteL’ adunino, e con studio e con ingegnoDappoi compongan le odorate cere,Per onorar l’ immagine di Dio;—Spettacoli ed effetti vaghi e rari,Di maraviglie pieni e di bellezze.—Le ApidelRucellai.While bent on singing your delightful giftsIn lofty rhyme, O little virgins chaste,Sweet little angels of the flowery brooks,Sleep seized me on the golden point of morn,And I beheld a choir of your small people,Who, with the tongue with which they take the honey,Buzz’d forth in the clear air these earnest words:—“O friendly soul, that after the long lapseOf thrice five hundred years, dost please thee singOur toils and art, shun—shun, we pray thee, rhyme:Shun rhyme, and its rebounding noise. Full wellThou know’st, that the invisible voice which sitsAnswering to calls in rocks, Echo by name,Was hostile to us ever; and thou know’st—Or dost thou not?—that she, who was herselfTurn’d to a hollow rock, first found out rhyme.Learn further then, that wheresoe’er she dwells,No bee can dwell, for very hate and dreadOf her importunate and idle babble.”Such were the words that issued from that choir;Then ’twixt my lips they put some honey drops,And so in gladness took their flight aloft.Whence I, with such divinity made strong,Doubt not, O bees, to sing your race renown’dIn Tuscan verse, freed from the clangs of rhyme.Yea, I will sing how the celestial boon,Honey, by some sweet mystery of the dew,Is born of air in bosoms of the flowers,Liquid, serene; and how the diligent beesCollect it, working further with such art,That odorous tapers thence deck holy shrines.O sights, and O effects, lovely and strange!Full of the marvellous and the beautiful!—The BeesofRucellai.
The reader need not be told, that the tapers here alluded to are those which adorn Catholic altars. Rucellai was a kinsman of Pope Leo the Tenth and his successor Clement; and his first mode of bespeaking favour for his bees was by associating them with the offices of the church. Beautiful are those tapers, without doubt; and well might the poet express his admiration at their being the result of the work of the little unconscious insect, who compounded the material. So,in every wealthy house in England, every evening, where lamps do not take its place, the same beautiful substance is lit up for the inmates to sit by, at their occupations of reading, or music, or discourse. The bee is there, with her odorous ministry. In the morning, she has probably been at the breakfast-table. In the morning, she is honey; in the evening, the waxen taper; in the summer noon, a voice in the garden, or the window; in the winter, and at all other times, a meeter of us in books. She talks Greek to us in Sophocles and Theocritus; Virgil’s very best Latin, in hisGeorgics; we have just heard her in Italian; and besides all her charming associations with the poets in general, one of the Elizabethan men has made a whole play out of her,—a play in which the wholedramatis personæare bees! And a very sweet performance it is according to Charles Lamb, who was not lavish of his praise. It was written by Thomas Day, one of the fellows of Massinger and Decker, and is called theParliament of Bees. Lamb has given extracts from it in hisSpecimens of the Dramatic Poets, and says in a note:—
“The doings,The births, the wars, the wooings
of these pretty winged creatures are, with continued liveliness, portrayed, throughout the whole of thiscurious old drama, in words which bees would talk with, could they talk; the very air seems replete with humming and buzzing melodies while we read them. Surely bees were never so be-rhymed before.” (Vol. ii., Moxon’s latest edition, p. 130.) Would to heaven that a horrid, heavy-headed monster called Hepatitis—who has been hindering us from having our way of late in the most unseasonable manner, and is at this minute clawing our side and shoulder for our disrespect of him—would have allowed us to go to the British Museum, and read the whole play for ourselves. We might have been able to give the reader some pleasant tastes of it, besides those to be met with in Mr. Lamb’s book. The following is a specimen. Klania, a female bee, is talking of her lovers:—
Philon, a BeeWell skill’d in verse and amorous poetry,As we have sate at work,both on one rose,[16]Has humm’d sweet canzons, both in verse and prose,Which I ne’er minded. Astrophel, a Bee(Although not so poetical as he),Yet in his full invention quick and ripe,In summer evenings on his well-tuned pipe,Upon a woodbine blossom in the sun,(Our hive being clean swept and our day’s work done—)Would play us twenty several tunes; yet INor minded Astrophel, nor his melody.Then there’s Amniter, for whose love fair Leade(That pretty Bee) flies up and down the meadWith rivers in her eyes—without deserving,Sent me trim acorn bowls of his own carving,To drink May-dews and mead in. Yet none of these,My hive-born playfellows and fellow Bees,Could I affect, until this strange Bee came.
