The Roman historian Niebuhr reviewing the literature of the Augustan age, gave it as his opinion that epic poetry was dead, the lyric form of poetical expression being the only one adapted to the genius of the Romans at that period. Virgil’s “Æneid,” beautiful as are its details, he considers a failure as an epic; for an epic hero should, with fresh simple spontaneity, go straight home to the heart of the people at large, and this, he argues, the character of Æneas could never have done. Greek legends in Virgil’s poem are so dove-tailed into the Latin ones that the work loses its national character, loses therefore its spontaneity, and remains now, as it must have been from the beginning, an exquisite mosaic, to be appreciated only by the cultured; and appreciated, moreover, rather for the delicacy of the descriptions and the art of the versification, than for any inherent interest attaching to the principal characters. Roman literary society was, in fact, too positive to produce an epic poem. The sceptical spirit was uppermost. Legend, instead of firing the imagination, did but arouse the critical faculty. The story of Romulus, of his wondrous birth and preservation, of his building of the city, his government, and marvellous death, was neither believed in as fact nor treated as poetry. Men set to work to examine and to explain it; a useful task, no doubt, and one which Niebuhr himself has performed as well as anyone else, but one expressive of a spirit far removed from that which animates the writer of an epic poem. The death of the epic meant, however, the life of the lyric. Occupying themselves but little with the motives and actions of those who lived in other ages, men felt all the more need of uttering their own subjective feelings and impressions. For such utterances they naturally chose the lyric form, which the highly developed Æsthetic sense of the time induced them to work to a high degree of perfection. This, in fact, was the age of Horace and Catullus.

Surely much the same causes are at work, in different forms of society, at the present day. The Italian critic Trezza sings the dirge of the epic, and proves that the lyric is the only form of poem possible to the society of the nineteenth century. Another authority besides Trezza makes a similar assertion.

“The epic,” he says, “was buried some time ago. To violate the tomb of the mighty dead by singing doggerel over it, even if it were not the sign of a depraved disinclination to undertake higher flights, would not be particularly diverting. The drama (referring to poetic drama) is in extremis, and the superabundance of doctors won’t even let it depart in peace. Lyric poetry, individual by nature, appears to stand its ground, and may still last some little while provided it does not forget it is an art. If it degrades itself into a mere secretion of the sensibility or sensuality of such and such an one, if it surrenders itself to all the unnatural licences which sensibility and sensuality allow themselves, then, poor lyric, she too is no longer recognisable.... To have adapted to the lyric this style of versification, fit only for narration and description, without verses, and with rhymes a piacere, is a sure sign that every idea of the true lyric has been lost.... An asthmatic lyric, paunch-bellied, in dressing-gown of ample girth, and slippers—tie upon it!... I, bending at the foot of the Italian Muse, first kiss it with respectful tenderness, then try to fit on the sapphic, alcaic, and asclepiadaic buskins in which her godlike sister led the choruses on the Parian marble of the Doric temples, which look down at themselves in the sea that was the fatherland of Aphrodite and Apollo.”

So writes the great Italian poet Carducci, using a similitude which might have come from the pen of Horace himself. The Augustan age produced a poet who measured the Greek lyric buskins on Latin measures; the nineteenth century has given birth to one who has fitted them on to Italian verse.

GiosuÉ Carducci, whose poetical works have raised so much controversy in Italy, and occasioned a deluge of treatises on metre, Italian and Latin, was born at Valdicastello, in the classic Tuscan land, on July 27th, 1836, of a family which, in the days of the independence of the Tuscan cities, had given a Gonfaloniere to the Florentine Republic. His first impressions of Nature he received from the Pisan Maremma, here stretching away in “peaceful hills, with steaming mists, and green plains smiling in the morning showers”; there in “chalk-hills of malignant aspect, sparsely shaded by wood, with horses wandering under the guilty-looking cork-oaks that bristle, lowering, in the plain below”; or again in “cloud-swept unsown plains, by the widowed shores of the Tuscan sea,” scattered with the old-world feudal towers, and full of ancient memories of decayed cities and mediÆval strife. It was among such surroundings that at the age of eleven Carducci wrote his first verses. These reveal at once the historical and classical tendency of his mind; for besides a few lines on the “Death of an Owl,” we find a poem on “The Fall of the Castle of Bolgheri into the hands of Ladislaus, King of Naples,” and another entitled “M. Brutus Meditating the Death of CÆsar.”

