The Roman historian Niebuhr reviewing the literature of the Augustan age, gave it as his opinion that epic poetry was dead, the lyric form of poetical expression being the only one adapted to the genius of the Romans at that period. Virgil’s “Æneid,” beautiful as are its details, he considers a failure as an epic; for an epic hero should, with fresh simple spontaneity, go straight home to the heart of the people at large, and this, he argues, the character of Æneas could never have done. Greek legends in Virgil’s poem are so dove-tailed into the Latin ones that the work loses its national character, loses therefore its spontaneity, and remains now, as it must have been from the beginning, an exquisite mosaic, to be appreciated only by the cultured; and appreciated, moreover, rather for the delicacy of the descriptions and the art of the versification, than for any inherent interest attaching to the principal characters. Roman literary society was, in fact, too positive to produce an epic poem. The sceptical spirit was uppermost. Legend, instead of firing the imagination, did but arouse the critical faculty. The story of Romulus, of his wondrous birth and preservation, of his building of the city, his government, and marvellous death, was neither believed in as fact nor treated as poetry. Men set to work to examine and to explain it; a useful task, no doubt, and one which Niebuhr himself has performed as well as anyone else, but one expressive of a spirit far removed from that which animates the writer of an epic poem. The death of the epic meant, however, the life of the lyric. Occupying themselves but little with the motives and actions of those who lived in other ages, men felt all the more need of uttering their own subjective feelings and impressions. For such utterances they naturally chose the lyric form, which the highly developed æsthetic sense of the time induced them to work to a high degree of perfection. This, in fact, was the age of Horace and Catullus.
Surely much the same causes are at work, in different forms of society, at the present day. The Italian critic Trezza sings the dirge of the epic, and proves that the lyric is the only form of poem possible to the society of the nineteenth century. Another authority besides Trezza makes a similar assertion.
“The epic,” he says, “was buried some time ago. To violate the tomb of the mighty dead by singing doggerel over it, even if it were not the sign of a depraved disinclination to undertake higher flights, would not be particularly diverting. The drama (referring to poetic drama) is in extremis, and the superabundance of doctors won’t even let it depart in peace. Lyric poetry, individual by nature, appears to stand its ground, and may still last some little while provided it does not forget it is an art. If it degrades itself into a mere secretion of the sensibility or sensuality of such and such an one, if it surrenders itself to all the unnatural licences which sensibility and sensuality allow themselves, then, poor lyric, she too is no longer recognisable.... To have adapted to the lyric this style of versification, fit only for narration and description, without verses, and with rhymes a piacere, is a sure sign that every idea of the true lyric has been lost.... An asthmatic lyric, paunch-bellied, in dressing-gown of ample girth, and slippers—tie upon it!... I, bending at the foot of the Italian Muse, first kiss it with respectful tenderness, then try to fit on the sapphic, alcaic, and asclepiadaic buskins in which her godlike sister led the choruses on the Parian marble of the Doric temples, which look down at themselves in the sea that was the fatherland of Aphrodite and Apollo.”
So writes the great Italian poet Carducci, using a similitude which might have come from the pen of Horace himself. The Augustan age produced a poet who measured the Greek lyric buskins on Latin measures; the nineteenth century has given birth to one who has fitted them on to Italian verse.
Giosué Carducci, whose poetical works have raised so much controversy in Italy, and occasioned a deluge of treatises on metre, Italian and Latin, was born at Valdicastello, in the classic Tuscan land, on July 27th, 1836, of a family which, in the days of the independence of the Tuscan cities, had given a Gonfaloniere to the Florentine Republic. His first impressions of Nature he received from the Pisan Maremma, here stretching away in “peaceful hills, with steaming mists, and green plains smiling in the morning showers”; there in “chalk-hills of malignant aspect, sparsely shaded by wood, with horses wandering under the guilty-looking cork-oaks that bristle, lowering, in the plain below”; or again in “cloud-swept unsown plains, by the widowed shores of the Tuscan sea,” scattered with the old-world feudal towers, and full of ancient memories of decayed cities and mediæval strife. It was among such surroundings that at the age of eleven Carducci wrote his first verses. These reveal at once the historical and classical tendency of his mind; for besides a few lines on the “Death of an Owl,” we find a poem on “The Fall of the Castle of Bolgheri into the hands of Ladislaus, King of Naples,” and another entitled “M. Brutus Meditating the Death of Cæsar.”
Those were unsettled times, however. Political revolution deprived Carducci’s father in 1849 of his post of village-doctor, and forced him to take refuge in Florence, where Giosué was put to school with the Scolopian Fathers. All readers of Ruffini will remember that author’s experience of the Scolopian convent school as described in “Lorenzo Benoni”; and can imagine that Carducci, accustomed to the open life of the Maremma, full of aspirations towards the freedom of classic times, did not feel himself altogether in his element as he sat learning from the black priest whose “clucking voice blasphemed Io amo,” and “whose face it was vexation to behold.”
