Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays

								

"pilgrim soul!" addressed, singly and sweetly to one who cannot be over-
praised, "pilgrim-soul!" is a phrase of fondness, the high homage of a
lover, of one watching, of one who has no more need of common flatteries,
but has admired and gazed while the object of his praises visibly
surpassed them--this is the facile Italian ecstasy, and it rises into an
Italian heaven.
It was by chance, and in an old play, that I came upon this impetuous,
sudden, and single sentence of admiration, as it were a sentence of life
passed upon one charged with inestimable deeds; and the modern editor had
thought it necessary to explain the exclamation by a note.  It was, he
said, poetical.
Anima pellegrina seems to be Italian of no later date than
Pergolese's airs, and suits the time as the familiar phrase of the more
modern love-song suited the day of Bellini.  But it is only Italian,
bygone Italian, and not a part of the sweet past of any other European
nation, but only of this.
To the same local boundaries and enclosed skies belongs the charm of
those buoyant words:-



   Felice chi vi mira,

   Ma piu felice chi per voi sospira!
And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would be
but a property of the turn of speech.  It is rather the profounder
advantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such feeling as the very
language keeps in store.  In another tongue you may sing, "happy who
looks, happier who sighs"; but in what other tongue shall the little
meaning be so sufficient, and in what other shall you get from so weak an
antithesis the illusion of a lovely intellectual epigram?  Yet it is not
worthy of an English reader to call it an illusion; he should rather be
glad to travel into the place of a language where the phrase is
intellectual, impassioned, and an epigram; and should thankfully for the
occasion translate himself, and not the poetry.
I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the charm
may still be unknown to Englishmen--"piuttosto bruttini."  See what
an all-Italian spirit is here, and what contempt, not reluctant, but
tolerant and familiar.  You may hear it said of pictures, or works of art
of several kinds, and you confess at once that not otherwise should they
be condemned.  Brutto--ugly--is the word of justice, the word for any
language, everywhere translatable, a circular note, to be exchanged
internationally with a general meaning, wholesale, in the course of the
European concert.  But bruttino is a soothing diminutive, a diminutive
that forbears to express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence,
and is, moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in the
rear--"rather than not."  "Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little way
that we need say few words about--the fewer the better;" nay, this
paraphrase cannot achieve the homely Italian quality whereby the printed
and condemnatory criticism is made a family affair that shall go no