In many respects the present revival of Italian literature is a reawakening of the same spirit that constituted the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, and disappeared under the subsequent influences of the Catholic reaction. Three hundred years of papal supremacy and foreign civic rule have, however, tempered the national spirit, weakened the manhood of the people, and developed a habit of childlike subserviency and effeminate dependence. While restraining 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 glow is rather that of an Indian summer than that of May. The purpose, the zeal, whatever shall be its final aim, will be the result of reflection and not of youthful impulse. 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; not only a new political life and a new poetry, but a new art, a new science, and, above all, a new religious faith. The steps to this renewal are necessarily at the beginning oftener of the nature of negation of the old than of assertion of the new. The destroyer and the clearer-away of the débris go before the builder. It will not be strange, therefore, if the present aspect of the new national life of Italy should offer us a number of conspicuous negations rather than any positive new conceptions; that the people's favorite scientist, Mantegazza,—the ultra-materialist,—should be the nation's chosen spokesman to utter in the face of the Vatican its denial of the supernatural; and that Carducci, the nation's foremost and favourite poet, should sing the return of the ancient worship of nature, of beauty, and of sensuous love, and seek to drown the solemn notes of the Christian ritual in a universal jubilant hymn to Bacchus. These are the contradictions exhibited in all great transitions. They will not mislead if the destroyer be not confounded with the builder who is to follow, and the temporary ebullition of pent-up passion be not mistaken for the after-thought of a reflecting, sobered mind. 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. Set to music, it became very popular with the army of the revolutionists, and the title is said to have led to the adoption of the present national emblem for the Italian flag. As a poem it is not remarkable, unless it be for the very conventional commingling of devout, loyal, and valorous expressions, like the following, in the closing stanza: