SOURCE: Roberts, J. Slingsby. “Giosue Carducci.” Quarterly Review 208, no. 415 (April 1908): 293-321.

There are certain writers whose privilege it seems to give to the contemporary genius of their country an adequate expression in literature. They neither follow public opinion nor lead it, for their minds are so constituted that they are almost certain to find themselves in accord with their countrymen. Tennyson is an instance in England, and in France Victor Hugo. Tennyson united the gifts of an incomparable literary artist with the convictions of an average Englishman under Queen Victoria. In boyhood he rang the church bells to celebrate the first Reform Act, and he lived long enough to become an ardent Imperialist. Victor Hugo, even while he denounced the bourgeois, was never really out of touch with the French middle class. Brought up as a Catholic and Legitimist, he lived to be a zealous champion of republicanism and free thought. In less tangible matters also than religious and political opinion, in that general outlook on life in which differences and likenesses elude classification, these men were inwardly at one with their fellow-citizens. The very moderation of Tennyson is national; so is the vehemence of Victor Hugo. Such authors may be regarded from two main standpoints—firstly, as literary artists, a quality that can be properly estimated only by men whose language is theirs; secondly, as interpreters of their age, an aspect which tends to become the most prominent to historians and foreigners. Italy has recently lost a man of this representative type in Giosue Carducci, who was born in 1836, and died in 1907.

Yet, while fully representing the Italian genius in many ways, Carducci was almost free from that quality in it which tends more than any other to repel the taste of northerners, the quality which the Italians themselves praise under the name of morbidezza. From the time of the Catholic revival, and even earlier, this melting mood seems to cling about the atmosphere of Italy. Already traceable in the later artists of the Renaissance, in Correggio, in Luini, in Andrea del Sarto, it becomes unbearably cloying in the devotional paintings of the Bolognese school, and in the insipid pastorals of Marini. When the Romantic movement revitalised the literature of Europe an unwholesome tinge of self-pity tainted its Italian exponents. Absent from the fiery Alfieri, it appears strongly both in Manzoni and in Leopardi. The great Italian novelist of reaction lacked the manliness of Walter Scott; and the virtue of ‘I Promessi Sposi’ is pathetic resignation, not the strong self-reliance of Henry Morton or Jeanie Deans. Great poet as he was, Leopardi was not untouched by the national malady. Scepticism in the Italian Shelley took a shape quite as unhealthy as piety in Manzoni. The title of one of his poems, ‘Amore e Morte,’ might well describe the whole work of his later years, when ill-health and political embitterment had deepened his inborn pessimism. Indeed Goethe's well-known saying, that classic art is healthy art, romantic art is sickly art, is perhaps truer of Italian literature than of any other. For in Italy the Romantic movement failed to permeate, as in Germany and France, the inmost being of the nation. It found neither, as in Germany, a fallow soil unencumbered by classical tradition, nor, as in France, a national consciousness palpitating with mighty cataclysms and achievements, with the upheaval of the Revolution and the epic campaigns of the First Empire. Being the outcome of foreign influences, it only affected isolated men of letters, as Carducci himself contended in an interesting essay on the ‘Renewal of the National Literature.’

Like Matthew Arnold, Carducci was a historian and teacher of literature as well as a poet; and this didactic side of his career has an important bearing on his poetry. His appreciations and studies have the twofold interest that always belongs to those of a creative artist; we read them as much for the light they reflect on the critic as for that which they throw on the subject of his criticism. As is natural in an Italian, the touchstone of his literary sympathies and insight is best found in his apprehension of Dante. On the one hand, as a southerner and a poet, he was in touch with aspects of Dante's mind which have perplexed Teutonic professors. To him there is no contradiction between the ethereal platonism of the ‘Vita Nuova’ and the fiery purgation on the threshold of the Earthly Paradise; for, to the more analytic, as well as more impulsive, southern temperament, the juxtaposition of one love purely of the intellect with many loves wholly of the senses scarcely offers a problem. On the other hand, when he says that the object of Dante's love is not the living woman, Beatrice Portinari, but an idea, surely the modern critic is severing the two elements, human and divine, actual and ideal, which it was the genius of the medieval poet to unite. Of course, like every one endowed with a feeling for literary art, Carducci, a literary artist to the backbone, admired the manner of Dante, the dolce stil nuovo, which reinaugurated literature in Europe after its eclipse in the dark ages; in Dante's subject-matter what aroused his enthusiasm was the love for Italy rather than the love for Beatrice. With what was allegorical, mystical, distinctively medieval, in Dante he is never in emotional, as distinct from intellectual, contact. When he repeats, more than once, that Dante should be regarded, not so much as the poet of Florence, but rather as the supreme exponent of the mind of medieval Christendom, we feel that he speaks from the brain, not from the heart. His inmost soul was with Dante, the Italian patriot; it was not with Dante, the cosmopolitan mystic.

This partial, not to say unsound, view of Dante was largely determined by Carducci's attitude to the political and religious controversies of his own day. From the outset he was an extreme partisan in both. He grew up during the prolonged struggle for Italian unity and freedom, at a time when political feeling, exasperated by alternations of armed revolt and savage repression, rose to a height almost inconceivable by those accustomed, as we are, to purely civil and parliamentary differences. Moreover, it has been the misfortune of modern Italy that political and religious parties became inextricably interwoven. The head of the national worship was also the ally of the nation's foreign foes; and hostility to alien and despotic rule came to involve hostility to the Catholic Church, almost to Christianity itself, for Italians of all parties have always tended to look on religion rather as an institution than as a personal influence.

Carducci was thoroughly Italian in his blend of anti-clerical with republican enthusiasm; and it is no wonder that a political and religious bias so marked as his should have somewhat warped his literary and artistic judgment. Most men have the defects of their qualities; and with Carducci an exquisite sense of what was ancient and pagan was balanced by a certain insensibility to what was medieval and Christian. This insensibility sometimes led him to odd critical pronouncements. For example, he calls Petrarch's eighth canzone the finest hymn ever addressed by a Catholic to the Virgin. Had he forgotten Villon's immortal ballade—in his wide reading he must have come across it—or did he deliberately postpone its throbbing directness to the semi-pagan artistry of Petrarch? He was out of touch, not only with devotional poetry, but with other features of medieval literature tainted, in his eyes, by Catholic and feudal associations. His treatment of chivalry was never satisfactory; and allegory so repelled him that he could see no merit in that charming allegorical poet, Guillaume de Lorris. This aversion from the medieval spirit in its own day naturally applied far more strongly to its attempted revival in modern times. The Gothic proclivities of the leading Romantics aroused in his mind a violent dislike to the whole school.

Accordingly, his earliest volume of poems, Juvenilia, opens with a repudiation of the Romantic movement in all its phases, Catholic and Satanic—a beginning that certainly suggests the student rather than the poet—though categoric avowals of literary faith are less repugnant to the spirit of Italian poetry than to that of ours. The trend of the Latin mind to classification and analysis asserts itself in literature as elsewhere. Poetry with the Latin nations is more gregarious, more a product of schools and fraternities, less of isolated inspiration, than with us. Quite genuine French and Italian poets often set out to advocate and exemplify definite poetic theories. Still the formality of the repudiation betrays the professor, just as its motives betray the partisan. They are political rather than strictly literary.

Romanticism is transalpine in origin and essentially anti-national. Tuscan by birth, Carducci will seek sounder traditions, the classic Roman poets and the Florentines of the fourteenth century. From the first there can be no doubt which of these two influences is to be really vital with him. When he writes sonnets in Petrarch's manner on Petrarch's subjects of love and exile, we feel that he is thinking of Petrarch, not of the lady to whom they are addressed; exquisite in dreamy music, they are far too imitative to convince. So soon as he expresses genuine feeling the only influence is that of the ancients, as in the sonnets on the death of his elder brother. One of these especially unites perfect sincerity with literary reminiscence, and reaches the famous valediction of Catullus by a path as direct and natural, though wholly diverse. The Horatian Odes that follow, though, from their subjects, without this tragic intensity, all have the same genuine ring, whether the poet is upbraiding his degenerate countrymen or celebrating the genialities of friendship and wine. In his ‘Canto di Primavera’ a sensuous joy at the return of pleasant weather blends quite naturally with a more complex wistfulness in presence of the year's renewal. It is Horace indeed still, but Horace in his most modern mood, the Horace of that ‘inhorruit veris adventus,’ the modernity in which shocked the scholarly instincts of Bentley. The breezes of the old Horatian spring seem interfused with the more languorous airs of Botticelli.

Of these early Odes, none, strange as it may seem, is more truly Horatian in spirit than that addressed to ‘La beata Diana Giuntini, venerata in Santa Maria a Monte.’ Carducci appeals to the saint by that which, after all, can alone make supernatural being real to us—her kinship to ourselves. She lived, it is true, in the age of faith.

‘Quando pie voglie e be' costumi onesti
Erano in pregio e cortesia fioriva
Le tósche terre, qui l' uman traesti
Tuo giorno, o diva.’

Yet, though a diva (is it saint or goddess?) now, her day was human, and she had human, not to say feminine, weaknesses to overcome.

‘E ti fûr vanto gli amorosi affanni,
Onde nutristi a Dio la nova etate,
E fredda e sola ne l'ardor de gli anni
Virginitate:
Pur risplendeva oltre il mortal costume
La dia bellezza nel sereno viso,
E dolce ardea di giovinezza il lume
Nel tuo sorriso.
Te in luce aperta qui l' eteree menti
Consolâr prima di letizia arcana,
Poi te beata salutâr le genti,
Alma Diana.
Onde a te, dotta de l' uman dolore,
Il nostro canto e prece d' inni ascende,
E, pieno l'anno, di votivo onore
L' ara ti splende.’

When pious wishes and good honest customs were rightly valued and courtesy blossomed in the Tuscan lands, here didst thou spend thy human day, O holy one. Thou didst turn to glory the yearnings of love, whence thou didst foster Godward the spring of thy years, and thy maidenhood was cold and lonely in the heyday of youth. Yet, beyond mortal wont, a godlike beauty shone in thy tranquil visage, and the light of youth glowed soft in thy smile. Here in the light of day the empyrean spirits first consoled thee with mystic gladness, then the nations hailed thee as blessed, gentle Diana. Wherefore to thee, taught by human sorrow, arise our praises and our prayers in hymns, and, when the year is full, thine altar is decked with votive honour.

The poet then beseeches this patroness of the hamlet to rain blessings on the fields and homesteads of her worshippers, and, be it added, to help them to practise the more homely virtues. The whole ode renders to perfection the holiday religion of Italy, the decorated altars and shrines, the processions of flower-laden children. At the end we are left wondering whether this tutelary diva, who smiles from her cloudless heaven, is really a saint or only a heathen goddess after all. Viewed thus, indeed, the worship of local saints in Italy is little more than a continuation of the old anthropomorphic cults. For anything distinctively Christian about her, the ‘alma Diana’ might almost be her maiden namesake of the ‘Carmen Sæculare.’

Such thorough interpenetration of ancient with modern feeling is in strong contrast with most northern imitations of Roman literature. We do not here speak of felicitous Latinisms of phrase, for we all remember many such in Milton and Tennyson, but of elaborate efforts to recapture the Roman outlook. Whenever these efforts aspire beyond mere vers de société, the outcome is almost always a lifeless literary exercise, such as the mythological poems of Leconte de Lisle or of Théodore de Banville. This is not true of the Italians to anything like the same degree. The Renaissance itself with them was, after all, the reawakening of a culture largely indigenous; and humanism was more able to bear its weight of learning like a flower, because the flower was of native, not exotic, growth. So with more recent imitation of the ancient classics, especially the Roman. The northerner is imitating a literature produced in a foreign climate by a civilisation which even the French have imperfectly assimilated; when the Italian imitates Latin poetry he is merely treading in the footsteps of his own forefathers. The landscape of the Latin poets is his own Italian landscape. The vines and olives that gladdened the heart of Horace still clothe the Umbrian and Sabine hills, the sunshine still glows that ripened them in Horace's day. The Roman glories too are his. The strife with Hannibal is his own repulse of a foreign invader; and the names of the great consuls stir patriotic as well as literary memories. Hence no violent mental transposition was needed for Carducci to place himself at the Horatian standpoint. Horace's mood of genial enjoyment, crossed by flashes of patriotic pride, came to him unsought.

