THE Roman historian Niebuhr reviewing the literature of the Augustan
age, gave it as his opinion that epic poetry was dead, the lyric form
of poetical expression being the only one adapted to the genius of the
Romans at that period. Virgil’s “Æneid,” beautiful as are its details,
he considers a failure as an epic; for an epic hero should, with fresh
simple spontaneity, go straight home to the heart of the people at
large, and this, he argues, the character of Æneas could never have
done. Greek legends in Virgil’s poem are so dove-tailed into the Latin
ones that the work loses its national character, loses therefore its
spontaneity, and remains now, as it must have been from the beginning,
an exquisite mosaic, to be appreciated only by the cultured; and
appreciated, moreover, rather for the delicacy of the descriptions and
the art of the versification, than for any inherent interest attaching
to the principal characters. Roman literary society was, in fact, too
positive to produce an epic poem. The sceptical spirit was uppermost.
Legend, instead of firing the imagination, did but arouse the critical
faculty. The story of Romulus, of his wondrous birth and preservation,
of his building of the city, his government, and marvellous death,
was neither believed in as fact nor treated as poetry. Men set to
work to examine and to explain it; a useful task, no doubt, and one
which Niebuhr himself has performed as well as anyone else, but one
expressive of a spirit far removed from that which animates the writer
of an epic poem. The death of the epic meant, however, the life of the
lyric. Occupying themselves but little with the motives and actions of
those who lived in other ages, men felt all the more need of uttering
their own subjective feelings and impressions. For such utterances they
naturally chose the lyric form, which the highly developed æsthetic
sense of the time induced them to work to a high degree of perfection.
This, in fact, was the age of Horace and Catullus.
Surely much the same causes are at work, in different forms of society,
at the present day. The Italian critic Trezza sings the dirge of the
epic, and proves that the lyric is the only form of poem possible to
the society of the nineteenth century. Another authority besides Trezza
makes a similar assertion.
“The epic,” he says, “was buried some time ago. To violate the tomb
of the mighty dead by singing doggerel over it, even if it were not
the sign of a depraved disinclination to undertake higher flights,
would not be particularly diverting. The drama (referring to poetic
drama) is _in extremis_, and the superabundance of doctors won’t even
let it depart in peace. Lyric poetry, individual by nature, appears
to stand its ground, and may still last some little while provided
it does not forget it is an art. If it degrades itself into a mere
secretion of the sensibility or sensuality of such and such an one, if
it surrenders itself to all the unnatural licences which sensibility
and sensuality allow themselves, then, poor lyric, she too is no
longer recognisable.... To have adapted to the lyric this style of
versification, fit only for narration and description, without verses,
and with rhymes _a piacere_, is a sure sign that every idea of the
true lyric has been lost.... An asthmatic lyric, paunch-bellied,
in dressing-gown of ample girth, and slippers—tie upon it!... I,
bending at the foot of the Italian Muse, first kiss it with respectful
tenderness, then try to fit on the sapphic, alcaic, and asclepiadaic
buskins in which her godlike sister led the choruses on the Parian
marble of the Doric temples, which look down at themselves in the sea
that was the fatherland of Aphrodite and Apollo.”
So writes the great Italian poet Carducci, using a similitude which
might have come from the pen of Horace himself. The Augustan age
produced a poet who measured the Greek lyric buskins on Latin measures;
the nineteenth century has given birth to one who has fitted them on to
Italian verse.
Giosué Carducci, whose poetical works have raised so much controversy
in Italy, and occasioned a deluge of treatises on metre, Italian and
Latin, was born at Valdicastello, in the classic Tuscan land, on July
27th, 1836, of a family which, in the days of the independence of the
Tuscan cities, had given a Gonfaloniere to the Florentine Republic.
His first impressions of Nature he received from the Pisan Maremma,
here stretching away in “peaceful hills, with steaming mists, and
green plains smiling in the morning showers”; there in “chalk-hills
of malignant aspect, sparsely shaded by wood, with horses wandering
under the guilty-looking cork-oaks that bristle, lowering, in the plain
below”; or again in “cloud-swept unsown plains, by the widowed shores
of the Tuscan sea,” scattered with the old-world feudal towers, and
full of ancient memories of decayed cities and mediæval strife. It
was among such surroundings that at the age of eleven Carducci wrote
his first verses. These reveal at once the historical and classical
tendency of his mind; for besides a few lines on the “Death of an Owl,”
we find a poem on “The Fall of the Castle of Bolgheri into the hands of
Ladislaus, King of Naples,” and another entitled “M. Brutus Meditating
the Death of Cæsar.”
Those were unsettled times, however. Political revolution deprived
Carducci’s father in 1849 of his post of village-doctor, and forced him
to take refuge in Florence, where Giosué was put to school with the
Scolopian Fathers. All readers of Ruffini will remember that author’s
experience of the Scolopian convent school as described in “Lorenzo
Benoni”; and can imagine that Carducci, accustomed to the open life of
the Maremma, full of aspirations towards the freedom of classic times,
did not feel himself altogether in his element as he sat learning from
the black priest whose “clucking voice blasphemed _Io amo_,” and “whose
face it was vexation to behold.”
