that is soul-informed, I do not know a better name for the latter
than the Classic Realism. I mean by this something as far remote as
possible from the classic formalism of the age of Pope and Dryden,
as remote indeed as form is from formalism. For in that period it was
neither truth to nature nor truth to the imagination that was aimed at
in expression, but rather a cold and rigid conformity to the rules of
correct writing as found in the recognized standards. “Classic” hence
got to mean merely according to the standards. But by a Classic Realism
we will certainly understand that effort to obtain a form of expression
which recognizes both the internal and the external reality of things,
and is able to combine both in one ultimation like the soul and body
that make the one man.
The subjectivity of the Saxon mind and a large inheritance of both the
classic formalism and the romanticism of former periods of English
literature have prevented our English writers from attaining that
spontaneous realism which was native to the Hellenic mind; and yet
they have the gift to recognise and interpret it when found. This did
Tennyson when he chose for translation the following lines closing the
Eighth Book of the “Iliad”:
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak,
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest; and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So, many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain: and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And, champing golden grain, the horses stood,
Hard by their chariots, waiting for the dawn.
The same vision into the charmed world of the classic realism had Keats
when he wrote his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” and
put a whole age of ecstatic delight into these matchless lines:
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when, with eagle eyes,
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Listen to Theocritus describing in most realistic language the Joys
of Peace. Notice how he does not so much as mention any emotion, but
awakens it by his faithful description of the objective world:
And oh! that they might till rich fields, and that unnumbered
sheep and fat might bleat cheerily through the plains, and that
oxen, coming in herds to the stalls, should urge on the traveller
by twilight. And oh! that the fallow lands might be broken up for
sowing, when the cicada, sitting on his tree, watches the shepherd
in the open day and chirps on the topmost spray; that spiders may
draw their fine webs over martial arms, and not even the name of
the battle-cry be heard. [Idyl XVI.]
Keats has felt the same appeal of nature to human sympathy in all
the humblest forms of life, and has expressed it in his sonnet on the
“Grasshopper and the Cricket”:
The poetry of earth is never dead.
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead:
That is the grasshopper's—he takes the lead
In summer luxury—he has never done
With his delights, for, when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
This is realism, but a truly classic realism; it is earth, but the
“poetry of earth.”
Probably Whitman has here and there approached as nearly as any English
writer to this pure realism, and, when he has not allowed his delight
in words to outrun his inward conception, he has given us pictures
possessing much of the vivid objectivity of the Greek realists. Compare
with the above passage from Theocritus the Farm Picture drawn by
Whitman in these two lines:
Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn
A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding.
Or this:
Lo, 'tis autumn.
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio's villages, with leaves fluttering in the
moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis'd
vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and
with wondrous clouds,
Below, too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm
prospers well.
Perhaps it is because Whitman is not the literary heir of the past, but
the beginner of his line, that he enjoys this freedom and completeness
of ultimation. He could dare what Keats, born to the purple, would
fain have dared, but, in his sonnet to Haydon, confesses his fear of
attempting:
Haydon! forgive me that I cannot speak
Definitively of these mighty things;
Forgive me that I have not eagles' wings,
That what I want I know not where to seek.
And think that I would not be over meek
In rolling out up-followed thunderings
Even to the steep of Heliconian springs,
Were I of ample strength for such a freak.
Undoubtedly true it is that a spring-like freshness and vigour in
Whitman's poems give voice to the life of a strong and youthful
nationality; and in grateful appreciation of this we will not stop to
inquire to what extent he owes his present popularity to the charm of
novelty. But, novel as his style may seem, it is but the re-discovered
secret of all true art, the realism that is the ultimation of the soul.
That Goethe was a realist in this sense is shown by the fact that
where the emotion was deepest and the moral substance of his writing
the most intense and unmistakable, the form was purely objective
and classic—dealing with the simplest and commonest of the world's
every-day material, and indulging in little or no reflection or
introspection. Such is he in the _Hermann und Dorothea_, at once the
most Teutonic and the most Hellenic of modern poems. Of this Professor
Dowden says in a recent essay:[5]
“Goethe never attempted to transform himself into a Greek; on the
contrary, it seemed to him essential for the object which he had in
view that he should remain a German, since it was from the alliance
of the Teutonic genius with the genius of Greece that he hoped for the
birth of the ardent child Euphorion. And in the representative poem of
this period, _Hermann und Dorothea_, if Goethe is more than elsewhere
a Greek in the bright purity of his art and its fine simplicity of
outline, here also more than elsewhere in the body of thought and
feeling he is a German of the Germans.”