In the main, Carducci's poetic gift was strong enough to absorb his classical and his historical learning and convert them to its own use; it had a harder task with his political and religious partisanship, a task indeed that it sometimes failed to accomplish. For politics are even more conspicuous in his poetry than in his criticism. Already, in one of his early sonnets, he announces that he will devote himself to rekindling patriotic ardour in his countrymen; and in his later career he became the unofficial laureate of the Risorgimento—a position that has probably contributed more than any other cause to restrict his reputation abroad and also to enhance it, for the time being, in his own country. Everywhere verses on national topics make a wider immediate appeal than those of more intimate inspiration; and in Italy Carducci, by giving them prominence, only carried forward a national tradition which dates from the Romans. For the Romans, less meditative and less imaginative than the Greeks, brought into public life almost all the emotional intensity of which they were capable. Virgil's line about the elder Brutus, ‘Vincit amor patrie laudumque immensa cupido,’ might be the watchword of the whole Roman people. From Ennius to Claudian, nearly every Roman poet wrote on public topics, and often wrote his best on them. Horace is at his happiest when celebrating Roman glory; Ovid is patriotic in the ‘Fasti’; even the tender Propertius is fired by the tidings of Actium. The greatest of Latin poems has nothing greater than Æneas' vision of the mighty Romans sweeping past him toward the upper world, and the address to the genius of Rome that follows. Patriotism is again conspicuous in the later poetry of Italy. The first and greatest poet in her modern tongue was also a statesman; and a passionate love of Florence burns in the ‘Divine Comedy.’ The exiled Petrarch felt keenly the woes of his native land, and became the friend and upholder of Rienzi. In more recent times there is as much patriotic as dramatic fervour in the eloquence of Alfieri. Even the decadent Leopardi was at his finest in the ‘Canzone all' Italia’ and the ‘Monumento di Dante’; the best known verses of the romantic Manzoni, ‘Il Cinque Maggio,’ were written on the death of Napoleon. The Roman tradition in this respect, as in others, extended to French poetry also. Victor Hugo was seldom more poetic than in ‘Les deux Îles’ or ‘Le Chasseur Noir.’

There is a wide gulf here between the literature of the Latin races and that of the Teutonic, especially our own. In the nineteenth century, at least, the genius of English poetry has been mainly lyrical and personal, not public or rhetorical. Our poets have either held aloof from public questions, like Keats, or been at their worst when referring to them, like Shelley. So far as the the poet's interest has been with the world and not absorbed in his own soul, his concern has been with individuals, not with generalities. When Browning and Rossetti wrote on this very theme of the Italian Risorgimento they produced ‘The Italian in England’ and ‘A Last Confession,’ not an ode to Italy or an invective against Austrian tyranny. Our conception of the poetic temperament is that described by Wordsworth as his own at the time of his visit to Orleans in 1791:

                                                                                ‘… to acts
Of nations and their passing interests,
If with unworldly ends and aims compared,
Almost indifferent, even the historian's tale
Prizing but little otherwise than I prized
Tales of the poets, as it made the heart
Beat high, and filled the fancy with fair forms,
Old heroes and their sufferings and their deeds.’

Enquiry into the probable causes of this difference between the Latin literatures and our own raises curious problems of national temperament and history. From the nature of the case the two influences cannot be sharply distinguished. National history is the outcome of national temperament and reacts upon it in a way that baffles analysis, while national literature is the outcome of both, as reflected and manifested in certain minds of distinction. By temperament we are more meditative and imaginative than the Latin peoples, more reserved and self-centred than they. We tend to brood over emotion rather than to give it instant utterance. Hence, as a nation, we are bad public speakers; and it is curious to note how many of our prominent preachers and orators have been of Celtic or Jewish origin. History has combined with temperament to induce in the typical Englishman a rational, rather than an emotional, treatment of public questions. Our marriage with freedom is a mariage de raison; our love of freedom is that love which Tennyson admired in Arthur Hallam:

‘Of freedom in her regal seat
Of England; not the schoolboy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt.’

And Tennyson, certainly not an unpoetic nature, probably regarded most French and Italian political verse rather in that light.

The temperament indeed of our leading poets has been in this respect at one with that of the nation at large, and has kept our poetry further from rhetoric than that of our neighbours. Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, were all famous as orators. Wordsworth confesses himself—we may well believe with truth—‘little graced with power of eloquence’ and ‘all unfit for tumult and intrigue.’ The very notion of Keats or Shelley making a speech has something incongruous. Although Tennyson was greatly interested in public questions, and often refers to them in his poems, we can scarcely fancy him a successful debater in a popular assembly. When, indeed, our poets—and it happens far more seldom than with those of France or Italy—do enter on political themes, they do so in a less rhetorical spirit. Wordsworth is philosophic and contemplative. Both in the books of the Prelude concerning the French Revolution and in the ‘Sonnets dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’ he is too preoccupied in analysing the processes within his own mind to have much leisure for eloquence about outside events. Mr Swinburne, with all his wonderful command of sonorous metre, is, like all the Pre-Raphaelites, primarily pictorial. His rhythm moves swiftly enough, but what is in his mind is form and colour rather than movement. The only leading English poet of a rhetorical turn is Byron; and this is probably one of the chief reasons why his popularity is greater on the Continent than in England. With us, when a poet's work is recognised as akin to rhetoric, it is classed by that kinship as second-rate.

Apart, moreover, from any prepossession we may feel against political and rhetorical verse in general, Carducci's poems of this kind already suffer in England, as they must suffer everywhere outside his own country, from the further disadvantage that many of them refer to incidents only known to students of recent history. While Wordsworth describes his feelings as he watched the vicissitudes of the French Revolution, we can understand that the fate of mankind was at stake; when Victor Hugo utters his sonorous periods about the downfall of the first Napoleon, that titanic personality dominates our imagination. In Carducci foreign readers are perplexed, if not exasperated, by panegyrics on heroes and elegies on martyrs of whom they never heard, by pæans over victories and dirges over defeats which led to no lasting or widespread outcome. The Italian Risorgimento is now too far off to give us the thrill of contemporary excitement; on the other hand, it is still too recent to have won the halo of a romantic past. Perhaps no events in which England was not directly concerned ever stirred Englishmen more deeply at the time they happened; certainly none, not even the insurrections in Poland, are so often mentioned in English poetry. To-day the successful achievement of Italian unity, and the quite unromantic processes by which that unity was at length attained, have relegated the whole movement into the region of prose. Most educated English people travel in Italy, and the new régime suffers in their eyes from the vandalism, partly inevitable, which has followed in its wake. Heroes like Garibaldi, statesmen like Victor Emmanuel and Cavour, are vulgarised by the hideous statues put up to them and the ‘long, unlovely streets’ that bear their names. Again, those travellers who also read the Italian newspapers get a doubtless exaggerated impression of the jobbery and financial scandals amid which these pretentious eyesores were reared, while the corruption and iniquities of preceding governments are now forgotten.