It is pretty clear, however, from this passage, that Mr. Lamb’s usual exquisite judgment was seduced by the little loves and graces of these unexpecteddramatis personæ; for this is certainly not the way in which bees would talk. It is all human language, and unbeelike pursuits. “Rivers in her eyes” is beautifully said, but bees do not shed tears. They are no carvers of bowls; and we have no reason to believe that they know anything of music and poetry. The bee
Who, at her flowery work doth sing,
sings like the cicada of Anacreon, with her wings. To talk as bees would talk we must divest ourselves of flesh and blood, and develop ideas modified by an untried mode of being, and by unhuman organs. We must talk as if we had membranaceous wings, a proboscis, and no knowledge of tears and smiles; and, as to our loves,they would be confined to the queen and the drones—and very unloving and unpoetical work they would make of it. The rest of us would know nothing about it. We should love nothing but the flowers, the brooks, our two elegant manufactures of wax and honey, and the whole community at large—being very patriotic, but not at all amorous—more like tasteful Amazons than damsels of Arcadia; ladies with swords by their sides, and not to behummedby the beau-ideals of Mr. Thomas Day.
These same formidable weapons of the bees, their stings, remind us of the only drawback on the pleasures of thinking about them—their massacres of the drones. Every year those gentlemen have to pay for their idle and luxurious lives by one great pang of abolition. They are all stung and swept away into nothingness! Truly a circumstance to “give us pause,” and perplex us with our wax and honey. It seems, however, to be the result of an irresistible impulse—some desperate necessity of state, for want of better knowledge, or more available powers. We are to suppose them doing it unwillingly, with a horror of the task proportioned to the very haste and fury in which they perform it; as though they wished to get it off their hands as fast as possible, terrified and agonised at the terror and agony which they inflict. Why they leave this tremendousflaw in their polity—why they govern for the most part so well, and yet have this ugly work to do in order to make all right at the year’s end, is a question which human beings may discuss, when nations have come to years of discretion; when they have grown wise enough, by the help of railroads and mutual benefits, to dispense with cuffing one another like a parcel of schoolboys. Mankind have not yet outlived their own massacres and revolutions long enough to have a right to be astonished at the massacres of the bees. What they ought to be astonished at, is their own notion of the beehive as a pattern of government, with this tremendous flaw in it staring them in the face. But we believe they have now become sensible of the awkwardness of the analogy. Assuredly we should find no Archbishop of Canterbury now-a-days arguing in the style of his predecessor, in the play ofHenry the Fifth:—
So work the honey bees;Creatures, that, by a rule in nature, teachThe art of order to a peopled kingdom.They have a king, and officers of sorts:Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;Others, like soldiers, armèd in their stings,Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds;Which pillage they, with merry march, bring homeTo the tent-royal of their emperor;Who, busied in his majesty, surveysThe singing masons building roofs of gold;The civil citizens kneading up the honey;The poor mechanic porters crowding inTheir heavy burdens at his narrow gate;The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,Delivering o’er to executors paleThe lazy yawning drone.
Alas! in Beedom, the archbishop himself, inasmuch as he was no wax-chandler, would have been accounted one of these same lazy, yawning drones, and delivered over to the secular arm. Bees do not teach men, nor ought they. We have some higher things among us, even than wax and honey; and though we have our flaws, too, in the art of government, and do not yet know exactly what to do with them, we hope we shall find out. Will the bees ever do that? Do they also hope it? Do they sit pondering, when the massacre is over, and think it but a bungling way of bringing their accounts right? Man, in his self-love, laughs at such a fancy. He is of opinion that no creature can think, or make progression, but himself. What right he has, from his little experience, to come to such conclusions, we know not; but he must allow, that we know as little of the conclusions of the bees. All we feel certain of is, that with bees, as with men, the good of existence outweighs the evil; that evil itself is but a rough working towards good; and that if good canultimately be better without it, there is a thing called hope, which says it may be possible. We take our planet to be very young, and our love of progression to be one of the proofs of it; and when we think of the good, and beauty, and love, and pleasure, and generosity, and nobleness of mind and imagination, in which this green and glorious world is abundant, we cannot but conclude that the love of progression is to make it still more glorious, and add it to the number of those older stars, which are probably resting from their labours, and have become heavens.
