II CARDUCCI AND THE CLASSIC REALISM
Sojourning one autumn in a quiet pension at Lugano, I came in contact with a fellow-boarder, who, notwithstanding he bore the title of a Sicilian count of very high-sounding name, proved on acquaintance to be a man of serious literary taste and not above accepting pecuniary compensation for the products of his pen.
He was engaged at that time in translating into the Italian a well-known English classic, and was in the habit of appealing to me occasionally for my judgment as to the accuracy of his interpretation of an English word or phrase.
This led to pleasant interviews on the literary art in general.
It was one day when the conversation turned on the extreme materialism of certain scientific writers of the day, and especially on Mantegazza of Florence, whose grossness in treating of the human passions has called forth expressions of disgust from Italians, as well as others, that my Sicilian friend quietly remarked, “We Italians can never allow the holy Trine to be destroyed—the True, the Good, the Beautiful. It is not enough that a writer tell the facts as they are; nor that his purpose be a useful one; there must be the element of beauty also in his work, or the Italians will not accept it; and the ugly, the monstrous, and deformed the Italians will not endure.”
I thought herein he proved his lineage from a stock older than even his family title—that old race of the land where Theocritus sang as if for beauty alone, and whose Ætna cherishes still her deep-down fires uncooled and untamed by modern as by ancient contrivances of man.
It is this presence of the love of the beautiful that everywhere accompanies the Greek race and their descendants, and imparts what we may call the Hellenic instinct of form. And in this sense of form born of the love of beauty lies the secret of the immortal art of the Greeks, whether as presented in sculpture, architecture, painting, or letters.
The survival of a certain Hellenic religious feeling in the Italian people after centuries of a superimposed Christianity has already been treated of in the previous essay. I desire here to speak of Carducci as affording an example—perhaps one among many, but I know none better—of the restoration of the Greek love of form to modern letters, and so as illustrating what we may designate as the classic realism.
No term has been more abused of late years than this word—realism. Become the watchword of schools of “realists” in every branch of art and literature, it has been reduced at last to a service as empty of meaning as was ever the vaguest idealism empty of reality.
The tendency of the age has been unquestionably one of ultimation; everything presses into the plane of outermost effect. We have seemed to be no more satisfied with the contemplation of intangible ideals: we rest content only with what hand can touch and eye rest upon. The “power in ultimates” is the display of force characteristic of this age of the world. The forces physical and mental have been always there: it has taken a time like the present, an age of inventive frenzy filled with a yearning for the doing and trying of things long dreamt of, to give vent to these hidden forces.
This tendency to ultimation, the seeking expression of inmost emotions and conceptions in material embodiments, has characterized of late years every form of mental activity.
Religion exemplifies it in the impatience the people exhibit at fine analyses of doctrines and laborious attempts at creed-patching, at the same time that they are ready to engage in schemes of benevolence and social reform unparalleled in the history of the past. They would fain substitute a religion of doing for a religion of believing; and so impatient are they of the restrictions of dogma that they resent inquiry into the quality or inward motive of the doing, or even into its moral effect in the long run, so only some “good work” be done and done quickly.
We see the same tendency in music and the drama wonderfully illustrated in the whole conception and effort of the Wagnerian school. Expression is everything. The question is not—Is the thing in itself noble, but is the expression of it complete, unhindered by previous conventionalities? Is nothing kept back, or left to the imagination, but everything, rather, brought out into the actuality of sound, of color, of living performers, and material accessories?
The Ibsen drama, the Tourguenief and Tolstoi school of novelists, not to speak of Zola and his followers in France, writers like Capuana and Verga in Italy, and, although in a quite different vein, Howells among novelists and Whitman among poets in America, have aimed chiefly to give a faithful account of life as it is seen. Some have come dangerously near the assertion that by some mysterious law the bold doing ennobles even a commonplace motive, and that a regard for truth is enough whether there be any beauty behind it or not.
The power realised in full and free expression is one of the most exquisite delights known to man. We of a northern race who, according to the saying of our French neighbor, “take our pleasures sadly,” do so because of a hereditary conviction of the sanctity of the unexpressed. We have therefore been slowest in arriving at these efforts towards realism, or the untrammelled giving forth of the inward self into outward embodiment. That pure externalism of the southern or Greek nature which sought its highest satisfaction in a visible embodiment of the divine in art, and which distinguishes still the Roman from the Saxon religious nature, has been regarded as verging on the sinful. It is not strange that a tendency so long suppressed when once set free should rush even into lawless extremes, and that an age or school of writers tasting the delights of this liberty for the first time should be loth to resign it and be ready rather to sacrifice all to its further extension. It is quite in accordance with this theory that puritan America should have given birth to Walt Whitman, who, with all his lawlessness, is in many respects the most of a Greek that modern literature can show.
To what extremes this delight has sought indulgence is shown not more plainly in Zola and his school above mentioned than in the whole contemporary school of French pictorial art. We see here how form, as expression, indulged in for its own sake, apart from a due consideration of the substance within the form, becomes itself monstrous and vicious. This is the essentially immoral element in art—the licentious worship of form, or of external shape, regardless of an internal soul or motive.