Once this drawback is overcome a comparison of Carducci's poems on contemporary events with those of Victor Hugo is rather to the advantage of Carducci. Even in his earlier, contentious period the attack is more on institutions, less on individuals, than in ‘Les Châtiments,’ and sinks less often into abuse. Yet Carducci also could be vehement at times, and with success, as in his poems on the raid into the Papal States in 1867; in one he effectively uses the customary exposition of the Host for twenty-four hours before capital punishments to bring out the incompatability of the Two Swords; in another the point that, if Pius IX sees blood in the chalice, it will not be that of Christ, is clinched in Victor Hugo's most telling manner. After the abolition of the temporal power the tone grows far less combative. Advancing years brought to Carducci, as to most broad-minded men, a more tolerant and philosophic temper. Events also tended to chasten enthusiasm. The freedom and unity of Italy were not achieved in the way that patriots, especially republican patriots, had dreamt. The victors, not the vanquished, of Aspromonte entered Rome by the Porta Pia; Mazzini died an amnestied rebel; Garibaldi was repudiated to conciliate Prussia. It seemed to many that Italian freedom had been sacrificed to Italian unity.

Yet Carducci, a democrat by temperament and abstract conviction, felt nevertheless obliged to accept the monarchy. It would be a superficial view to regard his conversion as brought about by the beauty and affability of Queen Margherita, his verses to whom were interpreted by both sides as a formal retractation of republican principles. In truth he saw, as Crispi saw, that the house of Savoy could hold Italy together, while a republic would divide her. Still, he felt keenly the decline in her ideals, the mediocrity of her political and intellectual leaders. Giants had perished in the strife and left pygmies to enjoy the triumph. Disappointment at the victors made Carducci more tolerant towards opponents now finally overcome. As he sits in the public garden at Perugia, where the papal stronghold of Rocca Paolina once had stood, he reflects that in the fine spring weather the pontiff must be growing weary of his self-imprisonment, and jocularly invites ‘Citizen Mastai’ to come out of the Vatican and drink a health to Liberty, for which he had been so eager in his youth.

Quite apart, however, from Carducci's militant hostility to the Catholic Church, a hostility almost wholly due to transitory causes, there lay deep in his temperament an elective kinship with paganism. His Vicinese contemporary, Fogazzaro, while sharing his political views as an Italianissimo, remained an ‘anima naturaliter Christiana’; Carducci, on the other hand, was an ‘anima naturaliter pagana.’ But his paganism is natural in every sense of the word, the genial worship of nature in a land of sunshine and vintage, quite different from the artificial paganism of the North, where paganism is an exotic, like the rest of classical culture. The northern pagan is a decadent; his dominant tone is a rebellion against moral limitations, against ‘creeds that refuse and restrain.’ Even the academic Leconte de Lisle spells ‘Désir’ with a capital letter, and in his ‘Chant Alterné’ treats Aphrodite Pandemos as the representative goddess of Athens. Landor is perhaps the only English pagan quite free from decadence or morbid hedonism. Most of our pagans are but melancholy Cyrenaics. Their unhealthy yearnings after Hellenism bring them nothing of Hellenic blitheness; the wine of Circe is to them a cup that inebriates but does not cheer. If we take two typical pagan poems of Mr Swinburne, ‘Laus Veneris’ and ‘Proserpina,’ the former describes an irresistible dominion of the senses, the latter is a hymn to a chthonic deity. The paganism of Carducci is of quite another tinge. There is nothing decadent or anti-social about it; and the only ethical defiance is against asceticism. When Carducci seeks to recover the Hellenic outlook he is not trying to get behind morality, but merely to get back to a more fundamental form of it. Indeed paganism would almost seem with him to resume its etymological meaning of village religion, a religion which rests on man's unsophisticated instincts. He appeals from the teaching of St Paul to that of Homer and Aristophanes, from a moral code based on personal holiness and self-denial to a moral sense of social ties and the human sanctities of the family.

This is the standpoint that Carducci sets forth in his ‘Nozze,’ an imitation of the well-known hymeneal song of Catullus. Like his forerunner, the modern poet gives his ode to alternating choruses of youths and maidens, and thus, by retaining the framework of ancient marriage poetry, leads us at first to believe that he will attempt to render ancient feeling on a subject whereon it differs perhaps more subtly from our own than on any other. So, to some extent, he does; but his aim is even bolder, namely, to apply such feeling to the life of our own day. Accordingly a chorus of youths contrasts the several ideals of womanhood upheld by Dante, Michael Angelo, and Raphael; and a chorus of girls awards the palm to the last. So daring a transfer of marriage customs essentially ancient into modern times is a historical solecism rather hard to defend; once, however, it is admitted, the opinions it serves to put forward have much inward historical truth. The award quite correctly renders the classical view. As between the serene motherhood of Raphael's Holy Families and any form of purely spiritual intensity, whether as etherealised by Dante or as embodied in titanic muscularity by Michael Angelo, there is no doubt which would have appealed to the ancient mind, with its strong dislike of morbidity and maidenhood. Nature, as Renan once pointed out, cares nothing for chastity; and the ancients were nearer to nature than we are in this respect, as in many others. A modern author could scarcely let a body of maidens avow a preference for wedded over platonic love elsewhere than in a classical setting, for the intervening centuries that worshipped virginity have made impossible such frankness as that of Antigone to the Theban elders. Indeed in one respect the conception of propriety has become precisely reversed. In Hellas a girl might express a general wish for marriage, not a wish to marry a certain man; with us she may admit her love for a certain man, not her general inclination to marriage. At the end of Carducci's poem the choruses unite to upbraid the unwillingness of the modern woman to bear children and to suckle them if she does. Here, again, we are in the full tide of contemporary life, quite classically treated, however; for, although Jean-Jacques Rousseau and M. Gaston Brieux have uttered such warnings in prose, any of the Latin satirists might well have done so in verse; even the bachelor Horace spoke rather like this in his serious moods.

It is a spirit of intellectual and political, not of moral, defiance that inspired the famous ‘Inno a Satana,’ which is as far removed as possible from the unwholesome decadence of Baudelaire's ‘Litanies de Satan.’ The Satan here glorified is not Baudelaire's unclean patron of orgies, not even Goethe's spirit that ever denies, not even Milton's leader of a cosmic opposition; he simply personifies the recreative forces of nature. Carducci assumes himself the standpoint he ascribes in one of his essays to the Middle Ages: ‘Nature, the world, society, is Satan.’ The love-deity, who is one of his avatars, is the benign worldwide power sung by Lucretius, worshipped under many names round the shores of the Mediterranean.

