CHAPTER L.

Remarks upon Andrea De Basso's Ode to a Dead Body.*

We are given to understand by the Italian critics, that this poern made a great sensation, and was alone thought sufficient to render its author of celebrity. Its loathly heroine had been a beauty of Ferrara, proud and luxurious. It is written in a fierce Catholic spirit, and is incontestably very striking and even appalling. Images, which would only be disgusting on other occasions, affect us beyond disgust, by the strength of such earnestness and sincerity. Andrea de Basso lays bare the mortifying conclusions of the grave, and makes the pride of beauty bow down to them. The picture of the once beautiful, proud, and unthinking creature, caught and fixed down in a wasting trap, the calling upon her to come forth, and see if any will now be won into her arms,-the taunts about the immortal balm which she thought she had in her veins,—the whole, in short, of the terrible disadvantage under which she is made to listen with unearthly ears to the poet's lecture, affects the imagination to shuddering.

No wonder that such an address made a sensation, even upon the gaiety of a southern city. One may conceive how it fixed the superstitious more closely over their meditations and skulls; how it sent the young, and pious, and humble, upon their knees; how it baulked the vivacity of the serenaders; brought tears into the eyes of affectionate lovers; and shot doubt and confusion even into the cheeks of the merely wanton. Andrea de Basso, armed with the lightnings of his church, tore the covering from the grave, and smote up the heart of Ferrara as with an earthquake.

* The reader will gather the substance of it from what follows. The ode is to be found in the sixth volume of the Parnaso Italiano. A translation has appeared in the volume of the author's Poetical Works, just published.

For a lasting impression, however, or for such a one as he would have desired, the author, with all his powers, overshot his mark. Men build again over earthquakes, as nature resumes her serenity. The Ferrarese returned to their loves and guitars, when absolution had set them to rights. It was impossible that Andrea de Basso should have succeeded in fixing such impressions upon the mind; and it would have been an error in logic, as well as everything else, if he had. He committed himself, both as a theologian and a philosopher. There is an allusion, towards the end of his ode, to the Catholic notion, that the death of a saintly person is accompanied by what they call "the odor of sanctity;"-a literalised metaphor, which they must often. have been perplexed to maintain. But the assents of superstition, and the instinct of common sense, keep a certain separation at bottom; and the poet drew such a picture of mortality, as would unavoidably be applied to every one, vicious or vir tuous. It was too close and mortifying, even for the egotism of religious fancy to overcome. All would have an interest in con

tradicting it somehow or other.

On the other hand, if they could not well contradict or bear to think of it, his mark was overshot there. It has been observed, in times of shipwrecks, plagues, and other circumstances of a common despair, that upon the usual principles of extremes meeting, mankind turn upon Death their pursuer, and defy him to the teeth. The superstitious in vain exhort them to think and threaten them with the consequences of refusal. They have threats enough. If they could think to any purpose of re. freshment, they would. But time presses; the exhortation is too like the evil it would remedy; and they endeavor to crowd into a few moments all the enjoyments to which nature has given. them a tendency, and to which, with a natural piety beyond that of their threateners, they feel that they have both a tendency and a right. If many such odes as Basso's could have been written,-if the court of Ferrara had turned superstitious and patronised such productions, the next age would not merely have been lively; it would have been debauched.

Again, the reasoning of such appeals to the general sense is absurd in itself. They call upon us to join life and death t

gether; to think of what we are not, with the feelings of what we are; to be different and yet the same. Hypochondria may do this; a melancholy imagination, or a strong imagination of any sort, may do it for a time; but it will never be done generally, and nature, never intended it should. A decaying dead body is no more the real human being, than a watch, stopped and mutilated, is a time-piece, or cold water warm, or a numb finger in the same state of sensation as the one next it, or any one modification of being the same as another. We may pitch ourselves by imagination into this state of being; but it is ourselves, modified by our present totalities and sensation, that we do pitch there. What we may be otherwise, is another thing. The melancholy imagination may give it melancholy fancies; the livelier one, if it pleases, may suppose it a state of exquisite dissolution. The philosopher sees in it nothing but a contradiction to the life by which we judge of it, and a dissolution of the compounds which held us together. There is one thing alone in such gloomy beggings of a question, which throws them back upon the prescriptions of wisdom, and prevents them from becoming general. They are always accompanied by ill health. We do not mean a breaking up of the frame, or that very road to death, which may be a kindly and cheerful one, illuminated by the sunset, as youth was by the dawn: but a polluted and artificial state of blood, or an insufficient vigor of existence, that state, in short, which is an exception to the general condition of humanity, and acts like the proof of a rule to the intentions of Nature. For these are so kind, that no mistake in the world, not even vice itself, is so sure to confuse a man's sensations and render them melancholy, as ill-health. Nature seems to say to us, "Be, above all things, as natural as you can be,-as much as possible in the best fashion of the mould in which I cast you, and you shall be happy." Nor is this unlucky for virtue, but most lucky: for it takes away its pride, and leaves it its cheerfulness. Real vice will soon be found to be real unhealthiness: nor could society have a better guide to the reforma ion of its moral systems, than by making them as compatible as possible with every healthy impulse. But why, it may be asked, are we not all healthy? It is impossible to say: but