On leaving school, young Carducci published his first volume of poems;
and in 1858, together with some of his friends, started a review named
after the famous sixteenth century poet “Il Poliziano.” The paper,
as is usual with such juvenile ventures, was short-lived; but it is
interesting as showing the efforts the young poet was already making
towards the adaptation of classical forms to modern ideas. It was,
however, impossible that any ardent youth should content himself with
mere literary form during that period of ferment which resulted in the
formation of a United Italy. He, like his contemporaries throughout the
length and breadth of the land, was fired by the noble efforts made
by Garibaldi and Mazzini for the redemption of their fatherland from
the hated Austrian yoke; and, though republican by tradition (as all
Italians must be) as well as by natural inclination, Carducci was yet
willing to follow the moderate party and Garibaldi in their support of
the monarchy of Savoy. Speaking of his political views at that time, he
says:—
“I was one of the very many who in ’59 and ’60 adopted the formula of
the Garibaldini, ‘Italy and Victor Emmanuel,’ without any enthusiasm
for the moderate party and its leaders, but loyally. I was drawn to
it partly from grateful affection for the King and Piedmont, in whose
firmness I had found some consolation for the misery of the preceding
ten years; partly from the idea that in the fusion of the noble with
the burgher element, of the army with the people, of the monarchical
traditions of one part of the country with the democratic traditions
of other parts, in the intimate union of loyalty with liberty, of
discipline with enthusiasm, of ancient tradition with modern belief,
the history of Italy—that history of wondrous tissue, which bears
within itself all the seeds, developments, blossomings, fadings of all
political ideas, forms and phenomena—will at length find, better than
the Greek could have done, its necessary unfolding and complement,
achieving the liberation, the union, the greatness of the whole
country by means of the valour and strength of the nation, without,
and even in opposition to, any foreign interference.”
As this extract clearly shows, Carducci’s attachment to the Moderates
(as he calls the Monarchists) was purely Platonic; his natural passion
was for the Republicans. Such dualism between head and heart, such war
between his just idea of the exigencies of modern times and his fervid
admiration of the methods and life of the classic world, soon brought
him into serious difficulties, and rendered his active participation
in the military and political events of the Sixties null. For the
men with whom he found himself associated as colleagues, though at
one with him as regards the fundamental tenet of the necessity of a
monarchy, had but little understanding of his idea that the valour
and strength of the nation was to be the making of Italy, without
foreign interference, or even in opposition to it. They relied more on
modern methods of diplomacy than on Greek dash and daring; and, to
gain their ends, were ready to compromise with other Powers and with
the Church in a way that clashed with Carducci’s classic enthusiasm.
Hence the poet was forced into opposition to the party to which his
reflection politically attached him, and poured out the bitterness of
his soul for the indignities inflicted on his ideal, in a series of
poems afterwards collected and published in a little volume bearing
the title of “Giambi ed Epodi” (“Iambics and Epodes”). This attitude
naturally led the Moderate party into the belief that Carducci was a
preacher of republicanism. As such they persecuted him, even suspending
him from his chair of Italian Literature at Bologna; and as such he has
ever been considered until he fell under the spell of the extraordinary
fascination exerted by the grace and manners of Queen Margherita.
Under this spell his old admiration for the House of Savoy revived,
becoming, as many think, exaggerated. He was reproached as a turncoat
by those who never fully understood his former opinions or his true
attitude with regard to the Moderate party; he lost caste among the
students, who once kept him for a whole hour in his lecture-room while
they hissed him violently; and the people at large, finding him turned
into a court poet, openly asserted that he was in his decadence, and
that his latter end was not worthy his beginning. It is certainly a
pity for his fame that it should have been, of all persons, the Queen
in whom he found so warm and appreciative a friend; for his constant
presence about her in the summer holidays doubtless laid him open,
for many minds, to the charge of snobbism. Two things, however, must
be remembered in his defence. Firstly, that he has always considered
monarchy as necessary for Italy in her present condition; secondly,
that the combination of military glory with grace and culture has been
his ideal from boyhood; and this combination he found represented in
King Umberto and Queen Margherita. One of his later poems, “War” (“La
Guerra”) which hymns the praises of military enterprise, clearly shows
that he has lost nothing of his ancient admiration for martial prowess;
while others, addressed to Queen Margherita, prove also his poetic
sensibility to feminine grace. It is thus easy to explain Carducci’s
apparent change of attitude, while at the same time fully understanding
that the masses—not apt to enquire into the workings of a man’s
mind, not apt to read with much attention or reflection—are simply
struck by the difference in tone between his earlier poems (the “Ça
Ira” in honour of the French Revolution, for instance), and his later
laudations of the House of Savoy, and launch against him the charge to
which we have alluded.