On leaving school, young Carducci published his first volume of poems; and in 1858, together with some of his friends, started a review named after the famous sixteenth century poet “Il Poliziano.” The paper, as is usual with such juvenile ventures, was short-lived; but it is interesting as showing the efforts the young poet was already making towards the adaptation of classical forms to modern ideas. It was, however, impossible that any ardent youth should content himself with mere literary form during that period of ferment which resulted in the formation of a United Italy. He, like his contemporaries throughout the length and breadth of the land, was fired by the noble efforts made by Garibaldi and Mazzini for the redemption of their fatherland from the hated Austrian yoke; and, though republican by tradition (as all Italians must be) as well as by natural inclination, Carducci was yet willing to follow the moderate party and Garibaldi in their support of the monarchy of Savoy. Speaking of his political views at that time, he says:—
“I was one of the very many who in ’59 and ’60 adopted the formula of the Garibaldini, ‘Italy and Victor Emmanuel,’ without any enthusiasm for the moderate party and its leaders, but loyally. I was drawn to it partly from grateful affection for the King and Piedmont, in whose firmness I had found some consolation for the misery of the preceding ten years; partly from the idea that in the fusion of the noble with the burgher element, of the army with the people, of the monarchical traditions of one part of the country with the democratic traditions of other parts, in the intimate union of loyalty with liberty, of discipline with enthusiasm, of ancient tradition with modern belief, the history of Italy—that history of wondrous tissue, which bears within itself all the seeds, developments, blossomings, fadings of all political ideas, forms and phenomena—will at length find, better than the Greek could have done, its necessary unfolding and complement, achieving the liberation, the union, the greatness of the whole country by means of the valour and strength of the nation, without, and even in opposition to, any foreign interference.”
As this extract clearly shows, Carducci’s attachment to the Moderates (as he calls the Monarchists) was purely Platonic; his natural passion was for the Republicans. Such dualism between head and heart, such war between his just idea of the exigencies of modern times and his fervid admiration of the methods and life of the classic world, soon brought him into serious difficulties, and rendered his active participation in the military and political events of the Sixties null. For the men with whom he found himself associated as colleagues, though at one with him as regards the fundamental tenet of the necessity of a monarchy, had but little understanding of his idea that the valour and strength of the nation was to be the making of Italy, without foreign interference, or even in opposition to it. They relied more on modern methods of diplomacy than on Greek dash and daring; and, to gain their ends, were ready to compromise with other Powers and with the Church in a way that clashed with Carducci’s classic enthusiasm. Hence the poet was forced into opposition to the party to which his reflection politically attached him, and poured out the bitterness of his soul for the indignities inflicted on his ideal, in a series of poems afterwards collected and published in a little volume bearing the title of “Giambi ed Epodi” (“Iambics and Epodes”). This attitude naturally led the Moderate party into the belief that Carducci was a preacher of republicanism. As such they persecuted him, even suspending him from his chair of Italian Literature at Bologna; and as such he has ever been considered until he fell under the spell of the extraordinary fascination exerted by the grace and manners of Queen Margherita. Under this spell his old admiration for the House of Savoy revived, becoming, as many think, exaggerated. He was reproached as a turncoat by those who never fully understood his former opinions or his true attitude with regard to the Moderate party; he lost caste among the students, who once kept him for a whole hour in his lecture-room while they hissed him violently; and the people at large, finding him turned into a court poet, openly asserted that he was in his decadence, and that his latter end was not worthy his beginning. It is certainly a pity for his fame that it should have been, of all persons, the Queen in whom he found so warm and appreciative a friend; for his constant presence about her in the summer holidays doubtless laid him open, for many minds, to the charge of snobbism. Two things, however, must be remembered in his defence. Firstly, that he has always considered monarchy as necessary for Italy in her present condition; secondly, that the combination of military glory with grace and culture has been his ideal from boyhood; and this combination he found represented in King Umberto and Queen Margherita. One of his later poems, “War” (“La Guerra”) which hymns the praises of military enterprise, clearly shows that he has lost nothing of his ancient admiration for martial prowess; while others, addressed to Queen Margherita, prove also his poetic sensibility to feminine grace. It is thus easy to explain Carducci’s apparent change of attitude, while at the same time fully understanding that the masses—not apt to enquire into the workings of a man’s mind, not apt to read with much attention or reflection—are simply struck by the difference in tone between his earlier poems (the “Ça Ira” in honour of the French Revolution, for instance), and his later laudations of the House of Savoy, and launch against him the charge to which we have alluded.
It is difficult to choose, from the scathing scorn of the “Giambi” (“Iambics”), poured out in the incisive terseness of Carducci’s verse, any short passage which should give an idea of the whole series. We may mention, however, the terrible little poem entitled “Meminisse Horret,” written in 1867 while the Court was at Florence. He describes a horrible nightmare in which he sees Italy giving the lie to all her past traditions. Her ancient heroes are turned into cowards and supplicate those whom once they proudly defied; Dante, dressed like a clown, obsequiously shows strangers round Santa Croce; while Machiavelli, peeping slyly from behind a tomb, proclaims with a wink the adulteries of his mother-country in few words which cut to the quick. In the poem, written on the death of Giovanni Cairoli, the youth who, like his three brothers before him, died in battle for the unity of his country, to the grief yet glory of his widowed mother, the poet, branding, as Dante might have done, the infamy of those who dance and make love, and bring Italy to shame on the very graves of her heroes, goes so far as to curse his fatherland:—