Produced by ellinora, Bryan Ness, Barbara Magni and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
POEMS
OF
GIOSUÈ CARDUCCI
TRANSLATED
WITH TWO INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
I GIOSUÈ CARDUCCI AND THE HELLENIC
REACTION IN ITALY
II CARDUCCI AND THE CLASSIC REALISM
BY
FRANK SEWALL
“_Le secret de l'art grec réside là, dans cette
finesse à dégager la ligne unique et nécessaire
qui évoque la vie et en détermine du coup comme
le type éternel_”
PAUL BOURGET
LONDON
OSGOOD, McILVAINE & CO.
45 ALBEMARLE ST., W.
1893
THE DE VINNE PRESS, NEW-YORK, U. S. A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE vii
ESSAYS
I. GIOSUÈ CARDUCCI AND THE HELLENIC REACTION
IN ITALY 1
II. CARDUCCI AND THE CLASSIC REALISM 29
TRANSLATIONS
I. ROMA 57
II. HYMN TO SATAN 58
III. HOMER 66
IV. VIRGIL 67
V. INVOCATION TO THE LYRE 68
VI. SUN AND LOVE 70
VII. TO AURORA 71
VIII. RUIT HORA 76
IX. THE OX 77
X. TO PHŒBUS APOLLO 78
XI. HYMN TO THE REDEEMER 81
XII. OUTSIDE THE CERTOSA 84
XIII. DANTE—SONNET 85
XIV. IN A GOTHIC CHURCH 86
XV. INNANZI, INNANZI! 88
XVI. SERMIONE 89
XVII. TO A HORSE 93
XVIII. A DREAM IN SUMMER 94
XIX. ON A SAINT PETER'S EVE 97
XX. THE MOTHER 99
XXI. “PASSA LA NAVE MIA, SOLA, TRA IL PIANTO” 101
XXII. CARNIVAL.
VOICE FROM THE PALACE 102
VOICE FROM THE HOVEL 103
VOICE FROM THE BANQUET 105
VOICE FROM THE GARRET 106
VOICE FROM BENEATH 107
XXIII. SONNET TO PETRARCH 109
XXIV. SONNET TO GOLDONI 110
XXV. SONNET TO ALFIERI 111
XXVI. SONNET TO MONTI 112
XXVII. SONNET TO NICCOLINI 113
XXVIII. IN SANTA CROCE 114
XXIX. VOICE OF THE PRIESTS 115
XXX. VOICE OF GOD 116
XXXI. ON MY DAUGHTER'S MARRIAGE 117
XXXII. AT THE TABLE OF A FRIEND 119
XXXIII. DANTE 120
XXXIV. ON THE SIXTH CENTENARY OF DANTE 126
XXXV. BEATRICE 127
XXXVI. “A QUESTI DÍ PRIMA IO LA VIDI. USCIA” 130
XXXVII. “NON SON QUELL'IO CHE GIÀ D'AMICHE CENE” 131
XXXVIII. THE ANCIENT TUSCAN POETRY 132
XXXIX. OLD FIGURINES 133
XL. MADRIGAL 134
XLI. SNOWED UNDER 135
PREFACE
In endeavouring to introduce Carducci to English readers through the
following essays and translations, I would not be understood as being
moved to do so alone by my high estimate of the literary merit of his
poems, nor by a desire to advocate any peculiar religious or social
principles which they may embody. It is rather because these poems
seem to me to afford an unusually interesting example of the survival
of ancient religious motives beneath the literature of a people old
enough to have passed through a succession of religions; and also
because they present a form of realistic literary art which, at this
time, when realism is being so perverted and abused, is eminently
refreshing, and sure to impart a healthy impetus to the literature of
any people. For these reasons I have thought that, even under the garb
of very inadequate translations, they would constitute a not unwelcome
contribution to contemporary literary study.
I am indebted to the courtesy of Harper & Brothers for the privilege
of including here, in an amplified form, the essay on _Giosuè Carducci
and the Hellenic Reaction in Italy_, which appeared first in _Harper's
Magazine_ for July, 1890.
F. S.
WASHINGTON, D. C., June, 1892.
I
GIOSUÈ CARDUCCI
AND THE HELLENIC REACTION IN ITALY
The passing of a religion is at once the most interesting and the most
tragic theme that can engage the historian. Such a record lays bare
what lies inmostly at the heart of a people, and has, consciously or
unconsciously, shaped their outward life.
The literature of a time reveals, but rarely describes or analyses, the
changes that go on in the popular religious beliefs. It is only in a
later age, when the religion itself has become desiccated, its creeds
and its forms dried and parcelled for better preservation, that this
analysis is made of its passing modes, and these again made the subject
of literary treatment.
Few among the existing nations that possess a literature have a history
which dates back far enough to embrace these great fundamental changes,
such as that from paganism to Christianity, and also a literature that
is coeval with those changes. The Hebrew race possess indeed their
ancient Scriptures, and with them retain their ancient religious ideas.
The Russians and Scandinavians deposed their pagan deities to give
place to the White Christ within comparatively recent times, but they
can hardly be said to have possessed a literature in the pre-Christian
period. Our own saga of Beowulf is indeed a religious war-chant
uttering the savage emotions of our Teutonic ancestors, but not a work
of literary art calmly reflecting the universal life of the people.