It is difficult to choose, from the scathing scorn of the “Giambi”
(“Iambics”), poured out in the incisive terseness of Carducci’s verse,
any short passage which should give an idea of the whole series. We
may mention, however, the terrible little poem entitled “Meminisse
Horret,” written in 1867 while the Court was at Florence. He describes
a horrible nightmare in which he sees Italy giving the lie to all
her past traditions. Her ancient heroes are turned into cowards
and supplicate those whom once they proudly defied; Dante, dressed
like a clown, obsequiously shows strangers round Santa Croce; while
Machiavelli, peeping slyly from behind a tomb, proclaims with a wink
the adulteries of his mother-country in few words which cut to the
quick. In the poem, written on the death of Giovanni Cairoli, the youth
who, like his three brothers before him, died in battle for the unity
of his country, to the grief yet glory of his widowed mother, the poet,
branding, as Dante might have done, the infamy of those who dance and
make love, and bring Italy to shame on the very graves of her heroes,
goes so far as to curse his fatherland:—
.... Cursed
be thou, my ancient fatherland,
on whom to-day’s shame and the vengeance
of the centuries lie heaped!
The plant of valour grows here yet
but for thy mules
to bed on; here the violet’s perfume
ends in the dung-heap.
Bitter, too, are the verses entitled “Italy’s Song as she goes up the
Campidoglio.” The mode, namely, in which the Italian Government,
after promising in the September Convention that it would not occupy
Rome, slunk into the city while France and Germany were busy with
their own affairs, revolted Carducci’s whole soul, much as he, like
all true Italian patriots, desired to set the Capitol as crown and
seal on United Italy. He represents the army as entering stealthily by
night, and calling on the Capitoline geese not to make such a dreadful
clatter; it’s only “Italy, great and united,” who is coming back to
her own again, and they’ll wake Cardinal Antonelli if they cackle so.
We might quote endlessly to show how intensely despicable Carducci
considered the diplomats of the Moderate party, who tried to gain their
ends by crooked negotiations now with one Power, now with another,
boasting that they had “read their Machiavelli”; and its generals who
led out the fiery Italian youth to be slaughtered by the enemy. Nothing
can equal, however, the concentration of scorn to be found in the
sonnet “Heu Pudor”:—
He lies who says that, when the heart flares up,
the breath of heated genius fans it.
With the eternal stamp of infamy had I too
branded the front of this unworthy herd.
As fierce mayhap as thine, oh Dante father,
the hate and scorn that camp within my heart;
But their voracious flaming roars enclosed,
destroying me, and ne’er attains its aim.
New lakes of pitch, made thick
with serpents, monsters, and with demons harsh
a new and twofold bolgia had I dug;
and, with its hills and with its walls, cast in—
like to a loathsome tatter—
this fatherland of Fucci and Bonturi.[18]
It must not be thought, however, that Carducci can emit nothing but
fire and smoke. From the lurid “Giambi” we can turn for relief to the
exquisite little word-pictures of the “Odi Barbare” and of many of the
poems published in the collections entitled “Levia Gravia” and “Rime
Nuove.” It is in these that Carducci’s sense of nature, frank classic
paganism, united curiously, however, to a certain German sentimental
pessimism, and his extraordinary power of word-sculpture reveal
themselves.
Let no reader of Burns or Hogg expect to find in Carducci, however,
the same type of nature-sense as abounds in the Saxon poets. The clear
sky and sharp outlines of Italy do not encourage that gentle sentiment
produced by the misty vagueness of hills and plains in the rain-laden
atmosphere of the north. A poet of Greek-Latin race is not likely to
give us the “Address to a Mountain Daisy,” the sweet tenderness of
“Kilmeny,” the undefined melancholy of Tennyson’s “Dying Swan,” or
even the cradling lusciousness of “Haroun Al-Raschid.” His landscape is
altogether larger; his sky, clear, “stripped to its depths,” as Shelley
says of that of Venice, renders distinct even small distant details of
scarped or forest-clad hill, and, reflected in lake or sea or lighting
up the mountains with amethyst and topaz, gives colours of greater
brilliancy, though of less mystic warmth and depth, than does the
ever-varying atmosphere of the British Isles. Macaulay and Longfellow
have already observed the difference of the two types of mind in the
exactitude of detail to be observed in Dante’s “Inferno” as compared
with the vagueness of Milton’s “Hell,” and it is very noticeable also
in the nature-descriptions of lyric poets. Take as an instance the
opening of the following poem “All’Aurora” “To the Dawn”:—
“Thou risest and kissest the clouds with thy rosy breath, O Goddess,
Kissest the darkling tops of marble temples.
The woods feel thee and rouse with a chilly shudder,
The falcon springs upon the wing with robber joy,
Whilst the garrulous nests are full of whisperings among the damp leaves,
And the sea-gull screams grey over the purple sea.