Those were unsettled times, however. Political revolution deprived Carducci’s father in 1849 of his post of village-doctor, and forced him to take refuge in Florence, where GiosuÉ was put to school with the Scolopian Fathers. All readers of Ruffini will remember that author’s experience of the Scolopian convent school as described in “Lorenzo Benoni”; and can imagine that Carducci, accustomed to the open life of the Maremma, full of aspirations towards the freedom of classic times, did not feel himself altogether in his element as he sat learning from the black priest whose “clucking voice blasphemed Io amo,” and “whose face it was vexation to behold.”

On leaving school, young Carducci published his first volume of poems; and in 1858, together with some of his friends, started a review named after the famous sixteenth century poet “Il Poliziano.” The paper, as is usual with such juvenile ventures, was short-lived; but it is interesting as showing the efforts the young poet was already making towards the adaptation of classical forms to modern ideas. 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. Speaking of his political views at that time, he says:—

“I was one of the very many who in ’59 and ’60 adopted the formula of the Garibaldini, ‘Italy and Victor Emmanuel,’ without any enthusiasm for the moderate party and its leaders, but loyally. I was drawn to it partly from grateful affection for the King and Piedmont, in whose firmness I had found some consolation for the misery of the preceding ten years; partly from the idea that in the fusion of the noble with the burgher element, of the army with the people, of the monarchical traditions of one part of the country with the democratic traditions of other parts, in the intimate union of loyalty with liberty, of discipline with enthusiasm, of ancient tradition with modern belief, the history of Italy—that history of wondrous tissue, which bears within itself all the seeds, developments, blossomings, fadings of all political ideas, forms and phenomena—will at length find, better than the Greek could have done, its necessary unfolding and complement, achieving the liberation, the union, the greatness of the whole country by means of the valour and strength of the nation, without, and even in opposition to, any foreign interference.”

As this extract clearly shows, Carducci’s attachment to the Moderates (as he calls the Monarchists) was purely Platonic; his natural passion was for the Republicans. Such dualism between head and heart, such war between his just idea of the exigencies of modern times and his fervid admiration of the methods and life of the classic world, soon brought him into serious difficulties, and rendered his active participation in the military and political events of the Sixties null. 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 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. Hence the poet was forced into opposition to the party to which his reflection politically attached him, and poured out the bitterness of his soul for the indignities inflicted on his ideal, in a series of poems afterwards collected and published in a little volume bearing the title of “Giambi ed Epodi” (“Iambics and Epodes”). This attitude naturally led the Moderate party into the belief that Carducci was a preacher of republicanism. As such they persecuted him, even suspending him from his chair of Italian Literature at Bologna; and as such he has ever been considered until he fell under the spell of the extraordinary fascination exerted by the grace and manners of Queen Margherita. Under this spell his old admiration for the House of Savoy revived, becoming, as many think, exaggerated. He was reproached as a turncoat by those who never fully understood his former opinions or his true attitude with regard to the Moderate party; he lost caste among the students, who once kept him for a whole hour in his lecture-room while they hissed him violently; and the people at large, finding him turned into a court poet, openly asserted that he was in his decadence, and that his latter end was not worthy his beginning. It is certainly a pity for his fame that it should have been, of all persons, the Queen in whom he found so warm and appreciative a friend; for his constant presence about her in the summer holidays doubtless laid him open, for many minds, to the charge of snobbism. Two things, however, must be remembered in his defence. Firstly, that he has always considered monarchy as necessary for Italy in her present condition; secondly, that the combination of military glory with grace and culture has been his ideal from boyhood; and this combination he found represented in King Umberto and Queen Margherita. One of his later poems, “War” (“La Guerra”) which hymns the praises of military enterprise, clearly shows that he has lost nothing of his ancient admiration for martial prowess; while others, addressed to Queen Margherita, prove also his poetic sensibility to feminine grace. It is thus easy to explain Carducci’s apparent change of attitude, while at the same time fully understanding that the masses—not apt to enquire into the workings of a man’s mind, not apt to read with much attention or reflection—are simply struck by the difference in tone between his earlier poems (the “Ça Ira” in honour of the French Revolution, for instance), and his later laudations of the House of Savoy, and launch against him the charge to which we have alluded.

