(1836-)
BY FRANK SEWALL
arely in the history of ancient or modern literature has a writer, while living, been so generally recognized by his countrymen as their national prophet as has the Italian poet and essayist Carducci. In January, 1896, he completed his thirty-fifth year as Professor of Belles-Lettres in the University of Bologna; and the solemn and brilliant festivities with which the event was celebrated, extending over three days and including congratulatory addresses from the king, from the municipality, from the students and graduates, from foreign universities, and from distinguished scholars at home and abroad, testified to the remarkable hold this poet has gained on the affections and esteem of the Italian people, and the deep impress his writing has made on the literature of our time.
Born in northern Italy in the year 1836, and entering upon his literary career at a time coincident with the downfall of foreign power in Tuscany, the history of his authorship is a fair reflection of the growth of the new Italy of to-day. In an autobiographical sketch with which he prefaces his volume of 'Poesie' (1871) he depicts with the utmost sincerity and frankness the transition through which his own mind has passed, in breaking from the old traditions in which he had been nursed at his mother's knee, and in meeting the dazzling radiance of modern thought and feeling; the thrill of national liberty and independence,—no longer a glory dreamed of, as by Alfieri, nor sung in tones of despair, as by Leopardi, but as a living experience of his own time. He felt the awakening to be at once a literary, political, and religious one; and following his deep Hellenic instincts, the religious rebound in him was rather to the paganism of the ancient Latin forefathers than to the spiritual worship that had come in with the infusion of foreign blood.
"This paganism," he says, "this cult of form, was naught else but the love of that noble nature from which the solitary Semitic estrangements had alienated hitherto the spirit of man in such bitter opposition. My sentiment of opposition, at first feebly defined, thus became confirmed conceit, reason, affirmation; the hymn to Apollo became the hymn to Satan. Oh! the beautiful years from 1861 to 1865, passed in peaceful solitude and quiet study, in the midst of a home where the venerable mother, instead of fostering superstition, taught us to read Alfieri. But as I read the codices of the fourteenth century, the ideas of the Renaissance began to appear to me in the gilded initial letters like the eyes of nymphs in the midst of flowers, and between the lines of the spiritual laude I detected the Satanic strophe."
So long had Italy lived in passive dependence on the fame of her great writers of the times of Augustus and of the Medici, and in the apathy of a long-abandoned hope of political independence and achievement, that it required a man of powerful instinct and genius to rouse the people to a sense of their actual possession of a national life and of a literature that is not alone of the past, and so to throw off both the "livery of the slave and the mask of the courtesan." Such was the mission of Carducci. As Howells in his 'Modern Italian Poets' remarks of Leopardi:—"He seems to have been the poet of the national mood; he was the final expression of that hopeless apathy in which Italy lay bound for thirty years after the fall of Napoleon and his governments." So it may be said of Carducci that in him speaks the hope and joy of a nation waking to new life, and recalling her past glories, no longer with shame but a purpose to prove herself worthy of such a heritage.
A distinguished literary contemporary, Enrico Panzacchi, says of Carducci:—
"I believe that I do not exaggerate the importance of Carducci when I say that to him and to his perseverance and steadfast work we owe in great part the poetic revival in Italy."
Cesar Lombroso, in the Paris Revue des Revues, says:—"Among the stars of first magnitude shines one of greatest brilliance, Carducci, the true representative of Italian literary genius."