In the laborious plain the first to rejoice in thee are the rivers,
Glittering tremulously among the murmurs of the poplars:
The sorrel foal runs joyfully towards the deep-flowing streams,
His maned head erect, neighing to the winds:
The watchful valour of the dogs gives answer from the cabins
And the whole valley resounds with lusty lowings.
But man, whom thou awakenest to consume his life in work,
Still regards thee with thoughtful admiration,
Just as, in time gone by, the noble Aryan fathers
Upright among their white flocks adored thee on the mountain.”
It is a pity that it is impossible for us to give the subtle melody
of Carducci’s verse. Although French and German poets have recognised
the master and translated some of his works, no Englishman appears
to have as yet shown this mark of appreciation. Nevertheless, the
characteristic way of treating the subject is clearly visible. The
hawk, emblem of freedom and strife, is the first living creature that
strikes the poet’s eye and mind. The sea-gull, the galloping foal, then
the baying of the dogs and the “lusty lowings,” render an impression
rather of grandeur than tenderness; the smaller birds are hardly
mentioned, the landscape is clear and exact. At the same time there are
little touches of exquisite beauty, worthy of Virgil himself, as in
the “rosy breath” with which the Dawn kisses the clouds, the “chilly
shudder of the woods,” “the garrulous nests whispering among the damp
leaves.” Such jewels of expression are indeed scattered throughout the
whole of Carducci’s work, their conciseness rendering very apparent the
classicality of the models on which Carducci formed his style. Of him,
indeed, Tennyson might have said, as he did of Virgil—
“All the wealth of all the Muses,
often flowering in a lonely word.”
Spring sets Carducci’s heart beating in dithyrambs; it is in his spring
songs that he abandons himself most completely to the joy of life as
life, and attains, perhaps, some of his highest flights of lyric song.
Very beautiful, for instance, are the three poems entitled “Greek
Spring Songs”: i. Æolic; ii. Doric; iii. Alexandrine. From the first of
these we may quote the return of Apollo
“from the hyperborean shores to the pious soil of Greece, to the
laurels from the sluggish cold; two white swans draw him as they
fly: the sky smiles. On his head he bears Jove’s golden fillet, but
the air sighs in his thick-growing locks, and the lyre moves in his
hand with amorous trembling. Around him circle in light dance the
Cyclades, fatherland of the deity; from afar Cyprus and Cythera send
up white foam of applause. And a slight skiff follows throughout the
great Ægean, purple-sailed, harmonious: Alcæus of the golden plectrum,
bearing arms, guides it through the waters. Sappho sits in the midst
of it, with soft smile and hyacinthine tresses, her white breast
heaving in the ambrosial air which streams from the god.”
The poet is not always so classical as this, however. Of a very
different stamp, to select one other out of many spring poems, is his
“Brindisi d’Aprile” (“April Drinking Song”)—
“When, in the dark ilexes and new-flowered almond, revels the nuptial
chorus of the birds, and the primroses on the sunny hills are eyes of
old-world nymphs looking out on mortal men, and the sun greets the
beds of flowers with youthful smile, and over the silent moor the sky
bends piously, and the breath of April moves the flowering corn like a
sigh of love stirring a young bride’s veil; then do the trunk of the
vine and the heart of the maiden leap up with throbs; they feel their
wounds. The vine breathes odorous buds into the cold twigs, the maiden
darts desire in her virgin blushes. Everything ferments and grows
languid in the tepor of the air: the blood within the veins, the wine
within the casks. O, ruddy prisoner! thou yearnest for thy fatherland,
and the breath of thy native hill raises a ferment within the tun.
There is the joyous life of the vine twigs: here thou art a prisoner
in the snare.... Hurrah for liberty! Let us go, let us go to liberate
the captive; let us call him back to life and make him sparkle in the
glass, sparkle on the crest of the hill, sparkle to the sunlight; let
the light breeze kiss him again; let him behold the young vines.”
And yet with all this revelling in nature, and especially the nature
of spring-time, the melancholy despondent strain is never far distant.
Even in the Greek spring songs there is nearly as much talk of chill
mist and rain as of clear sky and sunlight; and the third song,
the Alexandrine, goes so far as to even introduce a graveyard. In
the little poem entitled “School Memories,” too, the poet, after
describing the priest, makes a charming picture of the summer landscape
and beckoning trees that he sees through the window: but everything
is suddenly crossed and darkened by the thought of “death, and the
formless nothing,” and this thought of death has haunted him ever
since. He is too fond of graveyards; too apt, like some German poets
at the beginning of last century, to look upon the world as a vast
cemetery. It is perhaps to this same strain of pessimism, this same
tendency to look at the ugly side of things, that we are to attribute
the absolute repulsiveness of many of the images he employs. To
compare trees, bald, dripping, and bent, to sextons over a grave is
hardly poetical, but it is at any rate harmless; some of his other
similitudes are too repulsive for translation, and we must think it a
pity that so great a poet should encourage the tendency to dwell, quite
gratuitously, on disagreeable non-poetical subjects.
