In Italy the ideal of an austere simplicity and reserve, resting as it did on the immense prestige of Leopardi, asserted itself even in the naturally exuberant and impetuous genius of Carducci. Without it we should not have had those reticences of an abounding nature, those economies of a spendthrift, which make him one of the first poets of the sonnet in the land of its origin, and one of the greatest writers of Odes among the 'barbarians'. With reason he declared in 1891, when most of his poetry had been written, that 'all the apparent contradictions in my work are resolved by the triple formula: in politics Italy before all, in aesthetics classical poetry before all, in practice, frankness and force before all'. His two chief disciples, D'Annunzio and Pascoli, antithetical in almost all points, may be said to have divided his inheritance in this; Pascoli's Vergilian economy contrasting with the exuberance of D'Annunzio somewhat as with us the classicism of the present poet-laureate with that of Swinburne. In Germany the Parnassian reserve, concentration, and aristocratic exclusiveness was to reappear in the lyrical group of Stefan Georg.
(3) Finally, the Parnassian poetry, like most contemporary science, was in varying degrees detached from and hostile to religion, and found some of its most vibrating notes in contemplating its empty universe. Leconte de Lisle offers the Stoic the last mournful joy of 'a heart seven-times steeped in the divine nothingness',[9] or calls him to 'that city of silence, the sepulchre of the vanished gods, the human heart, seat of dreams, where eternally ferments and perishes the illusory universe'.[10] Here, too, Leopardi had anticipated him.
In the ebullient genius of Carducci and Swinburne this lofty disdain for theological illusions passes into the fierce derision of the Ode to Satan and the militant paganism of the Sonnet to Luther, and the Hymn to Man. In Matthew Arnold it became a half-wistful resignation, the pensive retrospect of the Greek 'thinking of his own gods beside a fallen runic stone', or listening to the 'melancholy long withdrawing roar' of the tide of faith 'down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world'; while in James Thomson resignation passed into the unrelieved pessimism of the City of Dreadful Night. In all these poets, what was of moment for poetry was not, of course, the anti-theological or anti-clerical sentiment which marks them all, but the notes of sombre and terrible beauty which the contemplation of the passing of the gods, and of man's faith in them, elicits from their art.
Yet the supreme figure, not only among those who share in the anti-Romantic reaction but among all the European poets of his time, was one who had in the heyday of youth led the Romantic vanguard—Victor Hugo. Leconte de Lisle never ceased to own him his master, and Hugo's genius had since his exile, in 1851, entered upon a phase in which a poetry such as the Parnassian sought—objective, reticent, impersonal, technically consummate—was at least one of the strings of his many-chorded lyre. Three magnificent works—the very crown and flower of Hugo's production—belong to this decade, 1850-60,—the Châtiments, Contemplations, and Légende des Siècles. I said advisedly, one string in his lyre. Objective reticence is certainly not the virtue of the terrible indictment of 'Napoleon the Little'. On the other hand, the greatest qualities of Parnassian poetry were exemplified in many splendid pieces of the other two works, together with a large benignity which their austere Stoicism rarely permits, and I shall take as illustration of the finest achievement of poetry in this whole first phase the closing stanzas of his famous Boaz Endormi in the Légende, whose beauty even translation cannot wholly disguise. Our decasyllable is substituted for the Alexandrine.[11]
'While thus he slumbered, Ruth, a Moabite,
Lay at the feet of Boaz, her breast bare,
Waiting, she knew not when, she knew not where,
The sudden mystery of wakening light.
Boaz knew not that there a woman lay,
Nor Ruth what God desired of her could tell;
Fresh rose the perfume of the asphodel,
And tender breathed the dusk on Galgala.
Nuptial, august, and solemn was the night,
Angels no doubt were passing on the wing,
For now and then there floated glimmering
As it might be an azure plume in flight.
The low breathing of Boaz mingled there
With the soft murmur of the mossy rills.
It was the month when earth is debonnaire;
The lilies were in flower upon the hills.
Night compassed Boaz' slumber and Ruth's dreams,
The sheep-bells vaguely tinkled far and near;
Infinite love breathed from the starry sphere;
'Twas the still hour when lions seek the streams.
Ur and Jerimedeth were all at rest;
The stars enamelled the blue vault of sky;
Amid those flowers of darkness in the west
The crescent shone; and with half open eye