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.