presence of the invisible and supernatural and the Hellenic worship
of immediate beauty and sensuous pleasure displayed in such bold and
majestic imagery as in the poem entitled “In a Gothic Church.” [XIV]
Here, in the most abrupt and irreverent but entirely frank transition
from the impression of the dim and lofty cathedral nave to the passion
kindled by the step of the approaching loved one, and in the epithets
of strong aversion applied to the holiest of all objects of Christian
reverence, the very shock given to Christian feeling and the suddenness
of the awful descent from heavenly to satyric vision tell, with the
prophetic veracity and power of true poetry, what a vast chasm still
unbridged exists between the ancient inherent Hellenism of the Italian
people and that foreign influence, named indifferently by Carducci
Semitic or Gothic, which for eighteen centuries has been imposed
without itself imposing on them.
The true poet of the people lays bare the people's heart. If Carducci
be, indeed, the national poet of Italy we have in this poem not only
the heart but the religious sense—we had almost said the conscience—of
the Italian people revealed to view. Nor is this all Bacchantic; the
infusion of the Teutonic blood in the old Etruscan and Italic stock has
brought the dim shadows of the cathedral and its awful, ever-present
image of the penalty of sin to interrupt the free play of Italian
sunshine. But just as on the canvas of the religious painters of the
Renaissance angels as amorous Cupids hover about between Madonna and
saints, and as in the ordinary music of an Italian church the organist
plays tripping dance melodies or languishing serenades between the
intoned prayers of the priests or the _canto firmo_ psalms of the
choir, so here we behold the sacred aisles of the cathedral suddenly
invaded by the dancing satyr, who, escaping from his native woods,
has wandered innocently enough into this his ancient but strangely
disguised shrine.
The stanzas that follow describe Dante's vision of the “Tuscan
Virgin” rising transfigured amid the hymns of angels. The poet, on
the contrary, sees neither angels nor demons, but is conscious only of
feeling
the cold twilight
To be tedious to the soul,
and then exclaims:
Farewell, Semitic God: the mistress Death
May still continue in thy solemn rites,
O far-off king of spirits, whose dim shrines
Shut out the sun.
Crucified Martyr! Man thou crucifiest;
The very air thou darkenest with thy gloom.
Outside, the heavens shine, the fields are laughing,
And flash with love.
The eyes of Lidia—O Lidia, I would see thee
Among the chorus of white shining virgins
That dance around the altar of Apollo
In the rosy twilight,
Gleaming as Parian marble among the laurels,
Flinging the sweet anemones from thy hand,
Joy from thy eyes, and from thy lips the song
Of a Bacchante!
ODI BARBARE.
Notwithstanding the bold assertion of the Hellenic spirit in this and
in the greater part of his poems, that, nevertheless, Carducci has
not been able to restore his fair god of light and beauty, the Phœbus
Apollo, to the undisputed sway he held in the ancient mind is evident
from the shadows of doubt, of fear, and anxious questioning which still
darken here and there the poet's lines, as in the sonnet _Innanzi,
Innanzi!_ [XV] It is here that the stern element of tragedy, the
real tragedy of humanity, makes itself felt in this rhapsodist of joy
and of love. It comes to tell us that to the Italian as he is to-day
life has ceased to be a carnival, and that other sounds than that of
the Bacchante's hymn have gained an entrance, with all their grating
discord, to his ear: and to silence this intruder will the praises of
Lidia and of Apollo suffice, be they sung on a lyre never so harmonious
and sweet? In this sonnet is depicted in wonderful imagery the ancient
and awful struggle which the sensuous present life sustains with the
question of an eternity lying beyond.
While our interest in Carducci is largely owing to the character he
bears as the poet of the Italian people, it would be quite erroneous to
consider him a popular poet. For popularity, whether with the court,
the school, or the masses, he never aimed, as is evident from his
satisfaction at narrowly escaping being made a political poet-laureate.