Perhaps the poems which are most free from these defects are those
contained in the first volume of the “Odi Barbare.” There we find the
exquisite little piece entitled “Fantasia.”
“Thou speakest and thy voice’s soul, yielding languidly to the gentle
breeze, floats out over the caressing waves, and sails to strange
shores. It sails smiling in a tepor of setting sunlight, into the
solitudes: white birds fly between sky and sea, green islands pass
by, the temples on their rocky summits dart rays of Parian whiteness
in the rosy sunset, the cypresses on the shores tremble, and the
thick myrtles send forth their odour. The smell of the salt breezes
wanders afar, and mingles with the slow singing of the sailors, whilst
a ship within sight of the harbour peacefully furls its red sails.
Maidens come down from the acropolis in long procession, and they have
beautiful white peplums, they bear garlands on their heads, in their
hands they have branches of laurel, they extend their arms and sing.
His spear planted in the sand of his fatherland, a man leaps to earth,
glittering in arms: is he perchance Alcæus come back from war to the
Lesbian virgins.”
To see the charming way in which Carducci can blend history with
nature, we must turn in the same volume to the poem entitled “Sull’
Adda.”
“Flow through the red fires of evening, flow, blue Adda: Lydia on
the placid stream, with tender love, sails towards the setting sun.
Behold, the memorable bridge fades behind us: the airy spring of the
arches yields to the distance and sinks to the level of the liquid
plain that widens and murmurs.”
And then the poet, in musical verse, traces the history of the battles
between the Romans and barbarians; speaks of the “pale Corsican who
passed the dubious bridge amid lightnings, bearing the fate of two
centuries in his slight and youthful hand”; and in contrast with
the smoke and clang and blood of battle we have the recurrence of
the verse representing Lydia floating through the fires of evening
towards the setting sun: “Beneath the Olympic smile of the air the
earth palpitates: every wave glows and rises trembling, swelling
with radiant love.” The smell of youthful meadows rises from either
bank, the great trees sign to the skiff as it passes, and, descending
from the trees and rising from the flowering hedges, the birds follow
through the gold and rosy streaks (of sky and water), mingling joyful
loves. Between rich meadows the Adda flows on to lose itself in the
Eridano; the untiring sun sinks to its setting.
“O sun, O flowing Adda!” exclaims the poet, “the soul floats through
an elysium behind thee; where will it and mutual love lose themselves,
O Lydia? I know not; but I would lose myself now far from men, in
Lydia’s languid glance, where float unknown desires and mysteries.”
His power of blending historical scenes with descriptive poetry is also
to be found in the poem entitled “At the Springs of the Clitunnus.”
Umbrians, Tuscans, Romans, Carthaginians pass before the reader; then
Catholicism appears with its black-robed priests, driving out ancient
gods and tillage, but ousted in its turn by new developments of the
human mind. “Before us the train, steaming and panting after new
industries, whistles as it rushes along.” Strange as it may seem, all
this history does not swamp the poetry, which is of the most purely
idyllic character throughout.
We must not leave the subject of Carducci’s sympathy with nature
without mentioning the pretty little dialogue between the poet and
the great alley of cypress-trees at which he used to fling stones,
and among which he used to go bird-nesting in his boyish days. The
cypresses run to meet him like a double row of young giants, welcome
him and beg him to remain with them, offering him the pastimes of
years gone by. The poet answers that he cannot stop; he has grown to
be a celebrity now, he reads Greek and Latin, writes and writes, is
no longer an urchin, and, as to stones, he no longer throws them,
especially at plants. A murmur runs through the doubting summits, the
rosy light of the setting sun shines athwart the dark cypress green
with a pitying smile, sun and trees seem to feel compassion for him,
and the murmur embodies itself in words. The winds have told the
poet’s old companions of his eternal unrest, of his eternal brooding
over vexed questions which can never be settled. Let him come back to
his old haunts, to the blue sea, the smile of the setting sun, the
flights of birds, the chirping of the sparrows, the choruses which pass
eternally between earth and sky. So only will he lay the evil spectres
which rise from the black depths of man’s thought-beaten heart, as
putrid flames rise before one walking in a cemetery. The poet will not
stop, yet, as the train whirls him back to the problems of the world,
he looks back at the quiet graveyard to which they lead up and where
his grandmother lies, wondering whether they may not be right, and
whether what he has sought for morning and evening so many years in
vain, may not after all be hidden there. Yet as the train rushes on,
the colts run racing beside it; and it is only a donkey, feeding on a
thistle, that stands stolidly gazing on the busy scene before him.
A pilgrim to this cypress alley relates that its owner, Count Walfredo
della Gherardesca, refuses to cut down the trees, many of which have
suffered much from storms, and replant the alley. “Carducci loves
them,” he said, “and therefore I respect them. Those that have suffered
I shall replace little by little by young plants, and thus the alley
will preserve its true and now celebrated appearance.”
