The poet’s thought on death is given, with the insistence of one who is very much in earnest, in two recently delivered lectures, “L’Era Nuova,” and “La Ginestra,” (“Flower of the Broom,” a development of Leopardi’s exquisite poem); and again in two of his most beautiful poems, “La Pace” (published after the Milan riots), and “Il Focolare” (“The Hearth”).
In the “Ginestra” Pascoli expounds Leopardi as follows:—
“And look at the stars. Reflect that there was a time when they were thought to be what they appear; small, mere atoms of light.... Instead, it is the earth that is small, a mere grain of sand. To believe the earth large and stars small; or to believe, as is the case, that the stars are infinite in number and size, and the earth very small; these are the two religions, this is the σκότος and the φῶς: darkness and light. Look at Vesuvius the destroyer, the glare of the lava glowing in the darkness. Look at Death. Look it in the face, without drooping the head cowardly, without erecting it proudly. You will feel the necessity of being at peace with your fellow-men. And say not that all men know they are mortal, but that that has never kept anyone from doing ill. I tell you it is not enough to know it; you must have your soul saturated with it, and have but that in your soul. Men know, too, that the stars are large, or rather they give an idle assent to the learned who say so. They know it, that is, but they do not think it as yet. Will the time come when they will think it?” And in the “Era Nuova” he continues:—Man “sought illusions and found them. The brute knows not that he will die: the man said to himself that he knows he will not die. So they again came to be like each other.... And thenceforth Death being denied, no longer received from man his sad and entire assent. Man feared not to sadden his fellow, feared not to kill him, feared not to kill himself, because he no longer felt the Irreparable. I know the Peisithanatos (Death-persuader) who it is. I know who persuaded man to violate life in himself and in others. It is he, who, in our souls, first violated Death.... This is light. Science is beneficent in that in which she is said to have failed. She has confirmed the sanction of Death. She has sealed up the tombs again.... The proof, moved against her, is her boast. Or rather it will be when from this negation the poet-priest shall have drawn the moral essence. Who can imagine the words by which we shall feel ourselves whirling through space? by which we shall feel ourselves mortal? We know this and that: we do not feel it. The day we feel it ... we shall be better. And we shall be sadder. But do you not see that it is exactly by his sadness that man differs from the brute beasts? And that to advance in sadness is to advance in humanity?... Man, embrace your destiny! Man, resign yourself to be man! Think in your furrow, do not rave. Love—think it—is not only the sweetest but the most tremendous of actions: it is adding new fuel to the great pyre that flames in the darkness of our night.”
Many will not agree with Pascoli’s method of arriving at his conclusions; for men’s minds are infinite in number, and but few think alike. But all will recognise the reverent earnestness of his belief, and respect the man whom hatred has moulded into a fervent apostle of love.
To understand Pascoli’s power of differentiating character and handling dialogue, we must turn, not to his Italian, but to his Latin poems. These are not in any sense of the word academic exercises: they are instinct with life and of extraordinary vivacity. The crowd in which the laughing Horace finds himself wedged, in the “Reditus Augusti”—the poetical rivalry in the tavern between Catullus and Calvus, in the “Catullo Calvos”—the witty yet serious discussion between Mæcenas, Varius, Virgil and Plotius in the “Cena in Caudiano Nervæ”—these are charming in the extreme, and have all the piquancy of the Horatian satire. The other two poems, “Jugurtha” and “Castanea,” are of a different stamp. The first is a powerful conception of the ravings and sufferings of the blinded Numidian king, in the Roman dungeon where he dies of hunger and thirst; the second is a description of the gathering and preparation of the chestnut crops, with an invocation to the tree on which alone the inhabitants of the Tuscan Apennines depend for warmth and food in winter. The peasant household is truly Virgilian in the conciseness and sympathy with which it is presented.
Truly Virgilian, too, is an Italian poem entitled “La Sementa” (The Sowing) published in the “Poemetti.” There is a simple dignity in all the actions and sayings of the peasants which prevents any feeling of the triviality which the poet might so easily have suggested; prevents at the same time that sentiment of unreality which enthusiastic and romantic writers on the subject are so apt to provoke.
It is perhaps in the quiet intimateness of “La Sementa” that the fundamental difference between the classic inspiration of Pascoli and that of the older poet Carducci is epitomised. Carducci is a born polemist. Son of the Risorgimento, he passed his youth in the midst of a great epic movement, stigmatizing shams and tyrants with the resources which a wide vocabulary placed at the disposal of an exceptionally energetic and enthusiastic nature. Carducci’s classicism is to a great extent formal. His verse imitates the Horatian metres, his periods are often more Latin than Italian in their construction, his women bear Latin names. And this Latin brevity, this careful exclusion of all superfluous words, this precision in the use of the smaller parts of speech (Carducci’s prepositions are a study in themselves) combined with the broad imagery and ample conception that seem inseparable from the age of Garibaldi, provoke in the reader a sense of exquisite form and of impressive grandeur. The grandeur, however, sometimes degenerates into rhetoric. Pascoli is more reflective; he has more quiet sentiment. He lives in a quieter age, when the enthusiastic hopefulness of the Risorgimento has found its reaction in a feeling of despondency concerning the accomplished reality. He is in no sense of the word a polemist. The form of his verse and of his period is Italian, though he has, it is true, revived the Latin meaning of many Italian words. He has less grandeur than Carducci, but on the other hand he is never rhetorical. The Latin spirit has taken such complete possession of him that it has become part of himself; it leavens his whole work, but leaves it strictly individual in form and conception, and admits the expression of a sense of mystery and vagueness which is rather of the romantic than of the classic mind. As illustrative of the difference in conception between the two poets we may compare their sonnets to “The Ox.”
The Ox. (Pascoli.)