It is difficult to choose, from the scathing scorn of the “Giambi” (“Iambics”), poured out in the incisive terseness of Carducci’s verse, any short passage which should give an idea of the whole series. We may mention, however, the terrible little poem entitled “Meminisse Horret,” written in 1867 while the Court was at Florence. He describes a horrible nightmare in which he sees Italy giving the lie to all her past traditions. Her ancient heroes are turned into cowards and supplicate those whom once they proudly defied; Dante, dressed like a clown, obsequiously shows strangers round Santa Croce; while Machiavelli, peeping slyly from behind a tomb, proclaims with a wink the adulteries of his mother-country in few words which cut to the quick. In the poem, written on the death of Giovanni Cairoli, the youth who, like his three brothers before him, died in battle for the unity of his country, to the grief yet glory of his widowed mother, the poet, branding, as Dante might have done, the infamy of those who dance and make love, and bring Italy to shame on the very graves of her heroes, goes so far as to curse his fatherland:—

.... Cursed
be thou, my ancient fatherland,
on whom to-day’s shame and the vengeance
of the centuries lie heaped!

The plant of valour grows here yet
but for thy mules

to bed on; here the violet’s perfume
ends in the dung-heap.

Bitter, too, are the verses entitled “Italy’s Song as she goes up the Campidoglio.” The mode, namely, in which the Italian Government, after promising in the September Convention that it would not occupy Rome, slunk into the city while France and Germany were busy with their own affairs, revolted Carducci’s whole soul, much as he, like all true Italian patriots, desired to set the Capitol as crown and seal on United Italy. He represents the army as entering stealthily by night, and calling on the Capitoline geese not to make such a dreadful clatter; it’s only “Italy, great and united,” who is coming back to her own again, and they’ll wake Cardinal Antonelli if they cackle so. We might quote endlessly to show how intensely despicable Carducci considered the diplomats of the Moderate party, who tried to gain their ends by crooked negotiations now with one Power, now with another, boasting that they had “read their Machiavelli”; and its generals who led out the fiery Italian youth to be slaughtered by the enemy. Nothing can equal, however, the concentration of scorn to be found in the sonnet “Heu Pudor”:—

He lies who says that, when the heart flares up,
the breath of heated genius fans it.
With the eternal stamp of infamy had I too
branded the front of this unworthy herd.

As fierce mayhap as thine, oh Dante father,
the hate and scorn that camp within my heart;
But their voracious flaming roars enclosed,
destroying me, and ne’er attains its aim.

New lakes of pitch, made thick
with serpents, monsters, and with demons harsh
a new and twofold bolgia had I dug;
and, with its hills and with its walls, cast in—
like to a loathsome tatter—
this fatherland of Fucci and Bonturi.[18]

It must not be thought, however, that Carducci can emit nothing but fire and smoke. From the lurid “Giambi” we can turn for relief to the exquisite little word-pictures of the “Odi Barbare” and of many of the poems published in the collections entitled “Levia Gravia” and “Rime Nuove.” It is in these that Carducci’s sense of nature, frank classic paganism, united curiously, however, to a certain German sentimental pessimism, and his extraordinary power of word-sculpture reveal themselves.

Let no reader of Burns or Hogg expect to find in Carducci, however, the same type of nature-sense as abounds in the Saxon poets. The clear sky and sharp outlines of Italy do not encourage that gentle sentiment produced by the misty vagueness of hills and plains in the rain-laden atmosphere of the north. A poet of Greek-Latin race is not likely to give us the “Address to a Mountain Daisy,” the sweet tenderness of “Kilmeny,” the undefined melancholy of Tennyson’s “Dying Swan,” or even the cradling lusciousness of “Haroun Al-Raschid.” His landscape is altogether larger; his sky, clear, “stripped to its depths,” as Shelley says of that of Venice, renders distinct even small distant details of scarped or forest-clad hill, and, reflected in lake or sea or lighting up the mountains with amethyst and topaz, gives colours of greater brilliancy, though of less mystic warmth and depth, than does the ever-varying atmosphere of the British Isles. Macaulay and Longfellow have already observed the difference of the two types of mind in the exactitude of detail to be observed in Dante’s “Inferno” as compared with the vagueness of Milton’s “Hell,” and it is very noticeable also in the nature-descriptions of lyric poets. Take as an instance the opening of the following poem “All’Aurora” “To the Dawn”:—

“Thou risest and kissest the clouds with thy rosy breath, O Goddess,

Kissest the darkling tops of marble temples.

The woods feel thee and rouse with a chilly shudder,

The falcon springs upon the wing with robber joy,

Whilst the garrulous nests are full of whisperings among the damp leaves,

And the sea-gull screams grey over the purple sea.

In the laborious plain the first to rejoice in thee are the rivers,

Glittering tremulously among the murmurs of the poplars:

The sorrel foal runs joyfully towards the deep-flowing streams,

His maned head erect, neighing to the winds:

The watchful valour of the dogs gives answer from the cabins

And the whole valley resounds with lusty lowings.

But man, whom thou awakenest to consume his life in work,

Still regards thee with thoughtful admiration,

Just as, in time gone by, the noble Aryan fathers

Upright among their white flocks adored thee on the mountain.”

It is a pity that it is impossible for us to give the subtle melody of Carducci’s verse. Although French and German poets have recognised the master and translated some of his works, no Englishman appears to have as yet shown this mark of appreciation. Nevertheless, the characteristic way of treating the subject is clearly visible. The hawk, emblem of freedom and strife, is the first living creature that strikes the poet’s eye and mind. The sea-gull, the galloping foal, then the baying of the dogs and the “lusty lowings,” render an impression rather of grandeur than tenderness; the smaller birds are hardly mentioned, the landscape is clear and exact. At the same time there are little touches of exquisite beauty, worthy of Virgil himself, as in the “rosy breath” with which the Dawn kisses the clouds, the “chilly shudder of the woods,” “the garrulous nests whispering among the damp leaves.” 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. Very beautiful, for instance, are the three poems entitled “Greek Spring Songs”: i. Æolic; ii. Doric; iii. Alexandrine. From the first of these we may quote the return of Apollo

“from the hyperborean shores to the pious soil of Greece, to the laurels from the sluggish cold; two white swans draw him as they fly: the sky smiles. On his head he bears Jove’s golden fillet, but the air sighs in his thick-growing locks, and the lyre moves in his hand with amorous trembling. Around him circle in light dance the Cyclades, fatherland of the deity; from afar Cyprus and Cythera send up white foam of applause. And a slight skiff follows throughout the great Ægean, purple-sailed, harmonious: AlcÆus of the golden plectrum, bearing arms, guides it through the waters. Sappho sits in the midst of it, with soft smile and hyacinthine tresses, her white breast heaving in the ambrosial air which streams from the god.”

The poet is not always so classical as this, however. Of a very different stamp, to select one other out of many spring poems, is his “Brindisi d’Aprile” (“April Drinking Song”)—

“When, in the dark ilexes and new-flowered almond, revels the nuptial chorus of the birds, and the primroses on the sunny hills are eyes of old-world nymphs looking out on mortal men, and the sun greets the beds of flowers with youthful smile, and over the silent moor the sky bends piously, and the breath of April moves the flowering corn like a sigh of love stirring a young bride’s veil; then do the trunk of the vine and the heart of the maiden leap up with throbs; they feel their wounds. The vine breathes odorous buds into the cold twigs, the maiden darts desire in her virgin blushes. Everything ferments and grows languid in the tepor of the air: the blood within the veins, the wine within the casks. O, ruddy prisoner! thou yearnest for thy fatherland, and the breath of thy native hill raises a ferment within the tun. There is the joyous life of the vine twigs: here thou art a prisoner in the snare.... Hurrah for liberty! Let us go, let us go to liberate the captive; let us call him back to life and make him sparkle in the glass, sparkle on the crest of the hill, sparkle to the sunlight; let the light breeze kiss him again; let him behold the young vines.”

And yet with all this revelling in nature, and especially the nature of spring-time, the melancholy despondent strain is never far distant. Even in the Greek spring songs there is nearly as much talk of chill mist and rain as of clear sky and sunlight; and the third song, the Alexandrine, goes so far as to even introduce a graveyard. In the little poem entitled “School Memories,” too, the poet, after describing the priest, makes a charming picture of the summer landscape and beckoning trees that he sees through the window: but everything is suddenly crossed and darkened by the thought of “death, and the formless nothing,” and this thought of death has haunted him ever since. He is too fond of graveyards; too apt, like some German poets at the beginning of last century, to look upon the world as a vast cemetery. It is perhaps to this same strain of pessimism, this same tendency to look at the ugly side of things, that we are to attribute the absolute repulsiveness of many of the images he employs. To compare trees, bald, dripping, and bent, to sextons over a grave is hardly poetical, but it is at any rate harmless; some of his other similitudes are too repulsive for translation, and we must think it a pity that so great a poet should encourage the tendency to dwell, quite gratuitously, on disagreeable non-poetical subjects.

Perhaps the poems which are most free from these defects are those contained in the first volume of the “Odi Barbare.” There we find the exquisite little piece entitled “Fantasia.”