It is only to the Latin nations of Europe, sprung from Hellenic stock
and having a continuous literary history covering a period of from two
to three thousand years, that we may look for the example of a people
undergoing these radical religious changes and preserving meanwhile a
living record of them in a contemporaneous literature. Such a nation we
find in Italy.
So thorough is the reaction exhibited during the last half of the
present century in that country against the dogma and the authority
of the Church of Rome that we are led to inquire whether, not the
church alone, as Mr. Symonds says,[1] but Christianity itself has ever
“imposed on the Italian character” to such an extent as to obliterate
wholly the underlying Latin or Hellenic elements, or prevent these from
springing again into a predominating influence when the foreign yoke is
once removed.
To speak of Christianity coming and going as a mere passing episode
in the life of a nation, and taking no deep hold on the national
character, is somewhat shocking to the religious ideas which prevail
among Christians, but not more so than would have been to a Roman of
the time of the Cæsars the suggestion that the Roman Empire might
itself one day pass away, a transient phase only in the life of a
people whose history was to extend in unbroken line over a period of
twenty-five hundred years.
In the work just referred to Mr. Symonds also briefly hints at
another idea of profound significance,—namely, whether there is not
an underlying basis of primitive race character still extant in the
various sections of the Italian people to which may be attributed the
variety in the development of art and literature which these exhibit.
In his _Studii Letterari_ (Bologna, 1880), Carducci has made this idea
a fundamental one in his definition of the three elements of Italian
literature. These are, he says, the church, chivalry, and the national
character. The first or ecclesiastical element is superimposed by
the Roman hierarchy, but is not and never was native to the Italian
people. It has existed in two forms. The first is Oriental, mystic,
and violently opposed to nature and to human instincts and appetites,
and hence is designated the ascetic type of Christianity. The other is
politic and accommodating, looking to a peaceful meeting-ground between
the desires of the body and the demands of the soul, and so between
the pagan and the Christian forms of worship. Its aim is to bring into
serviceable subjection to the church those elements of human nature or
of natural character which could not be crushed out altogether. This
element is represented by the church or the ecclesiastical polity.
It becomes distinctly Roman, following the eclectic traditions of the
ancient empire, which gave the gods of all the conquered provinces a
niche in the Pantheon. It transformed the sensual paganism of the Latin
races and the natural paganism of the Germanic into a religion which,
if not Christianity, could be made to serve the Christian church.
In the same way that the church brought in the Christian element,
both in its ascetic and its Roman or semi-pagan form, so did feudalism
and the German Empire bring in that of chivalry. This, again, was no
native development of the Italian character. It came with the French
and German invaders; it played no part in the actions of the Italians
on their own soil. “There never was in Italy,” says Carducci, “a true
chivalry, and therefore there never was a chivalrous poetry.” With
the departure of a central imperial power the chivalrous tendency
disappeared. There remained the third element, that of nationality, the
race instinct, resting on the old Roman, and even older Latin, Italic,
Etruscan, Hellenic attachments in the heart of the people. Witness
during all the Middle Ages, even when the power of the church and the
influence of the empire were strongest, the reverence everywhere shown
by the Italian people for classical names and traditions. Arnold of
Brescia, Nicola di Rienzi, spoke to a sentiment deeper and stronger in
the hearts of their hearers than any that either pope or emperor could
inspire. The story is told of a schoolmaster of the eleventh century,
Vilgardo of Ravenna, who saw visions of Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal,
and rejoiced in their commendation of his efforts to preserve the
ancient literature of the people. The national principle also exists
in two forms, the Roman and the Italian—the aulic or learned, and the
popular. Besides the traditions of the great days of the republic
and of the Cæsars, besides the inheritance of the Greek and Latin
classics, there are also the native instincts of the people themselves,
which, especially in religion and in art, must play an important part.
Arnold of Brescia cried out, “Neither pope nor emperor!” It was then
the people, as the third estate, made their voices heard—“_Ci sono
anch'io!_” (Here am I too!).
After the elapse of three hundred years from the downfall of the
free Italian municipalities and the enslavement of the peninsula
under Austrio-Spanish rule, we have witnessed again the achievement
by Italians of national independence and national unity. The effect
of this political change on the free manifestations of the Italian
character would seem to offer another corroboration of Carducci's
assertion that “Italy is born and dies with the setting and the rising
of the stars of the pope and the emperor.” (_Studii Letterari_, p. 44.)
Not only with the withdrawal of the Austrian and French interference
has the pope's temporal power come to an end, but in a large measure
the religious emancipation of Italy from the foreign influences of
Christianity in every way has been accomplished. The expulsion of the
Jesuits and the secularisation of the schools and of the monastic
properties were the means of a more real emancipation of opinion,
of belief, and of native impulse, which, free from restraint either
ecclesiastical or political, could now resume its ancient habit,
lift from the overgrowth of centuries the ancient shrines of popular
worship, and invoke again the ancient gods.
