Giosuè Carducci

“ Only one who, like the poet, has looked down from the Janiculum on the "pictured form" of the Eternal City, who has felt the wonder of her grandeur and the immortal loveliness of her decay, can fully realize how exquisitely, how subtly her charm pervades each word of the poet's Ave. The essential spirit of Rome is there—of that Rome who is as truly Mistress of the World to-day, in her empire over men's hearts, as when of old she ruled their lives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The glamour which the sun's "dying salutation" sheds on the grim towers and solemn church of dark-turreted Bologna, hangs like a golden haze over the whole poem; and in the last stanza one may feel the intensity of the poet's yearning for that antique beauty which has vanished with a vanished time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With childhood's brightness on them, seem to wait
The furrow that is left by the caress
Of the maternal hand. But now instead
They are cast into darkness, these young souls,
With none to comfort ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ While restraining [8] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But manhood's school of mysteries and cares
Enticed me to the temple's dark immuring.
Where now the lofty dames, with glance securing
What free-born knight or brave civilian dares?
Bright April days the roses bloom assuring?
The oak that through the castle rampart stares?
Poor and alone, again to that dear dwelling
I come where pious love did once deny
That I should heed the Enchantress' sweet impelling.
Open! O Child: though be the times awry,
Thy vision, Beatrice, wakes my heart's rebelling,—
Open! The Tuscan poesy am I! ”

“ It is in this interpretation, at once humble and sympathetic, that the veritable imitation of nature consists, in which all is soul, even, and above all the form—a soul which seeks itself, disguises itself at times and even debases itself, but a soul nevertheless and one that reveals itself only to the soul. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!
[53]
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”