Coming now to study Carducci as a poet who more perfectly than any
other living, perhaps, reflects the classic realism of his Hellenic
literary ancestry, I desire to emphasise as a point of peculiar
interest the fact that the religious element which I have spoken of
above as the most essential one in all art is here not Christian, but
avowedly pagan; but that, as such, it supplies that inward essence to
Carducci's poems that gives them reality. There is all the difference
imaginable between the description of landscape in his poem on the
peninsula of Sermione [XVI] and that of our modern writers who think
to have outgrown Christianity and see no suggestion of supernatural
presence or influence in the world around them. Were Carducci himself
a believer in the present existence of the Gods of Greece, he could
hardly have infused a more intense life into his writing than he has
done by the continually suggested presence of the happy gods, sirens,
and nymphs of the classic mythology. Our modern poets can use the
same mythologic personages in figurative embellishment or in allegoric
allusion. In Carducci they are real presences such as Wordsworth sighed
for in his sonnet, “The World is too much with us”:
Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn!
and as Keats felt when writing in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” these
lines:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on:
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity.
The same vivid realisation of the presence of the supernatural in
nature under truly pagan forms is seen in Carducci's poem “To Aurora”
[XVII]:
Thou risest and kissest, O Goddess, with rosy breath the clouds,
Kissest the dusky pinnacles of marble temples.
In this poem is contrasted in most realistic manner the Greek sense
of the sunlight as a divine presence, imparting only joy to men and
leading them to seek their delights under the open sky, with the
exhausting nightly dissipations of modern life and the hatred of
daylight which recalls men to their labour:
Ours is a wearied race:
Sad is thy face, O Aurora, when thou risest over our towers.
The dim street-lamps go out, and, not even glancing at thee,
A pale-faced troop go home imagining they have been happy.
Angrily at his door is pounding the ill-tempered labourer,
Cursing the dawn that only calls him back to his bondage.
Next to the emotion of the supernatural, we are struck with the intense
sympathy with nature both animate and inanimate, which gives so lively
a glow to Carducci's description. The sonnet on “The Ox” [IX] I have
referred to in the previous essay; here I would call attention to that
addressed “To a Horse” [XVII], which, if the former can be called
Homeric, can equally claim to be Phidian in the pure outline of the
drawing and the Olympic spirit that seems to quiver in the poet's
words:
O that for thee might blaze the sands Elean,
For thee great hymns the godlike Pindar sing,
Following thee there upon the waves Alphaean!
Keats proves how deeply he has imbibed the Greek poetic spirit in his
sonnet on the “Grasshopper and the Cricket”; for here he expresses
the same intense joy of communion with a certain soul in nature which
caused Theocritus to never tire of singing, or having his Sicilian
goatherds sing, of the bees that fed the imprisoned Comatas all through
the springtime, of the Oaks that sung the dirges of the shepherd
Daphnis, of the “shegoats feeding on the hill,” of “the young lambs
pasturing on the upland fields when the spring is on the wane,” of “the
white calves browsing on the arbutus,” of the “cicada to cicada dear,”
“the prattling locusts,” and “lizards that sleep at midday by the dry
stone wall.”
With the same zest Carducci delights to sing of the “forests awaking
with a cool shiver” at the rising of Aurora, of “the garrulous nests
that mutter amid the wet leaves” in the early dawn, of the “grey
gull far off that screams over the purple sea,” “the sorrel colt
breaking away with high lifted mane and neighing in the wind,” and
“the pack of hounds, wakeful, answering from their kennels.” What Mr.
Lang says of Theocritus may be as truly said of Carducci: “There is
nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the incommunicable sense
of nature.... It is as true to nature as the statue of the native
fisherman in the Vatican.” [Introduction to _Theocritus_.] Especially
are we aware of the almost oppressive feeling of nature's languor and
sweet melancholy on reading Carducci's poems on “A Dream in Summer”
[XVIII] and “On a Saint Peter's Eve” [XIX]. Here, indeed, the feeling
is more modern than ancient, but the mode of expressing it is the same.
How like Homer is the picture of
The sun across the red vapours descending,
And falling into the sea like a shield of brass
Which shines wavering over the bloody field of war,
Then drops and is seen no more.
It seems like the reverse of the figure in the “Iliad,” where the armed
Diomed is described:
Forth from his helm and shield a fire-light
Then flashed, like autumn star that brightest shines
When newly risen from his ocean bath.
And further, when we read of the swallows that
Wove and rewove their crooked flight around the gutters,
While in shadows malarious the brown sparrows were chattering;
and how there comes
through the humid air
The song of the reapers, long, distant, mournful and wearied—
a line which can only tell its full tale of tender sadness in the
original:
il canto
de mietitori, longo, lontano, piangevole, stanco—
how the sun looks down
like a cyclops heavy with wine—
and we are then as suddenly awakened out of our delicious reverie by
the screaming of a peacock and a bat's wing grazing our head, we know
that the poetry is real not by its mere accuracy of description, but by
the feeling that it awakens as only nature itself could awaken it.