Instead of writing down to the level of popular apprehension and taste,
he rather places himself hopelessly aloof from the contact of the
masses by his style of writing, which, simple and pure as it seems to
the cultured reader, is nevertheless branded by the average Italian as
learned and obscure, and not suited to the ordinary intelligence. As
an innovator both in the form and in the content of his verse, he has
still a tedious warfare to wage with a people so conservative as the
Italians of old habits and old tastes, confirmed as these have been
by the combined influence of centuries of political and ecclesiastical
bondage. But Carducci's writing, springing nevertheless from a strong
instinct, looks only to the people for a final recognition, even though
that has to be obtained through the medium of the learned classes at
first. How far he has succeeded in getting this vantage-ground of a
general recognition and acquiescence on the part of the learned, the
following testimony from Enrico Panzacchi, himself a critic and a poet
of high reputation, may help us to conclude:
“I believe that I do not exaggerate the importance of Carducci when
I affirm that to him and to his perseverance and steadfast courageous
work we owe in great part the poetic revival in Italy.
“I have great faith, I confess, in the initiative power of men of
strong genius and will, and, to tell the truth, while it is the fashion
of the day to explain always the individual by the age he lived in, I
think it is often necessary to invert the rule, and explain the age by
the individual.”
He goes on to show that, indifferent alike to conventional laws and
public opinion, Carducci always persisted in the constant endeavour to
_far l'arte_, to “do his art.” He defied the critics, and tried to be
himself.
Mr. Symonds says of the Renaissance that “it was a return in all
sincerity and faith to the glory and gladness of nature, whether in
the world without or in the soul of man.” Carducci reflects the spirit
of the Renaissance in so far as by setting free the national instincts
he has made way for the Hellenic reaction in favour of the “glory
and the gladness of the world without.” He has shown, moreover, how
foreign to these instincts is Christianity, considered apart from the
Roman Church, whether in its ascetic or in its spiritual aspects. But
it cannot be said of him, whatever may have been true of the poets of
the Renaissance, that he has reawakened or rediscovered “the glory and
gladness of nature in the soul of man,” and without this the gladness
of the world without is but a film of sunshine hiding the darkness
of the abyss. Indeed, if the soul and not the senses be addressed, we
question whether beneath all the Dionysian splendours and jollity of
Carducci's verses there be not discernible a gloom more real than that
of Leopardi. Even for Italy the day is past when Hellenism can fill
the place of Christianity; the soul craves a substance for which mere
beauty of form, whether in intellect, art, or nature, is a poor and
hollow substitute; and to revive not the poetry alone, but the humanity
of the nation, a force is needed greater and higher than that to be got
by the restoration of either dead Pan or Apollo.
II
CARDUCCI AND THE CLASSIC REALISM
Sojourning one autumn in a quiet _pension_ at Lugano, I came in contact
with a fellow-boarder, who, notwithstanding he bore the title of a
Sicilian count of very high-sounding name, proved on acquaintance to
be a man of serious literary taste and not above accepting pecuniary
compensation for the products of his pen.
He was engaged at that time in translating into the Italian a
well-known English classic, and was in the habit of appealing to me
occasionally for my judgment as to the accuracy of his interpretation
of an English word or phrase.
This led to pleasant interviews on the literary art in general.
It was one day when the conversation turned on the extreme materialism
of certain scientific writers of the day, and especially on Mantegazza
of Florence, whose grossness in treating of the human passions has
called forth expressions of disgust from Italians, as well as others,
that my Sicilian friend quietly remarked, “We Italians can never allow
the holy Trine to be destroyed—the True, the Good, the Beautiful. It
is not enough that a writer tell the facts as they are; nor that his
purpose be a useful one; there must be the element of beauty also
in his work, or the Italians will not accept it; and the ugly, the
monstrous, and deformed the Italians will not endure.”
I thought herein he proved his lineage from a stock older than even
his family title—that old race of the land where Theocritus sang as if
for beauty alone, and whose Ætna cherishes still her deep-down fires
uncooled and untamed by modern as by ancient contrivances of man.
It is this presence of the love of the beautiful that everywhere
accompanies the Greek race and their descendants, and imparts what
we may call the Hellenic instinct of form. And in this sense of form
born of the love of beauty lies the secret of the immortal art of the
Greeks, whether as presented in sculpture, architecture, painting, or
letters.
The survival of a certain Hellenic religious feeling in the Italian
people after centuries of a superimposed Christianity has already been
treated of in the previous essay. I desire here to speak of Carducci as
affording an example—perhaps one among many, but I know none better—of
the restoration of the Greek love of form to modern letters, and so as
illustrating what we may designate as the classic realism.
No term has been more abused of late years than this word—realism.
Become the watchword of schools of “realists” in every branch of art
and literature, it has been reduced at last to a service as empty of
meaning as was ever the vaguest idealism empty of reality.
The tendency of the age has been unquestionably one of ultimation;
everything presses into the plane of outermost effect. We have seemed
to be no more satisfied with the contemplation of intangible ideals:
we rest content only with what hand can touch and eye rest upon. The
“power in ultimates” is the display of force characteristic of this age
of the world. The forces physical and mental have been always there: it
has taken a time like the present, an age of inventive frenzy filled
with a yearning for the doing and trying of things long dreamt of, to
give vent to these hidden forces.
This tendency to ultimation, the seeking expression of inmost emotions
and conceptions in material embodiments, has characterized of late
years every form of mental activity.
Religion exemplifies it in the impatience the people exhibit at fine
analyses of doctrines and laborious attempts at creed-patching, at
the same time that they are ready to engage in schemes of benevolence
and social reform unparalleled in the history of the past. They would
fain substitute a religion of doing for a religion of believing; and
so impatient are they of the restrictions of dogma that they resent
inquiry into the quality or inward motive of the doing, or even into
its moral effect in the long run, so only some “good work” be done and
done quickly.
We see the same tendency in music and the drama wonderfully
illustrated in the whole conception and effort of the Wagnerian school.
Expression is everything. The question is not—Is the thing in itself
noble, but is the expression of it complete, unhindered by previous
conventionalities? Is nothing kept back, or left to the imagination,
but everything, rather, brought out into the actuality of sound, of
color, of living performers, and material accessories?
The Ibsen drama, the Tourguenief and Tolstoi school of novelists, not
to speak of Zola and his followers in France, writers like Capuana
and Verga in Italy, and, although in a quite different vein, Howells
among novelists and Whitman among poets in America, have aimed chiefly
to give a faithful account of life as it is seen. Some have come
dangerously near the assertion that by some mysterious law the bold
doing ennobles even a commonplace motive, and that a regard for truth
is enough whether there be any beauty behind it or not.
The power realised in full and free expression is one of the most
exquisite delights known to man. We of a northern race who, according
to the saying of our French neighbor, “take our pleasures sadly,” do so
because of a hereditary conviction of the sanctity of the unexpressed.
We have therefore been slowest in arriving at these efforts towards
realism, or the untrammelled giving forth of the inward self into
outward embodiment. That pure externalism of the southern or Greek
nature which sought its highest satisfaction in a visible embodiment
of the divine in art, and which distinguishes still the Roman from the
Saxon religious nature, has been regarded as verging on the sinful.
It is not strange that a tendency so long suppressed when once set
free should rush even into lawless extremes, and that an age or school
of writers tasting the delights of this liberty for the first time
should be loth to resign it and be ready rather to sacrifice all to
its further extension. It is quite in accordance with this theory that
puritan America should have given birth to Walt Whitman, who, with all
his lawlessness, is in many respects the most of a Greek that modern
literature can show.
To what extremes this delight has sought indulgence is shown not
more plainly in Zola and his school above mentioned than in the
whole contemporary school of French pictorial art. We see here how
form, as expression, indulged in for its own sake, apart from a
due consideration of the substance within the form, becomes itself
monstrous and vicious. This is the essentially _immoral_ element in
art—the licentious worship of form, or of external shape, regardless of
an internal soul or motive.