“Thou speakest and thy voice’s soul, yielding languidly to the gentle breeze, floats out over the caressing waves, and sails to strange shores. It sails smiling in a tepor of setting sunlight, into the solitudes: white birds fly between sky and sea, green islands pass by, the temples on their rocky summits dart rays of Parian whiteness in the rosy sunset, the cypresses on the shores tremble, and the thick myrtles send forth their odour. The smell of the salt breezes wanders afar, and mingles with the slow singing of the sailors, whilst a ship within sight of the harbour peacefully furls its red sails. Maidens come down from the acropolis in long procession, and they have beautiful white peplums, they bear garlands on their heads, in their hands they have branches of laurel, they extend their arms and sing. His spear planted in the sand of his fatherland, a man leaps to earth, glittering in arms: is he perchance AlcÆus come back from war to the Lesbian virgins.”

To see the charming way in which Carducci can blend history with nature, we must turn in the same volume to the poem entitled “Sull’ Adda.”

“Flow through the red fires of evening, flow, blue Adda: Lydia on the placid stream, with tender love, sails towards the setting sun. Behold, the memorable bridge fades behind us: the airy spring of the arches yields to the distance and sinks to the level of the liquid plain that widens and murmurs.”

And then the poet, in musical verse, traces the history of the battles between the Romans and barbarians; speaks of the “pale Corsican who passed the dubious bridge amid lightnings, bearing the fate of two centuries in his slight and youthful hand”; and in contrast with the smoke and clang and blood of battle we have the recurrence of the verse representing Lydia floating through the fires of evening towards the setting sun: “Beneath the Olympic smile of the air the earth palpitates: every wave glows and rises trembling, swelling with radiant love.” The smell of youthful meadows rises from either bank, the great trees sign to the skiff as it passes, and, descending from the trees and rising from the flowering hedges, the birds follow through the gold and rosy streaks (of sky and water), mingling joyful loves. Between rich meadows the Adda flows on to lose itself in the Eridano; the untiring sun sinks to its setting.

“O sun, O flowing Adda!” exclaims the poet, “the soul floats through an elysium behind thee; where will it and mutual love lose themselves, O Lydia? I know not; but I would lose myself now far from men, in Lydia’s languid glance, where float unknown desires and mysteries.”

His power of blending historical scenes with descriptive poetry is also to be found in the poem entitled “At the Springs of the Clitunnus.” Umbrians, Tuscans, Romans, Carthaginians pass before the reader; then Catholicism appears with its black-robed priests, driving out ancient gods and tillage, but ousted in its turn by new developments of the human mind. “Before us the train, steaming and panting after new industries, whistles as it rushes along.” Strange as it may seem, all this history does not swamp the poetry, which is of the most purely idyllic character throughout.

We must not leave the subject of Carducci’s sympathy with nature without mentioning the pretty little dialogue between the poet and the great alley of cypress-trees at which he used to fling stones, and among which he used to go bird-nesting in his boyish days. The cypresses run to meet him like a double row of young giants, welcome him and beg him to remain with them, offering him the pastimes of years gone by. The poet answers that he cannot stop; he has grown to be a celebrity now, he reads Greek and Latin, writes and writes, is no longer an urchin, and, as to stones, he no longer throws them, especially at plants. A murmur runs through the doubting summits, the rosy light of the setting sun shines athwart the dark cypress green with a pitying smile, sun and trees seem to feel compassion for him, and the murmur embodies itself in words. The winds have told the poet’s old companions of his eternal unrest, of his eternal brooding over vexed questions which can never be settled. Let him come back to his old haunts, to the blue sea, the smile of the setting sun, the flights of birds, the chirping of the sparrows, the choruses which pass eternally between earth and sky. So only will he lay the evil spectres which rise from the black depths of man’s thought-beaten heart, as putrid flames rise before one walking in a cemetery. The poet will not stop, yet, as the train whirls him back to the problems of the world, he looks back at the quiet graveyard to which they lead up and where his grandmother lies, wondering whether they may not be right, and whether what he has sought for morning and evening so many years in vain, may not after all be hidden there. Yet as the train rushes on, the colts run racing beside it; and it is only a donkey, feeding on a thistle, that stands stolidly gazing on the busy scene before him.

A pilgrim to this cypress alley relates that its owner, Count Walfredo della Gherardesca, refuses to cut down the trees, many of which have suffered much from storms, and replant the alley. “Carducci loves them,” he said, “and therefore I respect them. Those that have suffered I shall replace little by little by young plants, and thus the alley will preserve its true and now celebrated appearance.”