The “Summer Dream” recalls, in the vividness and delicacy of its
landscape and tenderness of feeling, perhaps more of Dante than of the
ancient poets. There is a vision of the mother walking with the poet's
little brother by the river bank,
the happy mother walking in the sunlight,
which suggests Dante's glimpse of the Countess Matilda in the
daisy-sprinkled meadow, described in the twenty-eighth canto of the
“Purgatory.” The bells of Easter-eve are telling from a high tower that
on the morrow Christ would rise again.
From the sea far below comes up the odorous breeze, while
on its waters four white sails rock slowly to and fro in the sun.
The poet's thoughts wander to where, in the solemn shades of Certosa
and on the flowering banks of the Arno, lie at rest the beloved ones.
But quickly, with the sudden waking from the nap, is dispelled the
vision of the poet and with it the modern introspective gloom; these
give place to the realism and the day-light contentment of the old
time:
Lauretta's joyous song was ringing through all the chambers
While Bice,[6] bending over her frame, followed silent the work of
the needle.
There is something majestic in the moral portraiture of the poem on
“The Mother.” [XX] We seem to be looking on a colossal bronze figure,
in which are blended pure natural joy and an instinct of the divine
holiness of motherhood. The reproach contained in the last verse
belongs to the present time of social unrest; it is hard to convey in
English the full intent of the subtle phrase:
la giustizia pia del lavoro—.
Paul Bourget speaks, in his _Sensations d'Italie_, of the simplicity
“peculiar to the lofty style of Italian poetry introduced by Dante,
under which one feels the glorious origin of the language”; and he
quotes, as illustrating this simplicity, Carducci's “divine sonnet”
commencing:
Passa la nave mia, sola, tra il pianto.
[XXI] On this he remarks:
“The quality of the words in which Roman vigour still palpitates,
the direct force of the image, the construction, at once flowing and
concise, of the sentence, give this poetry the charm of precision which
is the distinctive characteristic of the genius of the Romans. It is at
once sober and grand.” Surely no better example of such writing could
anywhere be found than in the poem on “The Mother.”
With what awful severity such a style lends itself to the exposure
of the corruption and inhumanity of society, like a veritable Juvenal
returned to hurl his satire at these modern times, is shown in the poem
on “The Carnival.” [XXII]
Another phase of Carducci's genuine realism is the subtle art of
blending with nature, not his own personality, but that of great souls
of the past who have lived amid the scenes described. Of this a fine
example is the poem “Sermione” mentioned above. [XVI] The peninsula
so named, which juts boldly out into the southern bay of the Lago di
Garda, the _Lacus Benacus_ of the Romans, is about equidistant from
Mantua on the south, the birthplace of Virgil, and from Verona on
the east, the birthplace of Catullus. Near by is situated one of the
castles of the Scaligers, where Dante may have had his abode when
taking refuge with that family on his banishment from Florence in 1316.
At the extremity of the promontory are still seen the relics of the
villa of Catullus, in which he is supposed to have written many of his
poems, especially the one beginning
Peninsularum, Sirmio, insularumque
Ocelle.
How endeared was the lake to the tender-hearted poet, and how its cool
and placid shores brought solace to his bosom, rent with the passions
of Rome's giddy life, Carducci tells in the song of the Sirens—
Come to us, Quintus Valerius!
Here to our grottos descend still the sunrays, but silvery, and
mild as those of Cynthia.
Here the assiduous tumults that burden thy life but resemble the
distant humming of bees.
We feel ourselves to be listening for the poet, and would fain with him
enjoy the fresh air, the soothing calm,
While Hesperus over the waters broadens his rosy face.
And the waves are lapping the shore.
In the glimpses afforded, in this poem, of Garda lifting her dusky
shoulders over the liquid mirror,
Singing the while a saga of cities ancient and buried,
And their barbaric kings;
of Catullus,
Mooring all day long to the wet rocks his pitched canoe
And watching in the phosphorescent waves the eyes of his Lesbia;
of the
white swans swimming down through the silvery Mincio;
and,
from the green pastures where sleeps Bianore, the sound of
Virgilius' voice;
and of the
face stern and grand looking out from the tower of the Scaligers,
centuries of literary history seem to pass before our eyes in living
procession.
Most tender of all these tributes of the poet, interweaving the memory
of his revered predecessors and masters with the nature loved by them,
and by himself for them, is the sonnet addressed to Petrarch [XXIII]:
If far from turbid thoughts and gloomy mood.