MISCELLANEOUS FEELINGS RESPECTING SICILY, ITS MUSIC, ITS RELIGION, AND ITS MODERN POETRY.
DANTE’S EVENING.—AVE MARIA OF BYRON.—THE SICILIAN VESPERS.—NOTHING “INFERNAL” IN NATURE.—SICILIAN MARINER’S HYMN.—INVOCATION FROM COLERIDGE.—PAGAN AND ROMAN CATHOLIC WORSHIP.—LATIN AND ITALIAN COUPLET.—WINTER’S “RATTO DI PROSERPINA.”—A HINT ON ITALIAN AIRS.—BELLINI.—MELI, THE MODERN THEOCRITUS.
DANTE’S EVENING.—AVE MARIA OF BYRON.—THE SICILIAN VESPERS.—NOTHING “INFERNAL” IN NATURE.—SICILIAN MARINER’S HYMN.—INVOCATION FROM COLERIDGE.—PAGAN AND ROMAN CATHOLIC WORSHIP.—LATIN AND ITALIAN COUPLET.—WINTER’S “RATTO DI PROSERPINA.”—A HINT ON ITALIAN AIRS.—BELLINI.—MELI, THE MODERN THEOCRITUS.
Timeflies, and friends must part. In closing our Blue Jar, a rosy light seems to come over it, at once beautiful and melancholy; for terminations arefarewells, and farewells remind us of evenings, and of the divine lines of the poet:—
Era già l’ ora, che volge ’l desioA’ naviganti, e intenerisce ’l cuoreLo dì ch’ an detto a’ dolci amici A Dio:E che lo nuovo peregrin d’ amorePunge, se ode squilla di lontano,Che paia ’l giorno pianger che si muore.’Twas now the hour, when love of home melts throughMen’s hearts at sea, and longing thoughts portrayThe moment when they bade sweet friends adieu;And the new pilgrim now, on his lone way,Thrills as he hears the distant vesper bell,That seems to mourn for the expiring day.
Divine, indeed, are those lines of Dante. Why didn’t he write all such, instead of employing two volumes out of three, to show us how much less he cared to be divine than infernal? Was it absolutely necessary for him to have so much black ground for his diamonds?
And another poet who took to the black, or rather the burlesque, side of things, how could he write so beautifully on the same theme, and resist giving us whole poems as tender and confiding, to assist in making the world happy? The stanza respecting the Ave Maria is surely the best inDon Juan:—
Ave Maria! blessed be the hour!The time, the clime, the spot where I so oftHave felt the moment in its fullest powerSink o’er the earth, so beautiful and soft,While swung the deep bell in the distant tower,Or the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft,And not a breathcrept through the rosy air,And yet the forest leavesseemed stirr’d with prayer.
Not, we beg leave to say, that we are Roman Catholic, either in our creed or our form of worship; though we should be not a little inclined to become such, did the creed contain nothing harsher or less just than the adoration of maternity. We have been taught to be too catholic in the true sense of the word (Universal) to wish for any ultimate form of Christianity, except that which shall drop all the perplexing thorns through which it has grown, and let the odour of its flower be recognised in its spotless force without one infernal embitterment.
But it will be said that there are infernal embitterments even in the sweetest forms of things, whether we will have them or no—massacres in bee-hives, Dantes among the greatest poets,SicilianVespers. Think of those, it will be said. Think of the horrible massacre known by the name of the “Sicilian Vespers.” Think of the day in your honeyed, Hyblæan island, when the same hour which
Sinks o’er the earth, so beautiful and soft,
with not a breath in its rosy air, and with the leaves of its trees moving as if they were lips of adoring silence, was the signal for an indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children; ay, babes at the breast, and mothers innocent as the object of vesper worship. Was there nothing infernal in that? Is there nothing hellish, and of everlasting embitterment in the recollection?
No. And again a loud and happy No, of everlasting sweetness.