The pope remains, indeed, and the Church of Rome fills a large space in
the surface life of the people of Italy; and so far as in its gorgeous
processions and spectacles, its joyous festivals and picturesque rites,
and especially in its sacrificial and vicarious theory of worship,
the church has assimilated to itself the most important feature of
the ancient pagan religion, it may still be regarded as a thing of the
people. But the real underlying antagonism between the ancient national
instinct, both religious and civil, and that habit of Christianity
which has been imposed upon it, finds its true expression in the strong
lines of a sonnet of Carducci's, published in 1871, in the collection
entitled _Decennali_. Even through the burdensome guise of a metrical
translation, something of the splendid fire of the original can hardly
fail to make itself felt. [I]
The movement for the revival of Italian literature may be said to
have begun with Alfieri, at the close of the last and the beginning of
the present century. It was contemporary with the breaking up of the
political institutions of the past in Europe, the dissolution of the
Holy Roman Empire, the brief existence of the Italian Republic, the
revival for a short joyous moment of the hope of a restored Italian
independence. Again a thrill of patriotic ardour stirs the measures of
the languid Italian verse. Alfieri writes odes on _America Liberata_,
celebrating as the heroes of the new age of liberty Franklin,
Lafayette, and Washington. Still more significant of the new life
imparted to literature at this time is the sober dignity and strength
of Alfieri's sonnets, and the manly passion that speaks in his dramas
and marks him as the founder of Italian tragedy.
But the promise of those days was illusory. With the downfall of
Napoleon and the return of the Austrian rule, the hope of the Italian
nationality again died out. Alfieri was succeeded by Vincenzo Monti
and his fellow-classicists, who sought to console a people deprived
of future hope with the contemplation of the remote past. This school
restored rather than revived the ancient classics. They gave Italians
admirable translations of Homer and Virgil, and turned their own poetic
writing into the classical form. But they failed to make these dead
forms live. These remained in all their beauty like speechless marble
exhumed and set up in the light and stared at. If they spoke at all, as
they did in the verses of Ugo Foscolo and Leopardi, it was not to utter
the joyous emotions, the godlike freedom and delight of living which
belonged to the world's youthful time; it was rather to give voice to
an all-pervading despair and brooding melancholy, born, it is true, of
repeated disappointments and of a very real sense of the vanity of life
and the emptiness of great aspirations, whether of the individual or
of society. This melancholy, itself repugnant to the primitive Italian
nature, opened the way for the still more foreign influence of the
romanticists, which tended to the study and love of nature from the
subjective or emotional side, and to a more or less morbid dwelling
upon the passions and the interior life. With a religion whose life-sap
of a genuine faith had been drained away for ages, and a patriotism
enervated and poisoned by subserviency to foreign rule and fawning
for foreign favour, naught seemed to remain for Italian writers who
wished to do something else than moan, but to compose dictionaries and
cyclopædias, to prepare editions of the thirteenth-century classics,
with elaborate critical annotations, and so to keep the people mindful
of the fact that there was once an Italian literature, even if they
were to despair of having another. The decay of religious faith made
the external forms of papal Christianity seem all the more a cruel
mockery to the minds that began now to turn their gaze inward, and
to feel what Taine so truly describes as the Puritan melancholy, the
subjective sadness which belongs peculiarly to the Teutonic race. The
whole literature of the romantic school, whether in Italy or throughout
Europe, betrayed a certain morbidness of feeling which, says Carducci,
belongs to all periods of transition, and appears alike in Torquato
Tasso, under the Catholic reaction of the sixteenth century, and in
Châteaubriand, Byron, and Leopardi, in the monarchical restoration of
the nineteenth. The despair which furnishes a perpetual undertone to
the writing of this school is that which is born of the effort to keep
a semblance of life in dead forms of the past, while yet the really
living motives of the present have found neither the courage nor the
fitting forms for their expression.
In many respects the present revival of Italian literature is a
reawakening of the same spirit that constituted the Renaissance of the
fourteenth and fifteen centuries, and disappeared under the subsequent
influences of the Catholic reaction. Three hundred years of papal
supremacy and foreign civic rule have, however, tempered the national
spirit, weakened the manhood of the people, and developed a habit of
childlike subserviency and effeminate dependence. While restraining the
sensuous tendency of pagan religion and pagan art within the channels
of the church ritual, Rome has not meanwhile rendered the Italian
people more, but, if anything, less spiritual and less susceptible
of spiritual teaching than they were in the days of Dante or even
of Savonarola. The new Italian renaissance, if we may so name the
movement witnessed by the present century for the re-establishment
of national unity and the building up of a new Italian literature,
lacks the youthful zeal, the fiery ardour which characterised the age
of the Medici. The glow is rather that of an Indian summer than that
of May. The purpose, the zeal, whatever shall be its final aim, will
be the result of reflection and not of youthful impulse. The creature
to be awakened and stirred to new life is more than a mere animal; it
is a man, whose thinking powers are to be addressed, as well as his
sensuous instincts and amatory passion. Such a revival is slow to be
set in motion. When once fairly begun, provided it have any really
vital principle at bottom, it has much greater promise of permanence
than any in the past history of the Italian people. A true renascence
of a nation will imply a reform or renewal of not one phase alone of
the nation's life, but of all; not only a new political life and a new
poetry, but a new art, a new science, and, above all, a new religious
faith. The steps to this renewal are necessarily at the beginning
oftener of the nature of negation of the old than of assertion of the
new. The destroyer and the clearer-away of the débris go before the
builder. It will not be strange, therefore, if the present aspect of
the new national life of Italy should offer us a number of conspicuous
negations rather than any positive new conceptions; that the people's
favorite scientist, Mantegazza,—the ultra-materialist,—should be the
nation's chosen spokesman to utter in the face of the Vatican its
denial of the supernatural; and that Carducci, the nation's foremost
and favourite poet, should sing the return of the ancient worship of
nature, of beauty, and of sensuous love, and seek to drown the solemn
notes of the Christian ritual in a universal jubilant hymn to Bacchus.
