“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: