GIOVANNI PASCOLI
Thoroughly Italian and of the best period is Pascoli in the exquisite propriety of his words; in the sharpness with which he outlines the little pictures, which are characteristic, especially, of his earlier work. In these respects one feels his close affinity with the Latin poets—above all Virgil—who are his Gods, and from whom the early Italian poets immediately derive. Less Italian—using the word in the stereotyped sense which would exclude Leopardi altogether from Italian song—less Italian is he in the mode and direction of his thought. No gay love-songs, no easy sentimentality have come from his pen: the passion of love is in fact strangely absent from his work. He is a child not so much of Italy, as of his age, in his attitude of enquiry towards the great questions of life and death; in the gravity, the earnestness resulting, especially in his later works, from this attitude.
Nor is this individuality to be wondered at; for Pascoli’s muse was cradled in sorrow. He was but a lad when his father, returning home, among the hills of Romagna and within sight of the mediæval republic of S. Marino, was treacherously murdered by an unknown hand. His mother died not very long after, having never really recovered from the shock; then three brothers and a sister; so that Giovanni found himself at a very early age head of a family of a brother and two sisters.
A hard struggle enabled him to form a home for them. One of the little poems to his mother which mark, year after year, the anniversary of her death, refers to this struggle as follows:—
Know—and perhaps thou dost know in the churchyard—
the child with long gold ringlets
and that other for whom thy last tear fell—
know that I fostered them, that I adore them.
For them I gathered up my shattered courage
and I wiped clear my soul for them;
they have a roof, they have a nest—my boast:
my love it is that feeds them, and my toil.
They are not happy, know it, but serene;
theirs is the smile but of a pious sadness:
I look on them—my sole, lone family—
and ever to my eyes I feel there comes
that last unfinished tear that wet thy lids
in the death-agony.
He now lives either at Messina, where he is Professor of Latin, or among the chestnut woods that clothe the hills round Barga near Lucca, with one of his sisters. This is Maria, the careful, winning housewife whom all readers of her brother’s poems love—herself known also in the world of letters as a graceful poetess and an accomplished Latin scholar. Two or three verses of the little poem entitled “Sorella” reflect the bond that unites them.
I know not if she be to him more mother
or more daughter, the sister, gently serious;
she—sweet, and grave and pious—
corrects, consoles and counsels;