These are the contradictions exhibited in all great transitions. They
will not mislead if the destroyer be not confounded with the builder
who is to follow, and the temporary ebullition of pent-up passion be
not mistaken for the after-thought of a reflecting, sobered mind. No
one has recognized this more truly than Carducci:
Or destruggiam. Dei secoli
Lo strato è sul pensiero:
O pochi e forti, all'opera,
Chè nei profundi è il vero.
Now we destroy. Of the ages
The highway is built upon thinking.
O few and strong, to the work!
For truth 's at the bottom.
It was in the year 1859, when once more the cry for Italian
independence and Italian unity was raised, that the newly awakened
nation found its laureate poet in the youthful writer of a battle hymn
entitled “Alla Croce Bianca di Savoia”—The White Cross of Savoy. Set to
music, it became very popular with the army of the revolutionists, and
the title is said to have led to the adoption of the present national
emblem for the Italian flag. As a poem it is not remarkable, unless it
be for the very conventional commingling of devout, loyal, and valorous
expressions, like the following, in the closing stanza:
Dio ti salvi, o cara insegna,
Nostro amore e nostra gioja,
Bianca Croce di Savoja,
Dio ti salvi, e salvi il Re!
But six years later, in 1865, there appeared at Pistoja a poem over
the signature Enotrio Romano, and dated the “year MMDCXVIII from the
Foundation of Rome,” which revealed in a far more significant manner
in what sense its author, Giosuè Carducci, then in his thirtieth year,
was to become truly the nation's poet, in giving utterance again to
those deeply hidden and long-hushed ideas and emotions which belonged
anciently to the people, and which no exotic influence had been able
entirely to quench. This poem was called a “Hymn to Satan.” The shock
it gave to the popular sense of propriety is evident not only from
the violence and indignation with which it was handled in the clerical
and the conservative journals, one of which called it an “intellectual
orgy,” but from the number of explanations, more or less apologetic,
which the poet and his friends found it necessary to publish. One of
these, which appeared over the signature Enotriofilo in the _Italian
Athenæum_ of January, 1886, has been approvingly quoted by Carducci in
his notes to the _Decennali_. We may therefore regard it as embodying
ideas which are, at least, not contrary to what the author of the poem
intended. From this commentary it appears that we are to look here “not
for the poetry of the saints but of the sinners,—of those sinners, that
is, who do not steal away into the deserts to hide their own virtues,
so that others shall not enjoy them, who are not ashamed of human
delights and human comforts, and who refuse none of the paths that lead
to these. Not _laudes_ or spiritual hymns, but a material hymn is what
we shall here find. “Enotrio sings,” says his admiring apologist, “and
I forget all the curses which the catechism dispenses to the world,
the flesh, and the devil. Asceticism here finds no defender and no
victim. Man no longer goes fancying among the vague aspirations of
the mystics. He respects laws, and wills well, but to him the sensual
delights of love and the cup are not sinful, and in these, to him,
innocent pleasures Satan dwells. It was to the joys of earth that the
rites of the Aryans looked; the same joys were by the Semitic religion
either mocked or quenched. But the people did not forget them. As a
secretly treasured national inheritance, despite both Christian church
and Gothic empire, this ancient worship of nature and of the joys of
the earth remains with the people. It is this spirit of nature and of
natural sensuous delights, and lastly of natural science, that the poet
here addresses as Satan. As Satan it appears in nature's secret powers
of healing and magic, in the arts of the sorcerer and of the alchemist.
The anchorites, who, drunk with paradise, deprived themselves of the
joys of earth, gradually began to listen to these songs from beyond
the gratings of their cells—songs of brave deeds, of fair women, and
of the triumph of arms. It is Satan who sings, but as they listen
they become men again, enamoured of civil glory. New theories arise,
new masters, new ideals of life. Genius awakes, and the cowl of the
Dominican falls to earth. Now, liberty itself becomes the tempter.
It is the development of human activity, of labour and struggle, that
causes the increase of both bread and laughter, riches and honour, and
the author of all this new activity is Satan; not Satan bowing his head
before hypocritical worshippers, but standing glorious in the sight
of those who acknowledge him. This hymn is the result of two streams
of inspiration, which soon are united in one, and continue to flow
in a peaceful current: the goods of life and genius rebelling against
slavery.”
