“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.”