As an expression of pure nature-sense, we may still quote, perhaps, the sonnet entitled “The Ox”:—

“I love thee, O pious ox; a gentle sentiment of strength and peace dost thou infuse into my heart, whether, solemn, monumental, thou lookest out over the free and fertile fields, or whether, bending to the yoke, thou secondest man’s swift work with grave content: he urges thee, he goads thee, and thou answerest with the slow turn of thy patient eyes. Thy breath streams from thy nostril large and damp and black, and thy lowing loses itself in the still air like a joyous hymn; and within the grave sweetness of thine eye, with its green-shadowed depths, the divine verdure of the plain lies reflected broadly and tranquilly.”

The conciseness and precision of Carducci’s language give him an extraordinary power of vivid representation of his subject. He “etches, sculptor-like,” as Emerson says of Dante. What can be more vivid, for instance, than the picture of rural life which opens the poem “At the Springs of the Clitunnus”?—

“Still do the flocks come down to thee, O Clitunnus, through the moist air of evening, from the mountain that waves with dusky ash-groves murmuring in the wind, and scatters afar its odours of wild sage and thyme; the Umbrian boy still plunges the struggling sheep into thy wave; whilst the babe at the breast of the sunburnt mother, sitting barefoot by the cottage door and singing, turns towards him, and smiles from its fair round face; thoughtfully does the father, his legs clad in goat-skins like the fauns of old, guide the painted ploughshare, and the strength of the beautiful heifers; the beautiful square-breasted heifers their heads erect with mooned horns, sweet-eyed, snowy, that gentle Virgil loved.”

Does not one see before one, too, the Bionda Maria (fair-haired Maria) of the “Idillio Maremmano” in the following verses?

“How lovely wert thou, O maiden, emerging from the long waving furrows, with fresh-plucked flowers in thy hand, tall and smiling; and under thy glowing brows thou opened’st the blue of thy large deep eyes darting untamed fire. Like the cornflower among the yellowing gold of the corn-ears did the blue of that eye blossom forth among thy tawny hair; and before and around thee the height of summer flamed; the sun laughed, broken by the green branches of the pomegranate, sparkling in red. At thy passing, as at that of a goddess, the gorgeous peacock opened his eyed tail, beholding thee, and sent up to thee a harsh cry.”

Of a different kind, but equally effective, is the following description, drawn from a scene in the hall of a thirteenth-century lord. The storm is raging outside; the greyhound bays at the thunder, and stretches out his taper head, with erect ears and restless eyes, towards the marchioness who sits amid her women and maidens; a fire, smelling of the pine forest, blazes in the midst, and, upright before it, Malaspina rises a whole head above the minor barons:—

“A fine trained goshawk perched on the knight’s fist, and, when the hail struck the windows now here now there according to the shifting wind, and the swift-passing lightning whitened the flashing arms hanging on the walls, the bird beat its wings, stretching out its snakelike neck, and gave out a hoarse cry of joy: the love of his native, free Apuan heights burnt in his piercing eye; he longed, the noble bird, to direct his flight through the thunder athwart the clouds.”

Diverse once more, yet none the less apt to remain impressed upon the memory, is the opening picture of the poem for the fifth anniversary of the battle of Mentana, where, it will be remembered, Garibaldi’s troops were defeated by the combined French and Papal forces:—

“Every year when the sad hour of Mentana’s rout sounds over the conscious hills, plains and hills heave, and proudly upright stands the band of the dead on the tumuli of Nomentum. They are no hideous skeletons; they are tall and beautiful forms, around which waves the rosy veil of twilight: through their wounds laugh the pious, virgin stars; the clouds of the sky wreathe lightly round their locks.”

No doubt it is Carducci’s classicism (in a poem entitled “Classicism and Romanticism” he holds up the latter to utter ridicule) which gives him this marked power of word-painting; it also informs his poem with a paganism of which we shall have presently to speak. Yet it is classicism deeply coloured by nineteenth-century life. Take, for instance, the little poem “Ruit Hora,” and see how the modern unrest comes across the calm of the classic scene. Horace’s Lydia would not have understood a lover of this sort for all his passion:—

“O green solitude for which I have yearned, far from the noise of men! hither come two divine friends with us, O Lydia, Wine and Love. See how LycÆus, the eternal youth, laughs in the shining crystal: as in thine eyes, O glorious Lydia, Love rides in triumph and unbinds his eyes. The sun shines low through the trellis and breaks, rosy, against my glass; he glances and trembles golden among thy locks, O Lydia. Among the blackness of thy locks, O snowy Lydia, a pallid rose languishes, and a gentle sudden sadness tempers the fires of love in my heart. Tell me: why does the sea down there send up mysterious groanings under the flaming evening? What songs, O Lydia, do those pines sing to each other? See with what desire those hills stretch out their arms to the setting sun: the shadow grows and embraces them: it seems as though they were begging the last kiss, O Lydia. I beg thy kisses, if the shade envelops me, O LycÆus, giver of joy; I beg thine eyes, O shining Lydia, if Hyperion sinks. And time is rushing by. O rosy mouth, unclose! O flower of the soul, O flower of desire, open thy cup! O loved arms, open!”

