.... Cursed
be thou, my ancient fatherland,
on whom to-day’s shame and the vengeance
of the centuries lie heaped!
The plant of valour grows here yet
but for thy mules
to bed on; here the violet’s perfume
ends in the dung-heap.
Bitter, too, are the verses entitled “Italy’s Song as she goes up the Campidoglio.” The mode, namely, in which the Italian Government, after promising in the September Convention that it would not occupy Rome, slunk into the city while France and Germany were busy with their own affairs, revolted Carducci’s whole soul, much as he, like all true Italian patriots, desired to set the Capitol as crown and seal on United Italy. He represents the army as entering stealthily by night, and calling on the Capitoline geese not to make such a dreadful clatter; it’s only “Italy, great and united,” who is coming back to her own again, and they’ll wake Cardinal Antonelli if they cackle so. We might quote endlessly to show how intensely despicable Carducci considered the diplomats of the Moderate party, who tried to gain their ends by crooked negotiations now with one Power, now with another, boasting that they had “read their Machiavelli”; and its generals who led out the fiery Italian youth to be slaughtered by the enemy. Nothing can equal, however, the concentration of scorn to be found in the sonnet “Heu Pudor”:—
He lies who says that, when the heart flares up,
the breath of heated genius fans it.
With the eternal stamp of infamy had I too
branded the front of this unworthy herd.
As fierce mayhap as thine, oh Dante father,
the hate and scorn that camp within my heart;
But their voracious flaming roars enclosed,
destroying me, and ne’er attains its aim.
New lakes of pitch, made thick
with serpents, monsters, and with demons harsh
a new and twofold bolgia had I dug;
and, with its hills and with its walls, cast in—
like to a loathsome tatter—
this fatherland of Fucci and Bonturi.[18]
It must not be thought, however, that Carducci can emit nothing but fire and smoke. From the lurid “Giambi” we can turn for relief to the exquisite little word-pictures of the “Odi Barbare” and of many of the poems published in the collections entitled “Levia Gravia” and “Rime Nuove.” It is in these that Carducci’s sense of nature, frank classic paganism, united curiously, however, to a certain German sentimental pessimism, and his extraordinary power of word-sculpture reveal themselves.
Let no reader of Burns or Hogg expect to find in Carducci, however, the same type of nature-sense as abounds in the Saxon poets. The clear sky and sharp outlines of Italy do not encourage that gentle sentiment produced by the misty vagueness of hills and plains in the rain-laden atmosphere of the north. A poet of Greek-Latin race is not likely to give us the “Address to a Mountain Daisy,” the sweet tenderness of “Kilmeny,” the undefined melancholy of Tennyson’s “Dying Swan,” or even the cradling lusciousness of “Haroun Al-Raschid.” His landscape is altogether larger; his sky, clear, “stripped to its depths,” as Shelley says of that of Venice, renders distinct even small distant details of scarped or forest-clad hill, and, reflected in lake or sea or lighting up the mountains with amethyst and topaz, gives colours of greater brilliancy, though of less mystic warmth and depth, than does the ever-varying atmosphere of the British Isles. Macaulay and Longfellow have already observed the difference of the two types of mind in the exactitude of detail to be observed in Dante’s “Inferno” as compared with the vagueness of Milton’s “Hell,” and it is very noticeable also in the nature-descriptions of lyric poets. Take as an instance the opening of the following poem “All’Aurora” “To the Dawn”:—