The infernal and the everlasting bitter imply the same things. There is nothing infernal that has a limit; therefore there is nothing infernal in nature. Look round, and show it if you can. Nature will have no unlimited pain. The sufferer swoons, or dies, or endures; but the limit comes. Death itself is but the dissolution of compounds that have either been disordered or worn out, and therefore cannot continue pleasantly to co-exist. Horrible was this Sicilian massacre; horrible and mad; one of the wildest reactions against wickedness in human history. The French masters of the island had grown mad with power and debauchery, and the islanders grew mad with revenge. It was the story in little of the French Revolution; not the Revolution of the Three Days, truly deserving the title of Glorious for its Christianforbearance; but the old, untaught, delirious, Robespierre Revolution. Dreadful is it to think of the vesper bell ringing to that soft worship of the mother of Jesus, and then of thousands of daggers, at the signal, leaping out of the bosoms of the worshippers, and plunging into the heart of every foreigner present, man, woman, and child. But there came an end; soon to the body; sooner or later, to the mind. The dead were buried; the French government in the island was expelled, and a better brought in. The evil perished, good came out of it; and myriads of vespers have taken place since then, but not one like that. Yes, myriads of vespers—a vesper every day, ever since—from the year 1282 to this present 1848,—all gentle, all secure from the like misery, all more or less worthy of the beautiful description of the poet. If the massacre called the Sicilian Vespers had been infernal, it would have been going on now! and nature has not made such hellish enormities possible. The only durability to which she tends is a happy one. Her shortest lives (generally speaking) are her least healthy; her greatest longevities are those of healthy serenity. Supposing the earth to be animated (as some have thought it), we cannot conceive it to be unhappy, rolling, as it has done for ages, round the sun, with a swiftness like the blood in the veins of childhood. Eternity of existence isinconceivable on any ground of analogy, except as identical with healthy prevalence; and healthy prevalence, with sensation, is inconceivable apart from sensations of pleasure.
Gone long ago are the bad Sicilian Vespers; but the good Sicilian Vespers, the beautiful Sicilian music, the beautiful Sicilian poetry, these remain; and, as if in sweet scorn of the catastrophe, they are particularly famous for their gentleness. To be told that a Sicilian air is about to be sung, is to be prepared to hear something especially sweet and soft. Every Protestant as well as Roman Catholic lover of music knows theSicilian Mariner’s Hymn; and is a Catholic, if not a Roman worshipper, while he sings it. Fancy it rising at a distance out of the white-sailed boat in the darkling blue waters, when the sun has just gone down, and the rock on the woody promontory above the chapel, whose bell gave the notice, is touched with rose-colour. Nay, fancy you forget all this, and think only of the honest simple mariners singing this hymn, at the moment when their wives and children are repeating the spirit of it on shore, and all Italy is doing the same:
O sanctissima, O purissima,Dulcis Virgo Maria!Mater amata, intemerata,Ora pro nobis!O most holy, O most spotless,Mary, Virgin glorious!Mother dearest, maiden clearest—Oh, we pray thee, pray for us.
The sweetest of English poets could not resist echoing this kind of evening music in a strain of his own; but though he did it in the course of an invocation, it is rather a description than a prayer. It is, however, very Sicilian:—
INVOCATION.Sung behind the scenes in Coleridge’s tragedy of “Remorse;”to be accompanied, says the poet, by “soft musicfrom an instrument of glass or steel.”Hear, sweet spirit—hear the spell!Lest a blacker charm compel;So shall the midnight breezes swellWith thy deep long-lingering knell;
INVOCATION.
Sung behind the scenes in Coleridge’s tragedy of “Remorse;”to be accompanied, says the poet, by “soft musicfrom an instrument of glass or steel.”
Hear, sweet spirit—hear the spell!Lest a blacker charm compel;So shall the midnight breezes swellWith thy deep long-lingering knell;
(Observe the various yet bell-like intonation of that last verse, and the analogous feeling in the repetition of the rhyme.)
And at evening evermore,In a chapel on the shore,Shall the chanters,sad and saintly,Yellow tapers burning faintly,Doleful masses chant for thee,Miserere, Domine!Hark! the cadence dies awayOn the yellow moonlight sea:The boatmen rest their oars, and say,Miserere, Domine!
The tapers are yellow in the chapel, and the moonlight yellow out of doors—one of those sympathies of colour which are often finer than contrast.
Coleridge was so fond of sweet sounds, that he makes one of the characters in this play exclaim,—
If the bad spirit retain’d his angel’s voice,Hell scarce were hell.
The Pagans of old were of the same opinion, for they made Pluto break his inexorable laws at the sound of the harp of Orpheus, his eyes, in spite of themselves, being forced to shed “irontears,” as Milton finely calls them. The notes, as the poet says,
Drewiron tears down Pluto’s cheek,And made Hell grant what Love did seek.