When the realist says: “With the motive of nature, of society, of
man, I have nothing to do; it is enough if I portray faithfully his
conduct,” he thereby advertises the fact that he is not an artist,
but a kind of moral photographer. He falls short of being an artist
in just the degree in which he sees the details of form apart from
their soul or spiritual essence; and as this spiritual element is that
wherein the unity of the world as idea exists, therefore, failing to
apprehend this, he fails to lay hold of the universal aspects which
alone can assign true relation and true meaning to any of the details
treated of. It is the apprehension of the universal element underlying
the particulars that constitutes the peculiar gift of the artist. It
is indeed true that nature, or humanity, is its own interpreter and
its own preacher; and the most faithful servant of either will be he
who most exactly presents his subject as he finds it. But the subject
is never found by the true artist detached from its community-life, or
severed from the endless woof of combinations, of causes and effects,
of law and recompense, which go to make up any present moment of
its existence; these constitute its “story.” So far as these inner
conditions are recognized and felt in giving the ultimate expression,
so far alone is the portrayal a real one in the true sense.
Undoubtedly the inmost motive that can give form to the literature of
any age or race is the religious one, by which I mean the recognition
of a life within and above nature, not our own, but to which we
entertain a personal relation. This is in the truest sense that “soul”
which “is form, and doth the body make,” and its presence or absence is
what sufficiently distinguishes the true from a false realism.
An age without a religion can produce only a soulless, and so an
unreal, art. What it calls art may abound in shape, but will possess
no form in the true sense of the word. For form is the combination of
particulars with a view to a single purpose, for which every particular
exists and to which it is subordinate; it is therefore never a many,
but always a one out of many. This inward controlling motive that
constitutes out of many the one, is the living substance within every
true or real form. That which does not possess this motive of unity is
not form, but shape, or an artificial cast made to resemble the living
thing, but having no life within it. Art is thus the form that grows
from within, while shape is but the impression mechanically imposed on
passive and lifeless material from without. The modern French school of
realists in art are the fittest examples of this substitution of shape
for form, and so of pseudo-realism. They have given us corpses, whether
physical or moral, and called them human beings. They have preferred
the charnel-house, the dissecting-room, or the field of carnage, as the
subjects in which to display most effectively their realism. The more
revolting the subject, the more hideously exact the representation,
the more credit was claimed for the artist. In literature the case was
parallel. Nothing so vile but it was to be admired for its faithfulness
in representation. The inner motive, the moral purpose of the writing
or the painting, was not only not there, but the producer scorned the
judgment that would look for it. Never was religion, or the sentiment
of reverence for the spiritual as the world's idea, so manifestly
wanting as in these recent French materialists. The abjuring of the
romantic and the ideal has gone so far as to extinguish the human
element, and so we find in these schools skilfully painted bodies and
an almost matchless power of expression; but, after all, how little is
expressed!
Compare a Greek statue of Phidias's time with the latest production
of a Parisian studio. Both are alike of hard, colourless, senseless
marble; but can we not see in one the breathing of a god, while in the
other we, at the most, study with a critical vision the outlines of a
human animal?
Reality is not reached by the negative process of taking away
conventional guises and concealments; and yet modern artists and
writers have alike thought to get at truth in this way. But the nude
is not the more real for being nude. The reality of an object depends
on what is within it, and not on anything that men put on or take away
from it. How many writers of late years have been deluding themselves
with the idea that if one can only succeed in avoiding everything
like a moral purpose, or even interesting situations, and reveal what
they call the bare facts of experience, one may thereby attain to
the real? As if ever art existed except in the discovering of unity,
the interpretation of purpose, and in the suggesting of that which is
interesting to the human heart!
The emptiness of this kind of realism, which is as naked of soul within
as of garments without, is proved by the reaction that is already
setting in in France, where materialism has made its boldest claims
in the domain of art. Not only in art is there a strong movement
for restoring the lost elements of romance and piety, leading to a
religious severity almost like that of the pre-Raphaelites, but in
literature there is a similar protest against the degradation of the
real to the plane of mere soulless matter. M. Paul Bourget, who has
been through all phases of French expression and knows its extremes,
gives voice to this reaction in the following passage from his
“Sensations d'Italie”:
“Sans doute, les grands peintres ont vu d'abord et avant tout l'être
vivant; mais dans cet être, ils ont dégagé la _race_ et ils ne
pouvaient pas la sentir, cette race, sans démêler l'obscur idéal qui
s'agite en elle, qui végète dans les créatures inférieures, ignoré
d'elles-mêmes et cependant consubstantiel à leur sang. La langueur et
la robustesse à la fois de ce pays de montagnes dont le pied baigne
dans la fièvre, le mysticisme des compatriotes de Saint François
d'Assise et leur sauvagerie, la mélancolie songeuse prise devant
l'immobile sommeil des lacs, tous ces traits élaborés par le travail
séculaire de l'hérédité, le Pérugin les a dégagés plus nettement qu'un
autre, mais it n'a eu qu'à les dégager. Sa divination instinctive les
a reconnus, sans peut-être qu'il s'en rendît compte, dans des coupes de
joues, des nuances de prunelles, des airs de tête. C'est là, dans cette
interprétation à la fois soumise et géniale, que réside la véritable
copie de la nature où tout est âme, même et surtout la forme,—âme qui
se cherche, qui se méconnaît parfois, qui s'avilit, mais une âme tout
de même et qui ne se révèle qu'à l'âme.”[4]
A Frenchman of to-day become an admirer of Perugino!
A tendency to realism, unlike that of French art in subject, but
not unlike in method, is that which is exhibited in England in the
recent religious novelists of the class headed by the authoress of
“Robert Elsmere.” Here, again, the effort has been to get at the real
by stripping off conventional religious admissions, pretensions,
and errors, and depicting a moral basis of conduct which can exist
independently of creed and church. The result has been disappointing,
because a creed incapable of perversion or corruption becomes as
lifeless and as powerless a factor in human character-building as
is the multiplication table; and without a miraculous incarnation of
Deity as its basis and its imperative authority, the whole system of
Christian ethics, when thus reduced to a scientific conclusion or to an
invention of man's individual moral sense, loses not only its power to
influence morally, but even to interest other minds. The “real” basis
of religion thus arrived at is found to be no religion at all, but only
the private opinion of this authoress as to what is good and right,
with every divine and therefore every universal and obligatory element
in it left out.
I have spoken indiscriminately, above, of the realists in our
modern literature as all subject to the temptation to rest satisfied
with photographic imitations of nature rather than with a reality
created from their apprehension of its ideal form. The end sought
for is faithfulness in expression, and the danger is that of making
subordinate to this the substance of what is expressed. But among these
writers there are all degrees of approach to the genuine realism which
undoubtedly, like the art of the Greeks, is a thing that can never die,
and which, even if for a long interval set aside, is sure to return
again to its rightful place as the only true form of expression.
Among the various aspirants to the title of realist, we have no more
interesting examples than in our own Howells and Whitman, both being
avowed prophets of this school of writing. In Whitman we see a generous
nature run away with by the passion of expression. His words are heaped
like sand-dunes. There is a sound of roaring waves, but the landscape
is, too often, on the whole, shapeless and wearisome. One feels that
there is meaning in the poet's mind, but the expression is excessive,
and so without form. The delight of ultimation has become a frenzy
of word-piling or word-inventing. The disappointment is like that
experienced on seeing a piece of sculpture which reveals a bold and
vigorous design with magnificent anatomy and muscular strength, but
which has a weak line in the face. It just falls short of being art.
With Howells the charm of his realism lies in the subtlety of his
concealment of it. The deep moral purpose which, like a strong,
irresistible current, underlies his recent and more serious writing,
is all the more potent because it is not “pointed”; and the reader
is allowed to indulge, as if with the author himself, in the little
delusion that this is only the ordinary superficial aspect of an
every-day world which is being described, and that things do thus
merely happen as they happen, without design or reason. So perfect
is the form and so true to nature that, with the author, we keep up,
too, the little deception, that it is with the form itself that we are
pleased, and that this constitutes the realism of which the author is
so ardent an advocate. Meanwhile we learn, when the story is ended,
that this realism was all informed with a soul of moral and divine
purpose, and that this is all that is real in it as in anything else.