With this explanation of its inner meaning we may now refer the reader
to the hymn itself. [II]
This poem, while excelled by many others in beauty or in interest, has
nowhere, even in the poet's later verses, a rival in daring and novelty
of conception, and none serves so well to typify the prominent traits
of Carducci as a national poet. We see here the fetters of classic,
romantic, and religious tradition thrown off, and the old national,
which is in substance a pagan, soul pouring forth in all freedom the
sentiments of its nature. It is no longer here the question of either
Guelph or Ghibelline; Christianity, whether of the subjective Northern
type, brought in by the emperors, or of the extinct formalities of
Rome, is bidden to give way to the old Aryan love of nature and the
worship of outward beauty and sensuous pleasure. The reaction here
witnessed is essentially Hellenic in its delight in objective beauty,
its bold assertion of the rightful claims of nature's instincts, its
abhorrence of mysticism and of all that religion of introspection and
of conscience which the poet includes under the term “Semitic.” It will
exchange dim cathedrals for the sky filled with joyous sunshine; it
will go to nature's processes and laws for its oracles, rather than to
the droning priests. While the worship of matter and its known laws, in
the form of a kind of apotheosis of science, with which the poem opens
and closes, may seem at first glance rather a modern than an ancient
idea, it is nevertheless in substance the same conception as that which
anciently took form in the myth of Prometheus, in the various Epicurean
philosophies, and in the poem of Lucretius. Where, however, Carducci
differs from his contemporaries and from the classicists so called is
in the utter frankness of his renunciation of Christianity, and the
bold bringing to the front of the old underlying Hellenic instincts of
the people. That which others wrote about he feels intensely, and sings
aloud as the very life of himself and of his nation. That which the
foreigner has tried for centuries to crush out, it is the mission of
the nation's true poet and prophet to restore.
The sentiments underlying Carducci's writings we find to be chiefly
three: a fervent and joyous veneration of the great poets of Greece
and Rome; an intense love of nature, amounting to a kind of worship
of sunshine and of bodily beauty and sensuous delights; and finally
an abhorrence of the supernatural and spiritual elements of religion.
Intermingled with the utterances of these sentiments will be found
patriotic effusions mostly in the usual vein of aspirants after
republican reforms, which, while of a national interest, are not
peculiar to the author, and do not serve particularly to illustrate
the Hellenistic motive of his writing. The same may be said of his
extensive critical labours in prose, his university lectures, his
scholarly annotations of the early Italian poets. How far Carducci
conforms to the traditional character of the Italian poets—always with
the majestic exception of the exiled Dante—in that the soft winds of
court favour are a powerful source of their inspiration on national
themes, may be judged from the fact that while at the beginning of
his public career he was a violent republican, now that he is known to
stand high in the esteem and favour of Queen Margherita his democratic
utterances have become very greatly moderated, and his praises of
the Queen and of the bounties and blessings of her reign are most
glowing and fulsome. Without a formal coronation, Carducci occupies the
position of poet-laureate of Italy. A little over fifty years of age,
an active student and a hard-working professor at the University of
Bologna, where his popularity with his students in the lecture-room is
equal to that which his public writings have won throughout the land,
called from time to time to sojourn in the country with the court,
or to lecture before the Queen and her ladies at Rome, withal a man
of great simplicity, even to roughness of manners, and of a cordial,
genial nature—such is the writer whom the Italians with one voice
call their greatest poet, and whom not a few are fain to consider the
foremost living poet of Europe.[2]
It would be interesting to trace the development of the Hellenic
spirit in the successive productions of Carducci's muse, to note his
emancipation from the lingering influences of romanticism, and his
casting off the fetters of conventional metre in the _Odi Barbare_.
But as all this has been done for us far better in an autobiographical
sketch, which the author gives us in the preface of the _Poesie_
(1871), we will here only glance briefly at some of the more
characteristic points thus presented.
After alluding to the bitterness and violence for which the Tuscans are
famous in their abuse, he informs us that from the first he was charged
with an idolatry of antiquity and of form, and with an aristocracy
of style. The theatre critics offered to teach him grammar, and the
schoolmasters said he was aping the Greeks. One distinguished critic
said that his verse revealed “the author's absolute want of all poetic
faculty.” The first published series of poems was in reality a protest
against the religious and intellectual bitterness which prevailed in
the decade preceding 1860, “against the nothingness and vanity under
whose burden the country was languishing; against the weak coquetries
of liberalism which spoiled then as it still spoils our art and our
thoughts, ever unsatisfactory to the spirit which will not do things by
halves, and which refuses to pay tribute to cowardice.” Naturally, even
in literary matters inclined to take the opposite side, Carducci felt
himself in the majority like a fish out of water. In the revolutionary
years 1858 and 1859 he wrote poems on the _Plébiscite_ and Unity,
counselling the king to throw his crown into the Po, enter Rome as its
armed tribune, and there order a national vote. “These,” says the poet,
“were my worst things, and fortunately were kept unpublished, and so
I escaped becoming the poet-laureate of public opinion. In a republic
it would have been otherwise. I would have composed the battle pieces
with the usual grand words—the ranks in order, arms outstretched in
command, brilliant uniforms, and finely curled moustaches. To escape
all temptation of this sort I resorted to the cold bath of philosophy,
the death-shrouds of learning—_lenzuolo funerario dell'erudizione_. It
was pleasant amid all that grand talk of the new life to hide myself in
among the cowled shadows of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I
journeyed along the Dead Sea of the Middle Ages, studied the movements
of revolution in history and in letters; then gradually dawned upon
me a fact which at once surprised and comforted me. I found that my
own repugnance to the literary and philosophical reaction of 1815 was
really in harmony with the experience of many illustrious thinkers and
authors. My own sins of paganism had already been committed, and in
manifold splendid guises, by many of the noblest minds and geniuses
of Europe. This paganism, this cult of form, was naught else but the
love of that noble nature from which the solitary Semitic estrangements
had alienated hitherto the spirit of man in such bitter opposition. My
at first feebly defined sentiment of opposition thus became confirmed
conceit, reason, affirmation; the hymn to Phœbus Apollo became the hymn
to Satan. Oh, beautiful years from 1861 to 1865, passed in peaceful
solitude and quiet study, in the midst of a home where the venerated
mother, instead of fostering superstition, taught us to read Alfieri!