“The grim king of the ghosts” would not have shed them if he could have helped it. So Moschus, in hisElegy on the Death of Bion, expresses his opinion that if his deceased friend would sing a pastoral to the Queen of Pluto, “somethingSicilian” as he emphatically calls it (Σικὲλικόν τι), she could not have the heart to deny his return to earth. One should like to know the hymns which the Pagans actually sung toProserpina and her mother Ceres, and how far they coincided, perhaps in some instances were identical, with strains now sung in the Catholic churches. Some of the oldest chants are supposed to be of Greek origin; and indeed it would be marvellous ifallthe ancient music had been swept away, considering how many ceremonies, vestments, odours, processions, churches themselves, and, to say the truth, opinions, were retained by the new creed from the old—wisely in many instances, most curiously in all. Very naturally, too; for the knees are the same knees with which all human beings kneel, Pagan or Christian; and the sky is the same to which they look up, whether inhabited by saints or goddesses. Nor is there anything “blasphemous” (as zealous Protestants are too quick to assert) in the Roman Catholic tendency to use the same kind of language towards the one, as was held and hymned towards the other; for blasphemy signifies what is injurious to the character of the divinity, and nothing is injurious to it except the attribution of injustice and cruelty. If theological opinions, of whatever creed, offended in nothing worse than an excess of zeal towards the beauty of the maternal character, or in behalf of the supposition that the spirits of the good and pious interested themselves in our welfare, the human heart would be little disposed to quarrel withthem, in times even more enlightened than the present. There is a couplet extant in Italy, remarkable for being both Italian and Latin. It might have been addressed by a Pagan of the Lower Roman Empire, to the goddess Proserpina, whenshewas the guardian angel of Sicily, or to the Virgin Mary, by a modern Roman Catholic; and we find nothing horrible in this. On the contrary, it seems to fuse the two eras gently and tenderly together, by the same affecting link of human want and natural devotion. This is the couplet:—
In mare irato, in subita procella,Invoco te, nostra benigna stella.In sudden storms, and when the billows blind,Thee I invoke, star sweet to human kind!
When we spoke, in a former chapter, of the beautiful Sicilian story of Proserpina, we forgot (a very ungrateful piece of forgetfulness) to add, that one of the loveliest tributes ever paid to it by genius, is theRatto di Proserpina—Winter’s opera so called. There is every charm of the subject in it,—the awfulness of the greater gods, the genial maternity of Ceres, the tender memory of her daughter, the cordial re-assurances given her by Mercury, the golden-age dances of the shepherds. What smile of encouragement ever surpassed that of the strain on the wordsCerere tornerà, in the divine trio,Mi lasci, O madre amata? Whatpassionate mixture of delight and melancholy, the world-famous duet ofVaghi colli? Why does not some publisher make anElegant Extractsof such music from composers that will survive all fashion, and have comments written upon them, like those on poets? What would we not give to see such an edition of the finest airs of all the great inventive melodists, the Pergoleses and Paisiellos and their satellites, and all the inventive harmonists too, the Bachs, Corellis, and Beethovens, each withvariorumnotes from the best critics, and loving indications of the beauties of particular passages? Publications of this kind are yet wanting, to the honour, and glory, and thorough household companionship of the art of music: and it is a pity somebody does not take the opportunity of setting about them, when there are critics, both in and out of the profession, qualified to do them justice.[17]
We cannot close our Jar better than with a taste of “the modern Theocritus,” Giovanni Meli, who deserves his title, and whose very name, as we said before, signifies honey.Meliis honey, both in modern Sicilian and in ancient Greek; and the poetmay be a descendant of the Greek possessors of the island; nay (to carry the fancy out), possibly of Theocritus himself! Who is to prove, on the beautiful negative principle, that he was not?