‘A te, Agramainio,
Adone, Astarte,
E marmi vissero
E tele e carte,
Quando le ioniche
Aure serene
Beò la Venere
Anadiomene.
A te del Libano
Fremean le piante,
De l' alma Cipride
Risorto amante:
A te ferveano
Le danze e i cori,
A te i virginei
Candidi amori,
Tra le odorifere
Palme d' Idume,
Dove biancheggiano
Le ciprie spume.’

To thee, Agramainius, Adonis, Astarte, lived marbles and canvas and parchments, when Venus Anadyomene made happy the calm breezes of Ionia. To thee the cedars of Lebanon quivered, re-arisen lover of the Cyprian goddess. To thee the dances and choruses exulted. To thee yearned the unsullied loves of the maidens, among the scented palms of Idumea or where whitens the Cyprian spray.

It is true that Venus is the first of the old heathen gods to awaken in the soul of Abelardus after the long slumber through the dark ages.

‘O dal tuo tramite
Alma divisa,
Benigno è Satana:
Ecco Eloisa.
In van ti maceri
Ne l' aspro sacco;
Il verso ei mormora
Di Maro e Flacco.’

O soul sundered from thy path, Satan is kindly; behold Eloise! In vain dost thou macerate thyself in the harsh sackcloth: he murmurs the verses of Virgil and Horace.

Strenuous, as well as sensuous, forms surge upward from the ancient world in the wake of Satan.

‘Ei, da le pagine
Di Livio, ardenti
Tribuni, consoli,
Turbe frementi
Sveglia; e, fantastico
D' italo orgoglio,
Te spinge, o monaco,
Su 'l Campidoglio.’

He from the pages of Livy awakens the ardent tribunes, the consuls, the eager throngs, and urges thee toward the Capitol, O monk distraught with the pride of Italy.

Satan not only restores the old Roman self-reverence; he is also the spirit of intellectual freedom; in the words of the essay, he is ‘happiness, dignity, liberty.’ His reawakening is the Renaissance ‘in its noblest aspect, as a resurrection of ideal naturalism.’

‘E già già tremano
Mitre e corone:
Dal chiostro brontola
La ribellione,
E pugna e prèdica
Sotto la stola
Di fra' Girolamo
Savonarola.
Gittò la tonaca
Martin Lutero:
Gitta i tuoi vincoli.
Uman pensiero,
E splendi e folgora
Di fiamme cinto;
Materia, inalzati
Satana ha vinto.’

Already mitres and crowns are tottering; rebellion growls from the cloister, and fights and preaches beneath the cowl of Fra Girolamo Savonarola. Martin Luther throws off the hood; throw off thy fetters, thought of man; shine and glister, girt with flame; matter, raise thyself; Satan has won.

Even when Satan is thus sublimated, it is rather startling to find the religious reformers among his vanguard; and Carducci seems here strangely at one with their extreme adversaries and his. Savonarola, who made a holocaust of ancient manuscripts at Florence, and Luther, who put forward justification by faith alone, rather depart from their historical setting in becoming advocates of free thought. They make dignified figures, no doubt, in the pageant of the human intellect, ‘mais ils ont diablement changé en route.’ On reflection, however, we are inclined to think that their ghostly foe has met them more than half-way. There is, indeed, no longer anything very fiendish about him, and we begin to share the hopes of Origen and Tillotson for his ultimate salvation. Nor can anything very like devil-worship be left in a religion, which is not only, like that of Flaubert's liberal-minded chemist in ‘Madame Bovary,’ ‘celle de Socrate, de Franklin, de Voltaire, et de Béranger,’ but also that of Luther and of Savonarola. Indeed Carducci's association of the revolted archangel with the Reformers, in some ways slightly comic, sheds a strong light on his own outlook. His quarrel is with social institutions, not with society itself. His dissatisfaction is finite, not the divine discontent of Werther or Obermann, too disgusted with mankind to wish to better them. It was largely this freedom from personal antinomianism that threw Carducci's literary preferences on the side of order, that of the classics.

The only strong romantic and non-classical influence on Carducci—for with him the influence of Dante was scarcely non-classical—was that of Heine. It seems strange that this influence should come to him from beyond the Alps, from the Germany he so hated; but Heine, Semitic by descent and French by sympathies, could not be suspected of the social and political medievalism which had made things German so hateful to Italian patriots. What, indeed, first attracted Carducci to Heine seems to have been the contrast in this respect between him and most of his brethren and followers of the Romantic school. At least this contrast is brought out both in the essay on the mock-heroic Atta Troll, and also in the verses ‘A un Heiniano d'Italia.’ Very inferior as inspired criticism to Arnold's ‘Heine's Grave,’ these lines also dwell on a quite different aspect of the poet's career, that which he himself expressed by telling his friends to lay on his grave a sword, as a brave soldier in the liberation-war of humanity. Still, in his method of warfare, the humorist who called Luther ‘the lover of truth and of Catherine von Borna,’ had little in common with the orator of the ‘Inno a Satana’; and to Carducci, as to many others, Heine's irony proved somewhat of a snare. Such moods as that of the meditations at Trent in the ‘Reisebilder,’ or of ‘Mir träumte wieder der alte Traum,’ are not to be imitated. Only perfect sincerity can excuse in art a systematic exposure of emotional reactions. If we once suspect exaggeration or, worse still, artificial exacerbation, such exposure becomes offensive; and Carducci, in his ‘Brindisi funebre’ and parts of his ‘Intermezzo’ treads perilously near the verge. It is quite otherwise with the shorter lyrics. Such lines as ‘Tedio Invernale’ have not merely Heine's technical perfection, far easier to achieve in so musical a tongue as Italian, but also that ironic sadness which seems peculiar to the North. For the time it becomes to Carducci a second nature. A second nature, however, it remains, and one that cannot long displace the first. Such a sentiment as this in ‘Ballata Dolorosa,’

‘Cimitero m' è il mondo allor che il sole
Ne la serenità di maggio splende,’

The world is a graveyard to me when the sun shines in the serenity of May.