As an expression of pure nature-sense, we may still quote, perhaps, the
sonnet entitled “The Ox”:—
“I love thee, O pious ox; a gentle sentiment of strength and peace
dost thou infuse into my heart, whether, solemn, monumental, thou
lookest out over the free and fertile fields, or whether, bending
to the yoke, thou secondest man’s swift work with grave content: he
urges thee, he goads thee, and thou answerest with the slow turn
of thy patient eyes. Thy breath streams from thy nostril large and
damp and black, and thy lowing loses itself in the still air like a
joyous hymn; and within the grave sweetness of thine eye, with its
green-shadowed depths, the divine verdure of the plain lies reflected
broadly and tranquilly.”
The conciseness and precision of Carducci’s language give him an
extraordinary power of vivid representation of his subject. He
“etches, sculptor-like,” as Emerson says of Dante. What can be more
vivid, for instance, than the picture of rural life which opens the
poem “At the Springs of the Clitunnus”?—
“Still do the flocks come down to thee, O Clitunnus, through the moist
air of evening, from the mountain that waves with dusky ash-groves
murmuring in the wind, and scatters afar its odours of wild sage
and thyme; the Umbrian boy still plunges the struggling sheep into
thy wave; whilst the babe at the breast of the sunburnt mother,
sitting barefoot by the cottage door and singing, turns towards
him, and smiles from its fair round face; thoughtfully does the
father, his legs clad in goat-skins like the fauns of old, guide the
painted ploughshare, and the strength of the beautiful heifers; the
beautiful square-breasted heifers their heads erect with mooned horns,
sweet-eyed, snowy, that gentle Virgil loved.”
Does not one see before one, too, the _Bionda Maria_ (fair-haired
Maria) of the “Idillio Maremmano” in the following verses?
“How lovely wert thou, O maiden, emerging from the long waving
furrows, with fresh-plucked flowers in thy hand, tall and smiling; and
under thy glowing brows thou opened’st the blue of thy large deep eyes
darting untamed fire. Like the cornflower among the yellowing gold of
the corn-ears did the blue of that eye blossom forth among thy tawny
hair; and before and around thee the height of summer flamed; the sun
laughed, broken by the green branches of the pomegranate, sparkling
in red. At thy passing, as at that of a goddess, the gorgeous peacock
opened his eyed tail, beholding thee, and sent up to thee a harsh cry.”
Of a different kind, but equally effective, is the following
description, drawn from a scene in the hall of a thirteenth-century
lord. The storm is raging outside; the greyhound bays at the thunder,
and stretches out his taper head, with erect ears and restless eyes,
towards the marchioness who sits amid her women and maidens; a fire,
smelling of the pine forest, blazes in the midst, and, upright before
it, Malaspina rises a whole head above the minor barons:—
“A fine trained goshawk perched on the knight’s fist, and, when the
hail struck the windows now here now there according to the shifting
wind, and the swift-passing lightning whitened the flashing arms
hanging on the walls, the bird beat its wings, stretching out its
snakelike neck, and gave out a hoarse cry of joy: the love of his
native, free Apuan heights burnt in his piercing eye; he longed, the
noble bird, to direct his flight through the thunder athwart the
clouds.”
Diverse once more, yet none the less apt to remain impressed upon the
memory, is the opening picture of the poem for the fifth anniversary of
the battle of Mentana, where, it will be remembered, Garibaldi’s troops
were defeated by the combined French and Papal forces:—
“Every year when the sad hour of Mentana’s rout sounds over the
conscious hills, plains and hills heave, and proudly upright stands
the band of the dead on the tumuli of Nomentum. They are no hideous
skeletons; they are tall and beautiful forms, around which waves the
rosy veil of twilight: through their wounds laugh the pious, virgin
stars; the clouds of the sky wreathe lightly round their locks.”
No doubt it is Carducci’s classicism (in a poem entitled “Classicism
and Romanticism” he holds up the latter to utter ridicule) which gives
him this marked power of word-painting; it also informs his poem
with a paganism of which we shall have presently to speak. Yet it
is classicism deeply coloured by nineteenth-century life. Take, for
instance, the little poem “Ruit Hora,” and see how the modern unrest
comes across the calm of the classic scene. Horace’s Lydia would not
have understood a lover of this sort for all his passion:—
“O green solitude for which I have yearned, far from the noise of
men! hither come two divine friends with us, O Lydia, Wine and Love.