Meli was an abbate at Palermo, a doctor of medicine, public professor of chemistry in the University there, and member of several academies. So are his titles set forth in the edition of his poems in seven volumes, which we have had the pleasure, since these chapters were first written, of picking up at a book-stall in Holborn. They are not very pastoral-sounding titles; yet the more knowledge the better, even for the shepherd; and the shepherd-poet turns it all to account, just as chemistry itself improves the field and the flowers. One of the friends whom Theocritus himself has immortalised, was a physician. We have it on the authority of a gentleman who knew the Abbate Meli, that he was as good a man as he was a charming poet. He seemed to live only (he says) to do good and to give pleasure: and he was as much beloved by the poor, as his company was in request among the prosperous. To say that Meli was to be of the party, was to give an evening assembly of friends its highest zest. His virtues were anything but narrow. He was temperate, but not ascetic. He balked no genial inspiration; was a modern Anacreonas well as Theocritus; evinced a liberal turn of mind in every respect, without offence; and could write hymns full of natural piety, as well as drinking and love songs. He was also a deeply read man, and a solid thinker. One of his longest poems is a banter upon the various assumptions of philosophy respecting the system of the world. Heartily do we wish it were in our power to give as good an account of the poems as of their titles; but though they have a glossary for the benefit of “the Italians,” we cannot yet boast such a knowledge of them as qualifies us to say much in evidence, beyond their general merits. These we can discern well enough, like glimmerings of nymphs and flocks among the trees; and very like Theocritus indeed is his genius; very true to nature and to manners, impulsive in its style, not afraid of colloquialisms and homely traits, but with an air of grace over all, and the right happy aroma of the subtle and the suggestive. The moment you open his first eclogue, you meet with a picture truly Theocritan. A herdsman asks a shepherdess if she has seen a cow of his which is missing, and he thus accosts her:—
O Pasturedda, di li trizzi ad unna,Chi fai pinnata di la manu manca,Pri’ un t’ appighiari ssa facciuzza biunna.
“O shepherdess with the waving locks, who make apenthouse over your eyes with your left hand, for fear of embrowning your pretty face,” &c.
Meli was poor, till, doubtless, he thought himself rich on receiving a small pension from the late King Ferdinand; for which (says the author of an interesting article on the “Dialects and Literature of Southern Italy,” in theBritish Quarterly Review) “the poet expressed his gratitude in respectful, but not adulatory terms.”
The dialect of Sicily is remarkable for preferring close sounds to broad ones. It converts the Tuscanl’s intod’s, and itse’s ando’s intoi’s andu’s. Thus, “bella” becomesbedda; “padre,”patri; “mare,”mari; “sono,”sunnu; “colorito,”culuritu, &c. This is reversing the state of things in the days of Theocritus, when the Dorian inhabitants of Sicily were accused of doing nothing when they spoke but “yawn” and “gabble.”[18]But it is attributed to the Arabs, when they were masters of the island. It has, probably, been injurious to the cause of music, and hindered the Sicilians from producing as many fine composers as their Neapolitan neighbours. Thus much, lest the reader should start at the strange, though pretty, look of Meli’s Italian, the poet havingwisely chosen to speak in the tongue of those, from whose natures and homes he copied.
The reader will see at once this leading difference between the Italian language and the Sicilian form of it, in the following opening stanzas of one of Meli’s canzonets, accompanied by a Tuscan version from the pen of Professor Rosini:—
“These quiet and green places, these mountains and valleys, were created by Nature on purpose for loving hearts.“The whispering of the leaves, the murmuring of the waters, the falling and rising of the wind—everything inspires the innermost feelings.”
“These quiet and green places, these mountains and valleys, were created by Nature on purpose for loving hearts.
“The whispering of the leaves, the murmuring of the waters, the falling and rising of the wind—everything inspires the innermost feelings.”
So, in the beginning of Eclogue the Second, a countryman, who seems fatigued, accosts another who is sitting at his door, and asks him whether his dogs are gentle, and he may venture to come in. The good householder begs him to stand a minute or two on the rock-stone, and he will call the dogs off.“Come here, Scamper,” says he, “thumping the ground there with your tail. Quiet, Wasp, quiet! Down, Lion! Now you can come in, and rest yourself; and I hope you’ll stop and take something. I have a new cheese at your service, and a piping hot loaf, just out of the oven, made of capital bread,” &c.
The graphic animation of this exordium, particularly the passage we have marked in Italics, is quite in the spirit of Theocritus. But we are obliged to stop short in it for want of understanding the next sentence.