is inspired by a chequered northern spring, not by the serene Maytime of Italy. We need only contrast the next poem, ‘Davanti ad una Cattedrale.’ Here we are back in the South once more, not on the dew-drenched lawn of a Gothic minster, but in front of an Italian duomo, on a piazza deep in sand and baked by the noonday sun. Suddenly, from the darkness within the doorway, an unsightly corpse glides into the yellow light. Again, in his vivid ‘Rimembranze di Scuola,’ Carducci describes how the thought of the cold stillness of the grave smote him with an icy thrill, as from his schoolroom he watched the birds and bees and butterflies shimmering in the warm summer without; thus again and again, he says, in later years the foreboding of death has come and gone. How unlike are these gusts of sadness to the enigmatic presence that visited the boyhood of Musset in the December night and abode with him until the morning. Into the joyous Mediterranean sunshine ‘Death, the crowned phantom, may leap with the flashing of cataracts’; he is not, and cannot become, the haunting terror of northern melancholy. He may leer as a macabre anatomy from a tomb; he cannot, as with Holbein, dance beside his victim through all the winding labyrinth of life. Such besetting nightmares, like the witches and fire-drakes of Carducci's ‘Carnia,’ may come southwards from Germany in the twilight of dawn; offspring of savagery and gloom, they vanish at the rising of the sun and the singing of Homer.

On the whole, Carducci's early distrust of the Romantics had been a sound instinct. Now once more he compares the classic spirit to the sun, that ripens the wheat and the grapes; the romantic spirit to the moon, that glimmers on dank graveyards and forsaken ruins. Again, romantic beauty is the beauty of autumn, doomed to fade away; classic beauty is the beauty of spring, fertile and full of hope. In the Primavere Elleniche the note of regret is there, but it is not persistent, as in northern nostalgies de paganisme. In the lands of their birth the gods of Hellas never die; they only slumber, awaiting the spring, in stream and flower and tree.

‘Muoiono gli altri dèi; di Grecia i numi
Non sanno occaso; ei dormon ne' materni
Tronchi e ne' fiori, sopra i monti, i fiumi,
I mari, eterni.’

Other godheads die; the gods of Hellas know no setting; they sleep in the trees that gave them birth, the flowers, the hills, the streams, the seas, everlastingly.

In the Odi Barbare, where Carducci's classicism at length finds perfect expression, what first strikes us is the novelty of the metre. Hitherto, although skilful and varied in his verse, he had never been an innovator. In theory he repudiated metrical elaborations as a veil to conceal poverty of poetic content, and in practice seldom experimented in them. His only conspicuous tour de force is his ‘Notte di Maggio,’ which is written in the most difficult of all strict metres, at all events, of all western metres, the sestina; it will bear comparison with the finest examples of Dante and Petrarch, or the exquisite lines of Mr Swinburne, ‘I saw my soul at rest upon a day.’ In the main, Carducci had used the lyric methods of his contemporaries; and his only unrhymed metre had been the narrative blank verse, often employed by Leopardi and others. When, in the Odi Barbare, he attempts the unrhymed lyrics of the ancients, the lines he prefixes from Platen, and his own ‘Odio l' usata poesia,’ show that he fully appreciated the difficulties. So far as a foreigner may presume to judge, he has solved them.

It is not by their metre only that the Odi Barbare attach themselves to what was best in the poetry of ancient Rome. They have much also of that wistful melancholy with which Virgil watched his native land, composed at length, after manifold tumults, in the golden mediocrity of Augustan peace. As the modern poet also listens to the murmur of the perennial stream and watches in the Umbrian valley the quiet life of tilth and meadow, the same to-day as two thousand years ago, he feels the poetry latent in the daily toil of country life, a feeling especially present at all times to the Latin races, and one that gives a vaguely Virgilian solemnity to the peasants and landscapes of Jean François Millet. In Virgil's own land his Georgics make an appeal scarcely understood by those only familiar with the rougher field-work of the North; and on this homelier aspect of his genius Carducci dwelt with peculiar fondness at the dedication of the monument to him in his native Mantua. Of this, too, he is reminded now as he watches the yeomen guide the plough and the ‘forza de' bei giovenchi’ (a wilfully Virgilian locution)—

‘de' bei giovenchi dal quadrato petto,
erti su 'l capo le lunate corna,
dolci ne gli occhi, nivei, che il mite
Virgilio amava,’

and feels the old spirit of Italy kindle within him—

                                        ‘Sento in cuor l' antica
patria e aleggiarmi su l' accesa fronte
gl' itali iddii.’

He thinks, too, as Virgil thought, of the glories of Rome, of her standards planted proudly on the surrounding hills, of her steadfastness in defeat, of her magnanimity in victory; how her former foes answered her call to arms after Thrasymene, how the Carthaginians poured in headlong flight from the walls of Spoleto. The source and soul of all this greatness, in arms and in song, lay in the open-air life of the ancients:

‘A piè de i monti e de le querce a l' ombra
co' fiumi, o Italia, è de' tuoi carmi il fonte.
Visser le ninfe, vissero: e un divino
talamo è questo.’

Now all is silence:

‘Tutto ora tace, o vedovo Clitumno,
tutto: de' vaghi tuoi delubri un solo
t' avanza, e dentro, pretestato nume,
tu non vi siedi.
Non più perfusi del tuo fiume sacro
menano i tori, vittime orgogliose,
trofei romani a i templi aviti: Roma
più non trionfa.’

The comely, square-chested oxen, their moon-shaped horns curving up above their heads, mild-eyed, snow-white, that the gentle Virgil loved. … I feel in my heart my ancient fatherland and the gods of Italy brush my kindled forehead with their wings. … At the foot of the mountains and under the shade of the oaks, as of thy streams, O Italy, so of thy songs is the fount. The nymphs lived, they lived indeed, and this is a bridal chamber of gods. … All now is silent, O widowed Clitumnus, all; of thy pleasant shrines one alone is left thee, and, within, O god robed in senatorial garb, thou sittest no longer. No longer the bulls, proud victims laved in thy hallowed stream, draw Roman trophies to the ancestral shrines: Rome triumphs no more. …

Rome triumphs no more; and the poet's wrath is kindled against the faith that overthrew her. As he watches the devotional processions crossing the Forum Romanum the sense of historic drama that fascinated Gibbon is merged in patriotic anger. The tutelary gods of Italy fled,

‘quando una strana compagnia, tra i bianchi
templi spogliati e i colonnati infranti,
procedé lenta, in neri sacchi avvolta,
litanïando,
e sovra i campi, del lavoro umano
sonanti, e i clivi, memori d' impero,
fece deserto, ed il deserto disse
regno di Dio.’