When the realist says: “With the motive of nature, of society, of man, I have nothing to do; it is enough if I portray faithfully his conduct,” he thereby advertises the fact that he is not an artist, but a kind of moral photographer. He falls short of being an artist in just the degree in which he sees the details of form apart from their soul or spiritual essence; and as this spiritual element is that wherein the unity of the world as idea exists, therefore, failing to apprehend this, he fails to lay hold of the universal aspects which alone can assign true relation and true meaning to any of the details treated of. It is the apprehension of the universal element underlying the particulars that constitutes the peculiar gift of the artist. It is indeed true that nature, or humanity, is its own interpreter and its own preacher; and the most faithful servant of either will be he who most exactly presents his subject as he finds it. But the subject is never found by the true artist detached from its community-life, or severed from the endless woof of combinations, of causes and effects, of law and recompense, which go to make up any present moment of its existence; these constitute its “story.” So far as these inner conditions are recognized and felt in giving the ultimate expression, so far alone is the portrayal a real one in the true sense.
Undoubtedly the inmost motive that can give form to the literature of any age or race is the religious one, by which I mean the recognition of a life within and above nature, not our own, but to which we entertain a personal relation. This is in the truest sense that “soul” which “is form, and doth the body make,” and its presence or absence is what sufficiently distinguishes the true from a false realism.
An age without a religion can produce only a soulless, and so an unreal, art. What it calls art may abound in shape, but will possess no form in the true sense of the word. For form is the combination of particulars with a view to a single purpose, for which every particular exists and to which it is subordinate; it is therefore never a many, but always a one out of many. This inward controlling motive that constitutes out of many the one, is the living substance within every true or real form. That which does not possess this motive of unity is not form, but shape, or an artificial cast made to resemble the living thing, but having no life within it. Art is thus the form that grows from within, while shape is but the impression mechanically imposed on passive and lifeless material from without. The modern French school of realists in art are the fittest examples of this substitution of shape for form, and so of pseudo-realism. They have given us corpses, whether physical or moral, and called them human beings. They have preferred the charnel-house, the dissecting-room, or the field of carnage, as the subjects in which to display most effectively their realism. The more revolting the subject, the more hideously exact the representation, the more credit was claimed for the artist. In literature the case was parallel. Nothing so vile but it was to be admired for its faithfulness in representation. The inner motive, the moral purpose of the writing or the painting, was not only not there, but the producer scorned the judgment that would look for it. Never was religion, or the sentiment of reverence for the spiritual as the world's idea, so manifestly wanting as in these recent French materialists. The abjuring of the romantic and the ideal has gone so far as to extinguish the human element, and so we find in these schools skilfully painted bodies and an almost matchless power of expression; but, after all, how little is expressed!
Compare a Greek statue of Phidias's time with the latest production of a Parisian studio. Both are alike of hard, colourless, senseless marble; but can we not see in one the breathing of a god, while in the other we, at the most, study with a critical vision the outlines of a human animal?
Reality is not reached by the negative process of taking away conventional guises and concealments; and yet modern artists and writers have alike thought to get at truth in this way. But the nude is not the more real for being nude. The reality of an object depends on what is within it, and not on anything that men put on or take away from it. How many writers of late years have been deluding themselves with the idea that if one can only succeed in avoiding everything like a moral purpose, or even interesting situations, and reveal what they call the bare facts of experience, one may thereby attain to the real? As if ever art existed except in the discovering of unity, the interpretation of purpose, and in the suggesting of that which is interesting to the human heart!
The emptiness of this kind of realism, which is as naked of soul within as of garments without, is proved by the reaction that is already setting in in France, where materialism has made its boldest claims in the domain of art. Not only in art is there a strong movement for restoring the lost elements of romance and piety, leading to a religious severity almost like that of the pre-Raphaelites, but in literature there is a similar protest against the degradation of the real to the plane of mere soulless matter. M. Paul Bourget, who has been through all phases of French expression and knows its extremes, gives voice to this reaction in the following passage from his “Sensations d'Italie”:
“Sans doute, les grands peintres ont vu d'abord et avant tout l'être vivant; mais dans cet être, ils ont dégagé la race et ils ne pouvaient pas la sentir, cette race, sans démêler l'obscur idéal qui s'agite en elle, qui végète dans les créatures inférieures, ignoré d'elles-mêmes et cependant consubstantiel à leur sang. La langueur et la robustesse à la fois de ce pays de montagnes dont le pied baigne dans la fièvre, le mysticisme des compatriotes de Saint François d'Assise et leur sauvagerie, la mélancolie songeuse prise devant l'immobile sommeil des lacs, tous ces traits élaborés par le travail séculaire de l'hérédité, le Pérugin les a dégagés plus nettement qu'un autre, mais it n'a eu qu'à les dégager. Sa divination instinctive les a reconnus, sans peut-être qu'il s'en rendît compte, dans des coupes de joues, des nuances de prunelles, des airs de tête. C'est là, dans cette interprétation à la fois soumise et géniale, que réside la véritable copie de la nature où tout est âme, même et surtout la forme,—âme qui se cherche, qui se méconnaît parfois, qui s'avilit, mais une âme tout de même et qui ne se révèle qu'à l'âme.”[4]
A Frenchman of to-day become an admirer of Perugino!
A tendency to realism, unlike that of French art in subject, but not unlike in method, is that which is exhibited in England in the recent religious novelists of the class headed by the authoress of “Robert Elsmere.” Here, again, the effort has been to get at the real by stripping off conventional religious admissions, pretensions, and errors, and depicting a moral basis of conduct which can exist independently of creed and church. The result has been disappointing, because a creed incapable of perversion or corruption becomes as lifeless and as powerless a factor in human character-building as is the multiplication table; and without a miraculous incarnation of Deity as its basis and its imperative authority, the whole system of Christian ethics, when thus reduced to a scientific conclusion or to an invention of man's individual moral sense, loses not only its power to influence morally, but even to interest other minds. The “real” basis of religion thus arrived at is found to be no religion at all, but only the private opinion of this authoress as to what is good and right, with every divine and therefore every universal and obligatory element in it left out.
I have spoken indiscriminately, above, of the realists in our modern literature as all subject to the temptation to rest satisfied with photographic imitations of nature rather than with a reality created from their apprehension of its ideal form. The end sought for is faithfulness in expression, and the danger is that of making subordinate to this the substance of what is expressed. But among these writers there are all degrees of approach to the genuine realism which undoubtedly, like the art of the Greeks, is a thing that can never die, and which, even if for a long interval set aside, is sure to return again to its rightful place as the only true form of expression.
Among the various aspirants to the title of realist, we have no more interesting examples than in our own Howells and Whitman, both being avowed prophets of this school of writing. In Whitman we see a generous nature run away with by the passion of expression. His words are heaped like sand-dunes. There is a sound of roaring waves, but the landscape is, too often, on the whole, shapeless and wearisome. One feels that there is meaning in the poet's mind, but the expression is excessive, and so without form. The delight of ultimation has become a frenzy of word-piling or word-inventing. The disappointment is like that experienced on seeing a piece of sculpture which reveals a bold and vigorous design with magnificent anatomy and muscular strength, but which has a weak line in the face. It just falls short of being art.
With Howells the charm of his realism lies in the subtlety of his concealment of it. The deep moral purpose which, like a strong, irresistible current, underlies his recent and more serious writing, is all the more potent because it is not “pointed”; and the reader is allowed to indulge, as if with the author himself, in the little delusion that this is only the ordinary superficial aspect of an every-day world which is being described, and that things do thus merely happen as they happen, without design or reason. So perfect is the form and so true to nature that, with the author, we keep up, too, the little deception, that it is with the form itself that we are pleased, and that this constitutes the realism of which the author is so ardent an advocate. Meanwhile we learn, when the story is ended, that this realism was all informed with a soul of moral and divine purpose, and that this is all that is real in it as in anything else.
To distinguish from the pseudo-realism of matter the genuine realism 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” [VII]:
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.”
It is in his poetic power of interpretation that here, as in the poems on nature, Carducci proves himself the true realist. Whatever form he chooses, is for the time filled with its own life, and speaks from that and no other. I have introduced the “Hymn to the Redeemer” [XI], that Lauda Spirituale, which the poet describes in the passage from his autobiography quoted in the previous essay as a youthful literary experiment, in which he attempted to clothe the spiritual idea of the Christ with the form of the pagan triumphal ode. The heroic picture of the Redeemer of the world returning from Battle as a Victor and receiving triumphal honour and applause, is novel, and not without a high order of beauty. It seems, indeed, to minds trained to modern religious thought, more pagan than Christian; but one may question whether this aspect of Christ as the Hero is not one which the Church has erroneously overlooked in her tendency to lay stress on the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, rather than on the actual deliverance wrought for man by Him in His warfare against the infernal hosts, setting the race thereby spiritually free from bondage. Do we not see here the same attempt to present the Christian Redemption in ancient heroic form, as the Pisan sculptors made when they copied from pagan sarcophagi the figures of their apostles and saints? It was not the conventional way; but we feel that they might have done worse.
A few poems from Carducci's youthful period, in which he indulges in the meaningless melancholy, the passion and despair, incident to that stage of the poet's growth, I have introduced, as showing that he too had his sentimental side. In these he describes his emotions. They are the sonnets from the Juvenilia, beginning respectively with the following lines:
O questi di prima io la vidi. Uscia. [XXXVI]
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Non son quell'io che già d'amiche cene. [XXXVII]
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Passa la nave mia, sola, tra il pianto. [XXI]
As such they are beautiful, but they lack that objectivity and realistic power which is felt in those poems where, as in life, the emotion tells itself, and does not need to be described.
In the Odi Barbare, for which title I am unable to find a better rendering than “Barbaric Odes,” foreign as it may seem to the character of these exquisitely finished verses, I have followed the poet's choice in omitting to capitalize the initial words of the lines. Many of these poems are without rhyme, and, for the sake of greater faithfulness in translating them, I have sometimes discarded both the rhyme and the strict rhythmical form.
F. S.
Washington, D. C., June, 1892.