But as I read the codices of the fourteenth century the ideas of the
Renaissance began to appear to me in the gilded initial letters like
the eyes of nymphs in the midst of flowers, and between the lines of
the spiritual _laude_ I detected the Satanic strophe. Meanwhile the
image of Dante looked down reproachfully upon me; but I might have
answered: ‘Father and master, why didst thou bring learning from the
cloister into the piazza, from the Latin to the vulgar tongue? Why
wast thou willing that the hot breath of thine anger should sweep the
heights of papal and imperial power? Thou first, O great public accuser
of the Middle Ages, gavest the signal for the rebound of thought: that
the alarm was sounded from the bells of a Gothic campanile mattered
but little!’ So my mind matured in understanding and sentiment to
the _Levia Gravia_, and thence more rapidly, in questions of social
interest, to the _Decennali_. There are those who complain that I am
not what I was twenty-four years ago:—good people, for whom to live and
develop is only to feed, like the calf _qui largis invenescit herbis_.
In the _Juvenilia_ I was the armour-bearer of the classics. In the
_Levia Gravia_ I held my armed watch. In the _Decennali_, after a few
uncertain preliminary strokes of the lance, I venture abroad prepared
for every risk and danger. I have read that the poet must give pleasure
either to all or to the few; to cater to many is a bad sign. Poetry
to-day is useless from not having learned that it has nothing to do
with the exigencies of the moment. The lyre of the soul should respond
to the echoes of the past, the breathings of the future, the solemn
rumours of ages and generations gone by. If, on the contrary, it allows
itself to be swayed by the breeze of society's fans or the waving of
soldiers' cockades and professors' togas, then woe to the poet! Let the
poet express himself and his artistic and moral convictions with the
utmost possible candour, sincerity, and courage; as for the rest, it
is not his concern. And so it happens that I dare to put forth a book
of verses in these days, when one group of our literati are declaring
that Italy has never had a language, and another are saying that for
some time past we have had no literature; that the fathers do not count
for much, and that we are really only in the beginnings. There let them
remain; or, as the wind changes, shift from one foreign servitude to
another!”
In my selection of poems for translation, regard has been had not so
much to the chronological order of their production as to their fitness
for illustrating the three important characteristics of Carducci as a
national poet which were enumerated above.
The first of these was his strong predilection for the classics, as
evinced not only by his veneration for the Greek and Latin poets, but
by his frequent attempts at the restoration of the ancient metres in
his own verse. Of his fervent admiration for Homer and Virgil let the
two sonnets III and IV testify, both taken from the fourth book of
the _Levia Gravia_. Already in the _Juvenilia_, during his “classical
knighthood,” he had produced a poem of some length on Homer, and in the
volume which contains the one I have given there are no less than three
sonnets addressed to the venerated master, entitled in succession,
“Homer,” “Homer Again,” and “Still Homer.” I have chosen the second in
order. [III]
In the tribute to Virgil [IV] the beauty of form is only equalled
by the tenderness of feeling. It shows to what extent the classic
sentiment truly lived again in the writer's soul, and was not a thing
of mere intellectual contemplation. In reading it we are bathed in the
very air of Campania; we catch a distant glimpse of the sea glistening
under the summer moon, and hear the wind sighing through the dark
cypresses.
Here it will be proper to notice the efforts made by Carducci not
only to restore as to their native soil the long-disused metres of
the classic poets, but to break loose from all formal restrictions
in giving utterance to the poetic impulse. This intense longing for
greater freedom of verse he expresses in the following lines from the
_Odi Barbare_:
I hate the accustomed verse.
Lazily it falls in with the taste of the crowd,
And pulseless in its feeble embraces
Lies down and sleeps.
For me that vigilant strophe
Which leaps with the plaudits and rhythmic stamp of the chorus,
Like a bird caught in its flight, which
Turns and gives battle.