Far more truly than the Roman legions, a band of celibate ascetics have made a wilderness and called it peace. They have substituted the abortive ecstasies of mysticism for the sanctities of family life and the fruitful labour of the harvest:

‘Maledicenti a l' opre de la vita
e de l' amore, ei deliraro atroci
congiugnimenti di dolor con Dio
su rupi e in grotte:
discesero ebri di dissolvimento
a le cittadi, e in ridde paurose
al crocefisso supplicarono, empi,
d' essere abietti.’

When a strange company, between the ravaged white temples and broken colonnades, slowly paced, wrapped in dark sackcloth, singing litanies, and over the plain, that rang with human toil and the heights mindful of imperial sway, they made a desert and called that desert the kingdom of God. … Cursing the works of life and of love, they held frenzied communion of grief with God on rocks and in caves. They came down mad for annihilation to the cities, and, in affrighted chorus, impiously besought the crucified godhead that they might be abject.

Whereas north of the Alps one of the most usual reproaches against Catholicism is that it is too Italian, Carducci, as an Italian, blames it as not Italian enough. To him it appears as a morbid orientalism overspreading the healthier instincts of the Latin race, one among the many religions of the East that sapped the life of the Roman Empire. In ‘Alexandria’ he even represents the victory of the Church as Egypt's revenge on Rome for Augustus' triumph over ‘her bleating gods.’

His meditations, ‘In una chiesa gotica,’ lead by a more personal road to a somewhat similar conclusion. His purpose, he says, is not worship, but a meeting with his mistress, a meeting which he compares to that of Dante with Beatrice. His mood perhaps reminds us rather more of Léon Dupuy, as he waited for Madame Bovary in Rouen Cathedral. Yet somehow an assignation in a church, which even Musset, certainly no pietist, condemned, does not seem very profane in Italy. Here at least there is no trace of the æsthetic decadent's search after emotional reactions, not even any ostentations defiance of the Christian standpoint; the poet simply records, not very regretfully, that it has passed him by. He expresses, quite naturally, the impatience of a southern temper in the gloom of twilight and self-denial and its eagerness to get outside into sunshine and enjoyment:

‘Non io le angeliche glorie né i démoni,
io veggo un fievole baglior, che tremola
per l' umid' aere: freddo crepuscolo
fascia di tedio l' anima.
Addio, semitico nume! Continua
ne' tuoi misteri la morte domina.
O inacessibile re de gli spiriti,
tuoi templi il sole escludono.’

I see not the angelic glories nor the demons, but a feeble gleam through the dank air; chill twilight swathes my soul in gloom. Farewell, Semitic godhead! Death rules continuous in thy mysteries. O inaccessible king of spirits, thy shrines shut out the sun.

A poem even more suggestive than this of prose fiction, both in mood and incident, is that called ‘A la Stazione in una Mattina d'Autunno,’ which describes the parting of a lover from his mistress at a railway station. At first sight this introduction into poetry of what to most of us is least poetic in modern life, its mechanism, seems a defiantly hazardous experiment. Hazardous of course it is, yet with less of deliberate defiance than would at first appear, far less than there would be in a like experiment by an English poet, although there are plenty of allusions to mechanical invention in English poetry. Tennyson, in the opening, afterwards cancelled, to his ‘Dream of Fair Women,’ describes the view from a balloon. James Thomson wrote some pretty lines about a return by train from Hampstead Heath; and Mr Henley, in his ‘Song of Speed,’ attempted to turn the motor-car to poetic uses. Nevertheless, efforts to treat in verse what is most modern in modern life always savour in English of the tour de force. A railway does not seem a natural object in a poem, any more than—in spite of Turner's ‘Rain, Steam, and Speed'—it seems so in a picture. Such things are part of life's prose; and it is in the genius of our literature that prose and verse should stand apart. If they do not necessarily treat different subjects, they look at these subjects from a widely different standpoint. In English, when modern life is looked at from the poetic standpoint—the standpoint we expect in a writer of verse—what is distinctively modern in it drops out of the field of vision. If it appears, we feel it has been dragged in through some eccentric literary theory, or, worse still, from a wish to attract attention by a deliberate defiance of criticism. It would not present itself of its own accord.

There is not the same gulf between prose and verse among the Latin nations. With them there is usually little difference of subject, often none at all of standpoint; prose and verse are merely two ways of saying the same thing. It is therefore not strange that Carducci's subject, and his treatment of it, should remind us more of scenes in contemporary French novels than of any parallel in poetry. The opening description suggests impressionism, because impressionists alone have depicted such things, but there is nothing impressionist in the manner of describing:

‘Oh quei fanali, come s' inseguono
accidïosi là dietro gli alberi,
tra i rami stillanti di pioggia
sbadigliando la luce su 'l fango!
Flebile, acuta, stridula fischia
la vaporiera da presso. Plumbeo
il cielo e il mattino d' autunno,
come un grande fantasma, n' è intorno.’

Nor is there anything forced or unnatural in the lines that follow:

‘Tu pur pensosa, Lidia, la tessera
al secco taglio dài de la guardia,
e al tempo incalzante i begli anui
dài gl' istanti gioiti e i ricordi.
Van lungo il nero convoglio e vengono
incappucciati di nero i vigili,
com' ómbre; una fioca lanterna
hanno, e mazze di ferro: ed i ferrei
freni tentati rendono un lugubre
rintòcco lungo: di fondo a l' anima
un' eco di tedio risponde
doloroso, che spasimo pare.
E gli sportelli sbattuti al chiudere
paion oltraggi: scherno par l' ultimo
appello che rapido suona:
grossa scroscia su' vetri la pioggia.’

O those lanterns, how they follow each other, lazily yonder behind the trees, between the branches, dripping with rain, casting a chequered light on the mud. Mournful, piercing, and strident, the steam-engine whistles close by. The sky is leaden, and the autumn morning, like a huge phantasm, is around us. … Thoughtful, Lydia, you give the ticket to the hard clip of the guard, and to time you give, as he treads down your years of beauty, the moments of gladness and the memories. Like phantoms, the watchmen, hooded in black, pass up and down along the dark carriages; they hold a glimmering lantern and hammers of iron, and the iron couplings as they are tested, give forth a mournful reverberation, long-drawn-out; from the depths of my soul an echo of weariness answers sorrowfully and seems an agony. And the doors slammed at shutting seem insults; the last call, that whistles sharply, seems a taunt; the rain in coarse drops bickers against the panes.

