Giuseppe Giacomo Carducci

“ THE life of Giosue Carducci, the foremost of living Italian poets, spans an epic period. He was born in 1835, when Italy was indeed little more than a "geographical expression," an aggregation of states separated from each other by wide differences in customs and even language, united only by common suffering under foreign tyranny. ”

“ 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 ”

“ As will be seen from the foregoing sketch, Carducci is no easy-going poet. He bears out in his everyday work the dislike he has expressed at seeing the Lyric in dressing-gown and slippers, and has given us, in a little poem [229] at the end of the “Rime Nuove,” his idea of what a poet should be—the true poietes (ποιητής) of the Greeks. For him the poet is a great artificer, with muscles hardened into iron at his trade: he holds his head high, his neck is strong, his breast bare, his eye bright. ”

“ CARDUCCI, GIOSUÈ (1836-1907) , Italian poet, was born at Val-di-Castello, in Tuscany, on the 27th of July 1836, his father being Michele Carducci, a physician, of an old Florentine family, who in his youth had suffered imprisonment for his share in the revolution of 1831. Carducci received a good education. He began life as a public teacher, but soon took to giving private lessons at Florence, where he became connected with a set of young men, enthusiastic patriots in politics, and in literature bent on overthrowing the reigning romantic taste by a return to classical models. ”

“ It was, however, impossible that any ardent youth should content himself with mere literary form during that period of ferment which resulted in the formation of a United Italy. He, like his contemporaries throughout the length and breadth of the land, was fired by the noble efforts made by Garibaldi and Mazzini for the redemption of their fatherland from the hated Austrian yoke; and, though republican by tradition (as all Italians must be) as well as by natural inclination, Carducci was yet willing to follow the moderate party and Garibaldi in their support of the monarchy of Savoy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a chief glory of Carducci to have united an intensely patriotic spirit to a comprehensive cosmopolitanism. Though ranging far and wide to enrich the domestic literature with new metrical forms, he loves those in which the Italian genius has embodied itself from days of old, and is always ready to defend them against degenerate countrymen, no less than against unappreciative foreigners. Like Wordsworth, he has simultaneously vindicated and illustrated the sonnet ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [5] 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.” ”

“ Carducci, who, when Vittorio Emanuele first flung down the gauntlet of defiance before Austria had hailed the Piedmontese king as the hero-liberator of his country, watched with small patience the dallyings and pettiness displayed by the monarchical party after its accession to power. The transference of the capital from Turin to Florence, with the implied abandonment of Rome, was the first blow to his loyalty. ”

“ It would hardly be possible for any man of strong feeling and quick imagination to have lived through such a struggle as that for Italian unity without having his character deeply influenced thereby. Carducci, moreover, was brought up in an environment and amid circumstances that still further tended to breed in him a peculiarly passionate love of country and hatred of foreign domination. ”

“ During these years Carducci's thirst for liberty and freedom, political, social, and religious, developed, and for a third of a century after he had reached the age of man he externalized it in moving, majestic, musical verse, which made known Italy's rights and aspirations, and encouraged her loyal sons to continue their struggles. ”

“ For the men with whom he found himself associated as colleagues, though at one with him as regards the fundamental tenet of the necessity of a monarchy, had but little understanding of his idea that the valour and strength of the nation was to be the making of Italy, without foreign interference, or even in opposition to it. They relied more on modern methods of diplomacy than on Greek [205] dash and daring; and, to gain their ends, were ready to compromise with other Powers and with the Church in a way that clashed with Carducci’s classic enthusiasm. ”

“ Because, in the early days, Vittorio Emanuele presents himself as the symbol of Italy's salvation, he sings the Cross of Savoy; the monarchy, triumphant, grows careless of its ideals, and Carducci passes to the Republicans with "After Aspromonte;" the great personalities that had been the glory of the Republican party disappear, the standard is lowered, and he draws near once more to the throne that has been sanctioned by the people's voice. It is with spiritual values, not with external forms, that he concerns himself ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Such jewels of expression are indeed scattered throughout the whole of Carducci’s work, their conciseness rendering very apparent the classicality of the models on which Carducci formed his style. Of him, indeed, Tennyson might have said, as he did of Virgil—
“All the wealth of all the Muses,
often flowering in a lonely word.”
Spring sets Carducci’s heart beating in dithyrambs; it is in his spring songs that he abandons himself most completely to the joy of life as life, and attains, perhaps, some of his highest flights of lyric song. ”

“ Stronger, however, than the Italian reverence for established form is the Italian responsiveness to beauty. It was recognized that the Odes presented a thoroughly harmonious whole, however unlawfully attained, and the contest ended in the establishment of Carducci as the foremost among living Italian poets and of the Odes as a triumphant assertion, not only of his maturest poetic thought, but of his mastery of a scheme of versification which, on first consideration, might appear somewhat alien to the genius of the language. ”

“ Carducci, like poets of the south, such as Apollinaire, (whose real name I believe savored of the north, being Ostrowsky) liked the romantic, serious minded German poets of long ago. He read and translated some of Klopstock, Platen, while a friend of Carducci’s translated him back again into Latin, where he really belongs.
If your pocketbook refuses a ticket to Italy, do not be unhappy. Read Carducci! Read d’Annunzio! There is usually somewhere an Ersatz, something to set, without discord, in place of the thing desired. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The latter, although still young, is, next to Carducci, the most considerable figure in Italian literature to-day. In his dramas, poetry, and novels he shows a wonderful command of language and descriptive imagination, and at one time bid fair to become a truly great writer. In his later works he shows retrogression rather than progress, and the taint of immorality and a certain exaggerated eccentricity of thought have vitiated his talent and tended to destroy his popularity.
QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW
1. ”

“ Carducci, far from being the literary dictator of his age, is perhaps not less distasteful to the ultra-realists for whom he paved the way, than to the romanticists whom he overthrew, yet is in a very special sense the representative of his age and nation. The commencement of poetical activity synchronised with a new dispensation in the world of politics. The reviving nation must have a new poet or none. ”