Theocritus could satirize a king. In the following passage in hisWinter Idyll, Meli is perhaps covertly sticking his sly pen into a monk. A good old grand-sire is proposing to have what we should now call a Christmas dinner; and he consults his family as to what shall be the principal dish—what meat he shall kill:—
Ora è lu tempu,Ch’unu di li domestici animaliMora pri nui; ma mi dirriti: quali?Lu voi, la vacca, l’asinu, la crapaSù stati sempri a parti tuttu l’annuDi li nostri travagghi; e na gran partiDuvemu an iddi di li nostri beni;Vi pari, chi sarria riconoscenzaDigna di nui, na tali ricompenza?Ma lu porcu? lu porcu è statu chiddu,Chi a li travagghi d’ autri ed a li nostriE statu un ozziusu spettaturi;Anzi abbusannu di li nostri curi;Mai s’ è dignatu scotiri lu ciancuDa lu fangusu lettu, a proprii pediAspittannu lu cibbu, e cu arroganzaNui sgrida di l’ insolita tardanza.Chistu, chi nun conusci di la vita,Chi li suli vantaggi, e all’ autri lassaLi vuccuni chiù amari, comu tuttiFussimu nati pri li soi piaciri;Chi immersu tra la vili sua pigrizziaStirannusi da l’ unu e l’ autru latuDi li suduri d’ autru s’ è ingrassatu;Si: chistu mora, e ingrassi a nui: lu porcu,Lu vili, lu putruni—Si: l’ ingrassatu a costu d’ autru, mora.Lettu già lu prucessu; e proferuta,Fra lu comuni applausu e la gioja,La fatali sintenza; attapanciatu,Strascinatu, attacatu, stramazzatuFù lu porcu a l’ istanti; un gran cutedduSprofundannusi dintra di la gula,Ci ricerca lu cori, e ci disciogghiLu gruppu di la vita: orrendi grida,Gemiti strepitusi, aria ed oricchiSfardanu e a li vicini, e a li luntani,Ed anchi fannu sentiri a li stiddiLa grata nova di lu gran maceddu.Saziu già di la straggi lu cutedduApri niscennu, spaziusa strataA lu sangu, ed a l’ anima purcina;L’ unu cadennu dintra lu tineddu,Prometti sangunazzi; e l’ autra scappa,E si disperdi in aria tra li venti,O com’ è fama, passa ad abitariDintru lu corpu di un riccuni avaru,Giacchì nun potti in terra ritruvariChiù vili e schiufusu munnizzaru.
“The bull, cow,donkey, and goat have all shared in the labours of the year, and assisted to keep us; so that to slaughter one of those would hardly be grateful. But the pig! What think you of the pig?Hehas been nothing but a lazy spectator—a fellow living on those labours; nay, an abuser of the care we take to keep him; for he scorns to stir from his muddy bed, expects his food to be laid at his feet, and even has the arrogance to cry out against us if we are not in a hurry. Nothing of life knows he but its luxuries; he leaves all his cares to us, as if we were born for nothing else but to heap him with enjoyments. Plunged in the vilest indolence, he contents himself with turning from one side to the other, and growing fat with the sweat of our brows. Oh, he must die by all means, and fatten us in our turn. The hog—the vile wretch—the poltroon—the corpulent selfish rascal—Death to him!
“No sooner said than done. The sentence is carried by acclamation. The pig is grappled with, dragged along, tied and bound, slain utterly, through and through. The huge knife, profoundly plungedinto that gullet of his, goes to his heart amid horrid shrieks and dinning lamentations, which bear the news of the great deed to friends afar off, and to the very stars in heaven. Blood and soul, in a flood ample as the way made for them, follow the withdrawing blade,—l’ anima purcina, the spirit of pork; the blood into a hogshead, promising black puddings; the soul, either into the passing winds, or, as others think, into the body of some greedy chuff of a millionaire, that vilest and most repulsive of muck-worms.”
Meli’s first volume consists entirely of bucolics; the second of odes, sonnets, and canzonets; the third chiefly of verses in the manner of Berni, of satires, and dithyrambics; the fourth is occupied with a long Bernesque poem, called theFairy Galanta, seemingly full of national as well as critical matters; the fifth and sixth with another on Don Quixote; and the seventh with elegies and fables. By this the reader may judge of the diversity of his genius, and its tendency to the sprightly; with which, however, a fund of thinking is always mixed up. He was evidently forced to conceal a great deal of deep thought and indignant sympathy in the garb of a jester. He did this, however, so well, expressed so much horror at the French revolution, and showed himself such a friend of all who had anything good in them, that in a country notorious for itsarbitrary government, he was in favour with the court and aristocracy; and the circumstance, upon the whole, does them credit. Princes in Sicily are as common as country squires in England; but they have beautiful titles, and it is pleasant to read the list of his subscribers. Among them, here and there, is the name of an Englishman ludicrously set forth. Thus we haveSua Altezza Reale, &c., to wit:—