It is as delicate as the odour of jessamine
in the green blackness of the tangled wood,
and breathes a rich melancholy, as if,
when day is done,
A nightingale from bough to bough were singing.
The sonnets addressed to the more recent poets, his fellow-countrymen,
seem mainly to have served as vents for Carducci's own indignation at
the literary and political degeneracy of the present time. Many of them
are from among the poet's earlier productions, and the changes which
have occurred since their writing make them seem to belong already to
a past period when perhaps more than at present his severe reflections
on his country and countrymen were deserved. A foreigner can hardly
enter into the bitterness of vituperation which finds utterance in such
poems as those “In Santa Croce” [XXVIII], or “The Voice of the Priests”
[XXIX], the sonnet addressed to Vittorio Alfieri [XXV],
O de l'italo agon supremo atleta,
and that to Goldoni, the “Terence of the Adria”; but all of these,
which we may call the literary sonnets, have a certain universal value
in that they reflect more than individual feeling. Each poet addressed
is identified in some way with the nation's weal or woe; and the soul
of the patriot, and no mere dilettante admiration, is what pours forth
those fervid utterances which, in another tongue and to the ear of
strangers, will naturally often seem overwrought.
No less truly does the soul of the father speak in the beautiful
verses “On my Daughter's Marriage,” and the soul of manly friendship in
that little song “At the Table of a Friend,” which seems as if it had
dropped from the pages of Horace like a purple grape from the cluster
all odorous with its bloom.
Over all others in stern and majestic portraiture rise those verses,
both of the earlier and later period, in which Carducci treats of Dante
and his influence. Nowhere are we more impressed than here with the
strange fascination of that man who
made things good and evil to tell their tale through him the fatal
prophet;
against whose Gothic sphere Carducci's Hellenic spirit continually
fretted and rebelled. Yet his soul is ever thrilled (see the Sonnet on
the Sixth Centenary of Dante [XXXIV]) with awe at the reappearing of
that “mighty Form,”
when shook the Adrian shore and all the land Italia trembled,
which,
like a morning mist
Did march along the Apenninian strand,
Glancing adown the vales on either hand,
Then vanished like the dawn;
while “in earthly hearts a fear arose, discovering the awful presence
of a God,” and there,
where, beyond the gates, the sun is burning,
The races dead, of war-like men and wise,
With joy saluted the great soul's returning.
The antagonism between the pagan and the Christian religious instincts
comes to light in all that Carducci writes of his revered master. Half
in anger he chides the awful singer who
Comes down from heaven bringing the Hymn Supreme,
while upon his brow shines
a radiance divine
Like his who spake with God in Sinai,—
because he cared not for
His poor country and the endless strife that rent its cities.
With the splendours of the holy kingdom, amid which Dante stood,
Carducci contrasts the mortal fields of civil war and the wastes
deserted and malignant,
whence comes the sound, dreary and dull, of dying warriors' sighs;
and yet no commentator seems to become so transformed as Carducci into
Dante's own being and manner when contemplating and describing him. The
poem on Dante, beginning with the words [XXXIII]:
Forte sembianze di novella vita,
recalls, in its statuesque strength and supple beauty, Michael Angelo's
“Sleeping Slave.” It breathes all through with the spirit of the
Italian Renaissance. In the narrative of Dante's secret heart-life and
soul-life it seems as if we were turning new leaves of _La Vita Nova_
rather than those of a nineteenth-century critic. No voice but Dante's
seems to speak in lines like these, describing the first awaking of the
passion of love in the youthful poet's heart:
Sighing and pensive, yet with locks aglow
With rosy splendour from another air,
Love made long stay:
And such the gentle things
He talked to thee with bashful lips: so sweetly
He entered all the chambers of thy heart
That no one ever knew to love like thee.
This surely is the “intelletto d'amore” of Dante himself.
Hardly less like Dante is the picture of Beatrice in that half-playful,
half-worshipful poem on that mysterious personage [XXXV]:
Like our Lady from heaven
She passes before me,
An angel in seeming, and yet all so ardent
My mind stopped thinking
But to look at her,
And the soul was at rest,—but for sighing!
How sweet and true an echo from Sonnet XXV in _La Vita Nova_:
Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare!
Here Carducci treats Beatrice under the favourite character of the Idea
which is to elevate mankind from its rude savagery. As in Goethe,
Das ewig weibliche zieht uns hinan.
Not a woman, but the Idea,
Am I, which heaven did offer
For man to study when seeking things on high.
Nevertheless, we cannot forget the satirical tone in which, in another
poem, he contrasts the ideal love of Dante with the passion of a lower
kind that found its home in the Greek nature, and sings rather of
Lalage and Lesbia than of this “Angel in seeming.”