In the preface of the same volume (1877) he pleads in behalf of his new
metres that “it may be pardoned in him that he has endeavoured to adapt
to new sentiments new metres instead of conforming to the old ones, and
that he has thus done for Italian letters what Klopstock did for the
Germans, and what Catullus and Horace did in bringing into Latin use
the forms of the Eolian lyric.”
In the _Nuove Rime_ (1887) are three Hellenic Odes, under the titles
“Primavere Elleniche,” written in three of the ancient metres, the
beauty of which would be lost by translation into any language less
melodious and sympathetic than the Italian. We give a few lines from
each:
I. EOLIA
Lina, brumaio turbido inclina,
Nell'aër gelido monta la sera;
E a me nell'anima fiorisce, O Lina,
La primavera.
II. DORICA
Muorono gli altri dii: di Grecia i numi
Non stanno occaso: ei dormon ne' materni
Tronchi e ne' fiori, sopra i monti, i fiumi,
I mari eterni.
A Cristo in faccia irrigidi nei marmi
Il puro fior di lor bellezze ignude:
Nei carme, O Lina, spira sol nei carme
Lor gioventude.
III. ALESSANDRINA
Lungi, soavi, profondi; Eolia
Cetra non rese più dolci gemiti
Mai nei sì molli spirti
Di Lesbo un dì tra i mirti.
The second of these examples demands translation as exhibiting perhaps
more forcibly than any others we could select the boldness with which
Carducci asserts the survival of the Hellenic spirit in the love
of nature as well as in art and literature, despite the contrary
influences of ascetic Christianity:
The other gods may die, but those of Greece
No setting know; they sleep in ancient woods,
In flowers, upon the mountains, and the streams,
And eternal seas.
In face of Christ,[3] in marble hard and firm,
The pure flower of their naked beauty glows;
In songs, O Lina, and alone in songs,
Breathes their endless youth.
The reader is also here referred to the “Invocation.” [V]
From this glance at the classic form which is so distinct a feature in
Carducci's poems, we proceed to examine the feeling and conceptions
which constitute their substance, and which will be found to be no
less Hellenic than the metres which clothe them. Nothing could stand in
stronger contrast with the melancholy of the romantic school of poets,
or with the subjective thoughtfulness and austere introspection of
the Christian, than the unfettered outbursts of song in praise of the
joy of living, of the delights of love and bodily pleasure, and of the
sensuous worship of beautiful form, which we find in the poems “Sun and
Love” [VI] and the hymn “To Aurora.” [VII]
The latter has in it the freshness and splendour of morning mists
rising among the mountains and catching the rosy kisses of the sun.
Equally beautiful but full of the tranquillity of evening is the _Ruit
Hora_ from the _Odi Barbare_ of 1877. [VIII]
No one will fail to be struck with the beauty of the figure in the last
stanza of this poem, nor with the picturesque force of the “green and
silent solitudes” of the first, a near approach to the celebrated and
boldly original conception of a _silenzio verde_, a “green silence,”
which forms one of the many rare and beautiful gems of the sonnet “To
the Ox.” [IX]
As an example of a purely Homeresque power of description and
colouring, and at the same time of an intense sympathy with nature
and exquisite responsiveness to every thrill of its life, this sonnet
stands at the summit of all that Carducci has written, if indeed it
has its rival anywhere in the poetry of our century. The desire to
produce in English a suggestion at least of the broad and restful tone
given by the metre and rhythm of the original has induced me to attempt
a metrical and rhymed translation, even at the inevitable cost of a
strict fidelity to the author's every word, and in such a poem to lose
a word is to lose much. Nothing but the original can present the sweet,
ever-fresh, and sense-reviving picture painted in this truly marvellous
sonnet. The unusual and almost grotesque epithet of the opening phrase
will be pardoned in view of the singular harmony and fitness of the
original.
We know not where else to look for such vivid examples as Carducci
affords us of a purely objective and sensuous sympathy with nature, as
distinguished from the romantic, reflective mood which nature awakens
in the more sentimental school of poets. We feel that this strong
and brilliant objectivity is something purely Greek and pagan, as
contrasted with the analysis of emotions and thoughts which occupies
so large a place in Christian writing. No one is better aware of the
existence of this contrast than Carducci himself. For the dear love
of nature—that boon of youth before the shadows of anxious care began
to darken the mind, or the queryings of philosophy, the conflicts
of doubt, and the stings of conscience to torment it—for this happy
revelling of mere animal life in the world where the sun shines, the
soul of the poet never ceases to yearn and cry out. The consciousness
of the opposite, of a world of thought, of care, and of conscience ever
frowning in sheer stern contrast from the strongholds of the present
life and the opinions of men—this is what introduces a kind of tragic
motive into many of these poems, and adds greatly to their moral, that
is, their human interest. For the poetry of mere animal life, if such
were poetry, however blissful the life it describes, would still not be
interesting.
