He Attributed His Escape From This And Every Other Peril To The Hand Of
God.
Throughout life he was a zealous reader of the Bible, a firm and
even ascetic believer, forever preoccupied, in childlike simplicity of
soul, with first causes.
His spirit moved majestically in a world of
fervent platitudes. The whole Cosmos lay serenely distended before his
mental vision; a benevolent God overhead, devising plans for the
prosperity of Albania; a malignant, ubiquitous and very real devil,
thwarting these His good intentions whenever possible; mankind on earth,
sowing and reaping in the sweat of their brow, as was ordained of old.
Like many poets, he never disabused his mind of this comfortable form of
anthropomorphism. He was a firm believer, too, in dreams. But his
guiding motive, his sun by day and star by night, was a belief in the
"mission" of the Pelasgian race now scattered about the shores of the
Inland Sea - in Italy, Sicily, Greece, Dalmatia, Roumania, Asia Minor,
Egypt - a belief as ardent and irresponsible as that which animates the
Lost Tribe enthusiasts of England. He considered that the world hardly
realized how much it owed to his countryfolk; according to his views,
Achilles, Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Pyrrhus,
Diocletian, Julian the Apostate - they were all Albanians. Yet even
towards the end of his life he is obliged to confess: -
"But the evil demon who for over four thousand years has been hindering
the Pelasgian race from collecting itself into one state, is still
endeavouring by insidious means to thwart the work which would lead it
to that union."
Disgusted with the clamorous and intriguing bustle of Naples, he
retired, at the early age of 34, to his natal village of Macchia,
throwing over one or two offers of lucrative worldly appointments. He
describes himself as wholly disenchanted with the "facile fatuity" of
Liberalism, the fact being, that he lacked what a French psychologist
has called the function of the real; his temperament was not of the
kind to cope with actualities. This retirement is an epoch in his
life - it is the Grand Renunciation. Henceforward he loses personal touch
with thinking humanity. At Macchia he remained, brooding on Albanian
wrongs, devising remedies, corresponding with foreigners and
writing - ever writing; consuming his patrimony in the cause of Albania,
till the direst poverty dogged his footsteps.
I have read some of his Italian works. They are curiously oracular, like
the whisperings of those fabled Dodonian oaks of his fatherland; they
heave with a darkly-virile mysticism. He shares Blake's ruggedness, his
torrential and confused utterance, his benevolence, his flashes of
luminous inspiration, his moral background. He resembles that visionary
in another aspect: he was a consistent and passionate adorer of the
Ewig-weibliche. Some of the female characters in his poems retain
their dewy freshness, their exquisite originality, even after passing
through the translator's crucible.
At the age of 19 he wrote a poem on "Odysseus," which was published
under a pseudonym.
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