See how Lycæus, the eternal youth, laughs in the shining crystal: as
in thine eyes, O glorious Lydia, Love rides in triumph and unbinds
his eyes. The sun shines low through the trellis and breaks, rosy,
against my glass; he glances and trembles golden among thy locks, O
Lydia. Among the blackness of thy locks, O snowy Lydia, a pallid rose
languishes, and a gentle sudden sadness tempers the fires of love in
my heart. Tell me: why does the sea down there send up mysterious
groanings under the flaming evening? What songs, O Lydia, do those
pines sing to each other? See with what desire those hills stretch out
their arms to the setting sun: the shadow grows and embraces them: it
seems as though they were begging the last kiss, O Lydia. I beg thy
kisses, if the shade envelops me, O Lycæus, giver of joy; I beg thine
eyes, O shining Lydia, if Hyperion sinks. And time is rushing by. O
rosy mouth, unclose! O flower of the soul, O flower of desire, open
thy cup! O loved arms, open!”
Perhaps, too, Carducci, for all his classic forms, is the only living
poet who could make a detailed description of a railway station, the
arrival of the train, clipping of the ticket, banging of the doors,
etc., without once falling into triviality or bombast; yet such a feat
has he performed in the poem entitled, “At the Station on an Autumn
Morning.”
Especially marked in Carducci’s poems, and particularly in his early
ones, is his rebellion against the Church. The poet’s paganism has
been much discussed. It is a paganism based not on any repugnance for
the teaching and character of Christ (on the contrary, the poet makes
a most attractive picture of Christ in one of his poems), but upon
the unfeigned joy in nature with which, as an antidote to his own
pessimism, the classic poets presented him. It takes the form of a
violent revolt against the creed that, in his opinion, had neglected if
not opposed art, had raved of “atrocious unions of God with Pain,” had
substituted gloom and sadness for the happy life of freedom and nature
(see the poem entitled “In a Gothic Church”), had for centuries been a
barrier to human progress, had constantly been found in alliance with
the enemies of Italy, and had, in these later years of ardent strife
for the unification of the Fatherland, systematically, with violence
and with cunning, opposed the heroes who were giving their lives in
the cause of freedom. The Romish Church was for him the symbol of
retrogression, gloom, and antipatriotism; and in the violence of his
reaction against it he confounded it with the whole of Christianity,
even going so far as to personify progress and liberty, by antithesis,
under the title of “Satan.”
The “Hymn to Satan,” published for the first time in 1865 at Pistoia
under the pseudonym of “Enotrio Romano,” may be said, indeed, to be the
beginning of his fame. Launched on the world without any explanation,
the misleading title caused it to be understood only by a few careful
readers. The world at large saw in it, according to the opinion of
one critic, “an intellectual orgy,” a blasphemous rebellion against
everything that the nation, and even the world, had hitherto considered
sacred and necessary for the existence of society. Its publication
excited great controversy, afterwards given to the world under the
title of the “Polemiche Sataniche,” which gave Carducci the opportunity
of responding to the attacks of the critics, and explaining the
intimate sense of the poem; but even after his explanations, even when
we know from his own lips that for him, taking up, as he believes,
the standpoint of the modern Roman Catholic Church, “Satan is beauty,
love, wellbeing, happiness”; that “Satan is thought that flies, science
that experiments, the heart that blazes up, the forehead on which is
written ‘I will not abase myself’; that Satanic were the revolutions
that brought men out of the middle ages; Satanic the Italian communes;
the German Reformation; Holland embodying liberty in deed; England
vindicating and avenging it; France spreading it abroad to all orders
and all peoples,”—even after the poet himself has told us this,
the poem still jars in many places for the unwonted violence of its
expressions. It is a battle-hymn, with all the fire and energy of the
battle-charge in it. The metre rushes like the swift running of horses,
sweeping the reader along with irresistible force. The poem opens with
the following invocation:—
“Towards thee, boundless principle of being, matter and spirit,
reason and sense, whilst the wine sparkles in the cups like the soul
in the eye; while the earth and sun smile and interchange words of
love, and a murmur of mysterious nuptials runs through the mountains,
and the fruitful plain palpitates,—towards thee does the bold
verse break forth; I invoke thee, O Satan, king of the feast. Away,
O priest, with your aspersorium and your chant! No, priest, Satan
turns not back. See, rust eats away Michael’s mystic brand; and
the faithful archangel, plucked of his feathers, falls into space.
Cold is the thunderbolt in Jehovah’s hand. Like pallid meteors,
extinguished planets, do the angels rain down from the firmaments. In
never-sleeping matter, king of phenomena, king of forms, Satan lives
alone.”
Satan lurks in beauty, love, and wine, so the poem goes on; and Satan
breathes “from my verse if, bursting forth from my breast and defying
the god of guilty priests, of bloody kings, it shakes the minds of men
like a thunderbolt.” It was Satan who breathed in the nature-worship
of ancient times; Satan that, driven out by the barbarous Nazarene
fury of the love-feasts whose sacred torches were used to burn down
temples, took refuge among the hearth-gods of the people, and shook the
breasts of witches, who, pale with eternal care, drew their inspiration
from nature and him. He opens the cloister gate before the alchemist,
revealing new and radiant skies. In vain monks and nuns try to shut
him out from their lives; he inspires Heloïse, he murmurs the verses
of Ovid and Horace among David’s psalms and tears of repentance. But
Satan often peoples the sleepless cell with images of a better age.