Something of this pathos appears in the poem “To Phœbus Apollo,” [X]
where the struggle of the ancient with the present sentiments of the
human soul is depicted. It will interest the reader to know that at the
time this poem was written (it appeared in Book II. of the _Juvenilia_)
the author had not broken so entirely with the conventional thought
of his time and people but that he could consent to write a _lauda
spirituale_ [XI] for a procession of the _Corpus Domini_, and a hymn
for the Feast of the Blessed Diana Guintini, protectress of Santa Maria
a Monti in the lower Valdarno. When called by the _Unità Cattolica_
to account for this sudden transformation of the hymn-writer into the
odist of Phœbus Apollo, Carducci replied by reminding his clerical
critics that even in his nineteenth year he was given to writing
parodies of sacred hymns, and he further offers by way of very doubtful
apology the explanation that, being invited by certain priests who knew
of his rhyming ability to compose verses for their feasts, the thought
came into his head, “being in those days deeply interested in Horace
and the thirteenth-century writers, to show that faith does not affect
the _form_ of poetry, and that therefore without any faith at all
one might reproduce entirely the forms of the blessed laudists of the
thirteenth century. I undertook the task as if it were a wager.”
In the lines of the poem _To Phœbus Apollo_ there is traceable a
romantic melancholy, the faint remnant of the impression left by those
writers through whom, says Carducci, “I mounted to the ancients, and
dwelt with Dante and Petrarch,” viz., Alfieri, Parini, Monti, Foscolo,
and Leopardi. He has not yet broken entirely with subjective reflection
and its gloom, and entrusted himself to the life which the senses
realize at the present moment as the whole of human well-being. This
sentiment becomes more strongly pronounced in the later poems, where
not even a regret for the past is allowed to enter to distract the
worship of the present, radiant with its divine splendour and bounty.
The one thought that can cast a shadow is the thought of death; but
this is not at all to be identified with Christian seriousness in
reflecting on the world to come. The poet's fear of death is not that
of a judgment, or a punishment for sins here committed, and hence it
is not associated with any idea of the responsibility of the present
hour, or of the amending of life and character in the present conduct.
The only fear of death here depicted is a horror of the absence of
life, and hence of the absence of the delights of life. It is the
fear of a vast dreary vacuum, of cold, of darkness, of nothingness.
The moral effect of such a fear is only that of enhancing the value
of the sensual joys of the present life, the use of the body for the
utmost of pleasure that can be got by means of it. This more than pagan
materialism finds its bold expression in the lines from the _Nuove Odi
Barbare_ entitled “Outside the Certosa.” [XII]
In studying the religious or theological tendency of Carducci's muse,
it is necessary to bear in mind constantly the inherent national
blindness of the Hellenic and, in equal if not greater degree, the
Latin mind to what we may call a spiritual conception of life, its
duties, and its destiny. But in addition to this blindness towards
the spiritual elements or substance of Christianity there is felt in
every renascent Hellenic instinct a violent and unrelenting hostility
towards that ascetic form and practice which, although in no true sense
Christian, the greater religious orders and the general discipline of
the Roman Church have succeeded in compelling Christianity to wear. The
mortification of nature, the condemnation of all worldly and corporeal
delights, not in their abuse, but in their essential and orderly
use, the dishonouring of the body in regarding its beauty as only an
incentive to sin, and in making a virtue of ugliness, squalor, and
physical weakness—these things have the offensiveness of deadly sins to
the sensuous consciousness of minds of the Hellenic type. To spiritual
Christianity Carducci is not adverse because it is spiritual—as such
it is still comparatively an unknown element to Italian minds—but
because it is foreign to the national instinct; because it came in with
the emperors, and so it is indissolubly associated with foreign rule
and oppression. It is the Gothic or Teutonic infusion in the Italian
people that has kept alive whatever there is of spiritual life in the
Christianity that has been imposed on them by the Roman Church. The
other elements of Romanism are only a sensuous cult of beautiful and
imposing forms in ritual, music, and architecture on the one hand; and
on the other a stern, uncompromising asceticism, which in spirit is the
direct contradiction of the former. While the principle of asceticism
was maintained in theory, the sincerity of its votaries gradually
came to be believed in by no one; the only phase of the church that
seized hold of the sympathies and affections of the people was the
pagan element in its worship and its festivals; and seeing these, the
popes were wise enough to foster this spirit and cater in the most
liberal measure to its indulgence, as the surest means of maintaining
their hold on the popular devotion. In the ever-widening antagonism
between the spirit and the flesh, between the subjective conception of
Christianity on the one hand, as represented by the Teutonic race and
the empire, and the sensuous and objective on the other, as represented
by the Italic race and the pope, may we not discern the reason why the
Italian people, in the lowest depths of their sensual corruption, were
largely and powerfully Guelph in their sympathies, and why the exiled
and lonely writer of the _Divina Commedia_ was a Ghibelline? It is at
least in the antagonism of principles as essentially native _versus_
foreign that we must find the explanation of the cooling of Carducci's
ardour towards the revered master of his early muse, even while the old
spell of the latter is still felt to be as irresistible as ever. This
double attitude of reverence and aversion we have already seen neatly
portrayed in the reference Carducci makes in the autobiographical
notes given above to Dante as the great “accuser of the Middle Ages who
first sounded the signal for the reaction of modern thought,” with the
added remark that the signal being sounded from a “Gothic campanile”
detracted but little from the grandeur of its import. The same contrast
of sentiment finds more distinct expression in the sonnet on Dante in
Book IV. of the _Levia Gravia_. [XIII]