Perhaps, too, Carducci, for all his classic forms, is the only living poet who could make a detailed description of a railway station, the arrival of the train, clipping of the ticket, banging of the doors, etc., without once falling into triviality or bombast; yet such a feat has he performed in the poem entitled, “At the Station on an Autumn Morning.”

Especially marked in Carducci’s poems, and particularly in his early ones, is his rebellion against the Church. The poet’s paganism has been much discussed. It is a paganism based not on any repugnance for the teaching and character of Christ (on the contrary, the poet makes a most attractive picture of Christ in one of his poems), but upon the unfeigned joy in nature with which, as an antidote to his own pessimism, the classic poets presented him. It takes the form of a violent revolt against the creed that, in his opinion, had neglected if not opposed art, had raved of “atrocious unions of God with Pain,” had substituted gloom and sadness for the happy life of freedom and nature (see the poem entitled “In a Gothic Church”), had for centuries been a barrier to human progress, had constantly been found in alliance with the enemies of Italy, and had, in these later years of ardent strife for the unification of the Fatherland, systematically, with violence and with cunning, opposed the heroes who were giving their lives in the cause of freedom. The Romish Church was for him the symbol of retrogression, gloom, and antipatriotism; and in the violence of his reaction against it he confounded it with the whole of Christianity, even going so far as to personify progress and liberty, by antithesis, under the title of “Satan.”

The “Hymn to Satan,” published for the first time in 1865 at Pistoia under the pseudonym of “Enotrio Romano,” may be said, indeed, to be the beginning of his fame. Launched on the world without any explanation, the misleading title caused it to be understood only by a few careful readers. The world at large saw in it, according to the opinion of one critic, “an intellectual orgy,” a blasphemous rebellion against everything that the nation, and even the world, had hitherto considered sacred and necessary for the existence of society. Its publication excited great controversy, afterwards given to the world under the title of the “Polemiche Sataniche,” which gave Carducci the opportunity of responding to the attacks of the critics, and explaining the intimate sense of the poem; but even after his explanations, even when we know from his own lips that for him, taking up, as he believes, the standpoint of the modern Roman Catholic Church, “Satan is beauty, love, wellbeing, happiness”; that “Satan is thought that flies, science that experiments, the heart that blazes up, the forehead on which is written ‘I will not abase myself’; that Satanic were the revolutions that brought men out of the middle ages; Satanic the Italian communes; the German Reformation; Holland embodying liberty in deed; England vindicating and avenging it; France spreading it abroad to all orders and all peoples,”—even after the poet himself has told us this, the poem still jars in many places for the unwonted violence of its expressions. It is a battle-hymn, with all the fire and energy of the battle-charge in it. The metre rushes like the swift running of horses, sweeping the reader along with irresistible force. The poem opens with the following invocation:—

“Towards thee, boundless principle of being, matter and spirit, reason and sense, whilst the wine sparkles in the cups like the soul in the eye; while the earth and sun smile and interchange words of love, and a murmur of mysterious nuptials runs through the mountains, and the fruitful plain palpitates,—towards thee does the bold verse break forth; I invoke thee, O Satan, king of the feast. Away, O priest, with your aspersorium and your chant! No, priest, Satan turns not back. See, rust eats away Michael’s mystic brand; and the faithful archangel, plucked of his feathers, falls into space. Cold is the thunderbolt in Jehovah’s hand. Like pallid meteors, extinguished planets, do the angels rain down from the firmaments. In never-sleeping matter, king of phenomena, king of forms, Satan lives alone.”