He arouses, from the pages of Livy, eager tribunes, consuls, agitated
shouting crowds. Wiclif and Huss, Savonarola, Luther secure the triumph
of human thought: matter, rise again! Satan has conquered.
“A beautiful and terrible monster breaks loose, traverses the ocean,
traverses the land: shining and smoke-wreathed like the volcano,
it climbs mountains, devours plains, leaps gulfs; then hides in
nameless caves traversing deep-hidden paths; and issues forth; and
untamed sends out its cry like a whirlwind from shore to shore, like
a whirlwind scatters abroad its breath: he passes, O peoples, Satan
the Great,—passes beneficent from place to place on the resistless
chariot of fire. Hail, O Satan, O rebellion, O avenging force of
reason! Sacred are the vows and the incense that rise to thee. Thou
hast conquered the Jehovah of the priest.”
The metre of the “Inno a Satana” is, as we have said, swinging and
free. It is not in this poem that Carducci has “measured the lyric
buskins on to Italian Muse”; and indeed he himself, in the “Polemiche
Sataniche,” severely criticises its form. It was the expression of the
poet’s inmost soul, written at white-heat in a single night. Carducci’s
real work as a lyric poet is to be found in his other poems, in the
three volumes of “Odi Barbare,” for instance, the “Levia Gravia,” the
“Rime Nuove,” the “Giambi ed Epodi.”
“I have called these odes barbarous,” he tells us, “because they would
sound so in the ears and judgment of the Greeks and Romans, although
I have attempted to compose them in the metrical form of their lyric
poetry. I felt,” he goes on to say in substance, “that I had different
things to say from those sung by Dante, Petrarch, Politian, Tasso, and
other classic lyric poets, and could not see why, since Horace and
Catullus were allowed to enrich Latin verse with Greek forms, since
Dante might adapt Provençal rhymes to Italian poetry, why I should
not be pardoned for doing that for which those great poets received
praise.”
Neither is Carducci alone in his attempts to adapt Latin measures to
Italian verse. Other poets (among them Chiabrera) had written _Poesia
Barbara_ before him, and his contemporary Cavallotti has tried it
too; but they have produced _Poesia Barbara_ of a different kind.
The essential difference between these poets and Carducci lies in
this: that whereas they copied the mechanism of the Latin metre, with
its complicated system of long and short syllables, Carducci, with
finer intuition of the genius of his mother-tongue, has aimed at
catching and reproducing the music, the rhythm of the Latin verse. He
is hence no copyist but a musician of most delicate ear, whose keen
sense of harmony has procured him success where others have failed,
and are likely to fail miserably. Modern Italian is not fitted, any
more than modern English, for the formal construction of verse on
the basis of long and short feet,—on the basis, that is, of metre.
Indeed many Italian critics think that even in Latin this form of
verse-construction was gradually giving way, or assimilating itself
to the rhythmical verse—the verse whose movement struck the ear,
as does the rhythm of music or dance, without awakening grammatical
considerations of length or shortness of syllables. It is this
reproduction of rhythm instead of metre that renders Carducci so
eminently and pleasurably readable where other poets, even great ones,
are insupportable. All readers of Tennyson, for instance, know the rage
with which one tries to infuse a little music into his “experiments.”
One struggles with “Boadicea,” trying vainly to discover some sort of
melody in it, but, on coming to such a line as this—
“Mad and maddening, all that heard her in her fierce volubility,”
really throws away the book in utter despair. Not so with Carducci.
It is rare to find a harsh verse in his work, though such, of course,
do occur here and there, and the ease with which his poetry can
be translated into Latin (as much of it has been) proves its close
affinity with this language.[19]
As will be seen from the foregoing sketch, Carducci is no easy-going
poet. He bears out in his everyday work the dislike he has expressed
at seeing the Lyric in dressing-gown and slippers, and has given us,
in a little poem at the end of the “Rime Nuove,” his idea of what a
poet should be—the true _poietes_ (ποιητής) of the Greeks. For him
the poet is a great artificer, with muscles hardened into iron at his
trade: he holds his head high, his neck is strong, his breast bare, his
eye bright. Hardly do the birds begin to chirp, and the dawn to smile
over the hills than he, with his bellows, rouses the joy of the leaping
flames in his smithy. Into the blazing furnace he throws the elements
of love and thought, and the memories and glory of his fathers and his
people. Past and future does he fuse in the incandescent mass. Then
with his hammer he works it on the anvil, and in the splendour of the
newly risen sun, sings as he fashions swords to strive for liberty,
wreaths to crown victory and glory, and diadems to deck out beauty.
“And for himself the poor workman makes a golden arrow, which he shoots
towards the sun: his eye follows its shining upward flight, follows it
and rejoices, and desires nothing more.”