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this is certain, that the oftener a man asks himself that question, the more intimations he has that he is to try and get out of the tendency to ask them. We may live elsewhere: we may be compounded over again, and receive a new consciousness here ;- -a guess which, if it seems dreary at first, might lead us to make a heaven of the earth we live in, even for our own sakes hereafter. But at all events, put, as Jupiter says in the fable, your shoulder to the wheel; and put it as cheerfully as you can. The way that Andrea de Basso should have set about reforming the Ferrarese beauties, would have been to show them, that their enjoyments were hurtful in proportion as they were extravagant, and less than they might be, in proportion as they were in bad taste. But to ask the healthy to be hypochondriacal: the beautiful to think gratuitously of ugliness; and the giddy, much less the wise, to desire to be angels in heaven, by representing God as a cruel and eternal punisher,—is what never could, and never ought to have, a lasting effect on humanity.

It has been well observed, that life is a series of present sensations. It might be added, that the consciousness of the present moment is one of the strongest of those sensations. Still this consciousness is a series, not a line; a variety with intervals, not a continuity and a haunting. If it were, it would be unhealthy; if it were unhealthy, it would be melancholy; if it were melancholy, the evident system upon which nature acts would be dif ferent. Thus it is impossible that men should be finally led by gloomy, and not by pleasant doctrines.

When the Ferrarese ladies read the poem of Andrea de Basso, it occupied the series of their sensations for a little while, more or less according to their thoughtfulness, and more or less, even then, according to their unhealthiness. The power of voluntary. thought is proportioned to the state of the health. In a little time, the Ferrarese, being like other multitudes, and even gayer, would turn to their usual reflections and enjoyments, as they accordingly did. About that period Ariosto was born. He rose to vindicate the charity and good-will of nature; and put forth more real wisdom, truth, and even piety, in his willing enjoyment of the creation, than all the monks in Ferrara could have mustered to. gether for centuries.

To conclude, Andrea de Basso mistook his own self, as well as the means of instructing his callous beauty. There are few things more oppressive to the heart, than the want of feeling in those whose appearance leads others to feeli ntensely-the sight of beauty sacrificing its own real comfort as well as ours, by a heartless and indiscriminate love of admiration from young and old, from the gross and the refined, the wise and the foolish, the good-natured and the ill-natured, the happy-making and the vicious. If Andrea de Basso's heroine was one of this stamp, we can imagine her to have irritated his best feelings, as well as his more equivocal. We hope she was not merely a giddy creature, who had not quite patience enough with her confessor. Alfred the Great, when a youth, was accustomed to turn a deaf ear to the didactics of his holy kinsman St. Neot; for which, says the worthy Bishop Asser, who was nevertheless a great admirer of the king, and wrote his life, all those troubles were afterwards brought upon him and his kingdom. Be this as it may, and supposing the Ferrarese beauty to have been an unfeeling one, the poet was not aware, while triumphing over her folly, and endeavoring to enjoy the thought of her torments, that he was confounding the sentiment of the thing with its reverse, and doing his best to make himself a worse and more hard-hearted person than she. His efforts to induce us to think lightly of the most beautiful things in the external world, by showing us that they will not always be what they are—that a smooth and graceful limb will not for ever be the same smooth and graceful limb, nor an eye an eye, nor an apple an apple, are not as wise as they are poetical. To have said that the limb, unless admired with sentiment as well as with ordinary admiration, is a common-place thing to what it might be, and that there is more beauty in it than the lady supposed, would have been good. To make nothing of it, because she did not make as much as she could, is unwise. But above all, to consign her to eternal punishment in the next world, because she gave rise to a series of fugitive evils in this-granting even that she, and not her wrong education, was the cause of them-is one of those idle worryings of himself and others, which only perplex further