Satan lurks in beauty, love, and wine, so the poem goes on; and Satan breathes “from my verse if, bursting forth from my breast and defying the god of guilty priests, of bloody kings, it shakes the minds of men like a thunderbolt.” It was Satan who breathed in the nature-worship of ancient times; Satan that, driven out by the barbarous Nazarene fury of the love-feasts whose sacred torches were used to burn down temples, took refuge among the hearth-gods of the people, and shook the breasts of witches, who, pale with eternal care, drew their inspiration from nature and him. He opens the cloister gate before the alchemist, revealing new and radiant skies. In vain monks and nuns try to shut him out from their lives; he inspires HeloÏse, he murmurs the verses of Ovid and Horace among David’s psalms and tears of repentance. But Satan often peoples the sleepless cell with images of a better age. He arouses, from the pages of Livy, eager tribunes, consuls, agitated shouting crowds. Wiclif and Huss, Savonarola, Luther secure the triumph of human thought: matter, rise again! Satan has conquered.

“A beautiful and terrible monster breaks loose, traverses the ocean, traverses the land: shining and smoke-wreathed like the volcano, it climbs mountains, devours plains, leaps gulfs; then hides in nameless caves traversing deep-hidden paths; and issues forth; and untamed sends out its cry like a whirlwind from shore to shore, like a whirlwind scatters abroad its breath: he passes, O peoples, Satan the Great,—passes beneficent from place to place on the resistless chariot of fire. Hail, O Satan, O rebellion, O avenging force of reason! Sacred are the vows and the incense that rise to thee. Thou hast conquered the Jehovah of the priest.”

The metre of the “Inno a Satana” is, as we have said, swinging and free. It is not in this poem that Carducci has “measured the lyric buskins on to Italian Muse”; and indeed he himself, in the “Polemiche Sataniche,” severely criticises its form. It was the expression of the poet’s inmost soul, written at white-heat in a single night. Carducci’s real work as a lyric poet is to be found in his other poems, in the three volumes of “Odi Barbare,” for instance, the “Levia Gravia,” the “Rime Nuove,” the “Giambi ed Epodi.”

“I have called these odes barbarous,” he tells us, “because they would sound so in the ears and judgment of the Greeks and Romans, although I have attempted to compose them in the metrical form of their lyric poetry. I felt,” he goes on to say in substance, “that I had different things to say from those sung by Dante, Petrarch, Politian, Tasso, and other classic lyric poets, and could not see why, since Horace and Catullus were allowed to enrich Latin verse with Greek forms, since Dante might adapt ProvenÇal rhymes to Italian poetry, why I should not be pardoned for doing that for which those great poets received praise.”

Neither is Carducci alone in his attempts to adapt Latin measures to Italian verse. Other poets (among them Chiabrera) had written Poesia Barbara before him, and his contemporary Cavallotti has tried it too; but they have produced Poesia Barbara of a different kind. The essential difference between these poets and Carducci lies in this: that whereas they copied the mechanism of the Latin metre, with its complicated system of long and short syllables, Carducci, with finer intuition of the genius of his mother-tongue, has aimed at catching and reproducing the music, the rhythm of the Latin verse. He is hence no copyist but a musician of most delicate ear, whose keen sense of harmony has procured him success where others have failed, and are likely to fail miserably. Modern Italian is not fitted, any more than modern English, for the formal construction of verse on the basis of long and short feet,—on the basis, that is, of metre. Indeed many Italian critics think that even in Latin this form of verse-construction was gradually giving way, or assimilating itself to the rhythmical verse—the verse whose movement struck the ear, as does the rhythm of music or dance, without awakening grammatical considerations of length or shortness of syllables. It is this reproduction of rhythm instead of metre that renders Carducci so eminently and pleasurably readable where other poets, even great ones, are insupportable. All readers of Tennyson, for instance, know the rage with which one tries to infuse a little music into his “experiments.” One struggles with “Boadicea,” trying vainly to discover some sort of melody in it, but, on coming to such a line as this—

“Mad and maddening, all that heard her in her fierce volubility,”

really throws away the book in utter despair. Not so with Carducci. It is rare to find a harsh verse in his work, though such, of course, do occur here and there, and the ease with which his poetry can be translated into Latin (as much of it has been) proves its close affinity with this language.[19]

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 at the end of the “Rime Nuove,” his idea of what a poet should be—the true poietes (p???t??) 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. Hardly do the birds begin to chirp, and the dawn to smile over the hills than he, with his bellows, rouses the joy of the leaping flames in his smithy. Into the blazing furnace he throws the elements of love and thought, and the memories and glory of his fathers and his people. Past and future does he fuse in the incandescent mass. Then with his hammer he works it on the anvil, and in the splendour of the newly risen sun, sings as he fashions swords to strive for liberty, wreaths to crown victory and glory, and diadems to deck out beauty. “And for himself the poor workman makes a golden arrow, which he shoots towards the sun: his eye follows its shining upward flight, follows it and rejoices, and desires nothing more.”