Examined from the standpoint of academic criticism these comparisons verge on the grotesque; viewed psychologically they seem quite likely to suggest themselves to an imaginative temperament in an exasperated nervous condition. What is grotesque in them is quite true to life; yet the ideas would only have occurred to a most penetrative insight, while only a supreme artist would have dared to use them.

Treatment such as this of individual incident or feeling is, however, the exception in the Odi Barbare as always with Carducci. What chiefly raises these Odi above his former work is their impressive amplitude of historic recollection, perhaps only possible in a land so rich as Italy in manifold memories. Everywhere the thought of the mighty dead is with him as he drifts down the full-fed stream of the Adda, past the ruined ramparts of Lodi, past ‘battlefields that nature has long since reconciled to herself with the sweet oblivion of flowers’; as he muses before the Gothic citadel of Verona, or at Bologna, his adopted home, before her towers and monasteries; as he sits by the still waters of Sirmio, where Catullus yet seems to contemplate his absent Lesbia, mirrored in the quiet shimmerings of the lake.

‘Dolce tra i vini udir lontane istorie
D' atavi, mentre il divo sol precipita,
E le pie stelle sopra noi viaggiano,
E tra l' onde e le fronde l' aura mormora.’

'Tis sweet among the vines to listen to far-off tales of our forefathers, while the godlike sun is setting and the gracious stars are voyaging over us, and across the waters and among the leaves the breeze is soughing.

In this sunset glow of thronging recollections patriotic pride is sobered into a sense of the continuity in national tradition. On the death of Mazzini he had hailed him the spiritual heir of Gracchus and Dante and Columbus. Now, when Garibaldi visits Rome for the first time since the Italian occupation, he welcomes the modern dictator as one of Livy's men, worthy to take his place by the side of Romulus and Camillus. The old political and religious hatreds too are softened. The note of reconciliation, still slightly ironic in the lines at Rocca Paolina, takes a more solemn tone. The ‘pie stelle,’ that voyage over the head of the poet at Desenzano, are no longer lucid shapes fulfilling their destiny without heed to mankind, as in one of the early sonnets; they are become Virgil's ‘conscia fati sidera.’ Indeed, although in this epithet of ‘pie,’ recurring again and again after the ancient manner, lingers no doubt the ancient suggestion of natural duties accomplished, yet it bears also its present Italian meaning of clement, pitiful, the old Virgilian pietas passing into that modern pitifulness of which Virgil had such strange foreshadowings. As Carducci muses at the castle of Miramar, whence Maximilian sailed for Mexico, the republican indignation of the sonnets on the expedition, and the resentment against the house of Austria that vents itself in the ‘Cradle-song of Charles V,’ are hushed. A solemn awe, as in the presence of mysterious forces of retribution, raises this poem to the level of tragedy. It has the grand manner of the ancients in handling contemporary events, the manner of Æschylus in the ‘Persæ.’

The strongest poems in Carducci's last volume, Rime e Ritmi, are those that continue this historical vein, the most congenial to his peculiar quality. Lines entitled ‘Alle Valchirie,’ on the murder of the Austrian Empress, recall ‘Miramar,’ though certainly inferior to it. Altogether there is a falling-off since the Odi Barbare in strength and spontaneity, in the higher kind of imagination, a falling-off that leaves the besetting weaknesses more evident. A still larger proportion of the poems are on political and occasional topics, and everywhere the philosophic observer of public events tends more and more to override the poet. So does the historian and critic of literature. Like most literary poets in this age of criticism, Carducci at all times of his career wrote much in verse about other poets, sometimes by way of panegyric, sometimes in order to reconstruct a historical setting, sometimes to study the mood that a poem induced in himself.

Among his pieces of this kind the most interesting to English readers are probably those on English poets. He shared the general admiration of the Latin peoples for Byron, to whom there is a fine sonnet in the Rime e Ritmi, and the Odi Barbare include poems written ‘Beside the Urn of Shelley’ and ‘On Reading Christopher Marlowe.’ His sense of these poets is not quite that of Englishmen to-day. He greets Byron as the champion of Hellenic freedom, and disclaims his pessimism and satire. Shelley is welcomed to the islands of the blessed by the epic and tragic heroes and heroines, and hailed as ‘poeta del liberato mondo’; surroundings and titles alike suggest ‘Prometheus’ and ‘The Cenci,’ perhaps even ‘The Revolt of Islam,’ rather than the lyrics which are now Shelley's chief glory in his own country. As Carducci reads Marlowe on a sultry journey by the seashore of the Campagna, the malarial landscape leads him to dwell on what seems unwholesome and mephitic in the playwright, his fondness for lurid crimes and barbaric excesses. What may be called the romantic side of the Renaissance, its love of strangeness, its lawless assertion of the prerogative of personality, was uncongenial to Carducci; to his essentially classical temperament the Renaissance appealed as a return from the superstitious frenzy of the Middle Ages to the ordered sanity of the ancients. As he grew older his poetic imagination lost the ardour needed to fuse his literary and historical learning into poetry. One need only compare the sonnets to Nicola Pisano in his last volume with the ode to La Beata Diana Giuntini in his first. Each renders the blending of paganism with the Catholic faith; in the ode it is suggested with the intuition of poetic fancy; in the sonnets it is set out with the precision of a philosophic history of Tuscan art.

Carducci's strong sense of local colour also now sometimes betrayed him. Many of his poems with topographical titles degenerate into mere enumeration of places and their characteristics, as in ‘Piemonte.’ In others the limitations of his historical sympathy still handicap him. Even in the Church of Polenta the Gothic capitals seem grotesque intruders from the northern gloom into a land hallowed by Hellenic memories. Yet, while the poet sits and muses where Dante may once have knelt and beheld the face of God, as he wept for his ‘bel San Giovanni,’ dislike of Catholicism is overcome by a sense of the historic function of religion as the great consoler. He summons the Italian people, ‘l' Itala gente da le molte vite,’ to answer the call of the angelus to prayer and closes with lines not unworthy to be set beneath Millet's picture:

‘Una di flauti lenta melodia
passa invisibil fra la terra e il cielo:
spiriti forse che furon, che sono
                                                            e che saranno?
Un oblio lene de la faticosa
vita, un pensoso sospirar quïete,
una soave volontà di pianto
                                                            l' anime invade.
Taccion le fiere e gli uomini e le cose,
roseo 'l tramonto ne l'azzurro sfuma,
mormoran gli alti vertici ondeggianti
                                                            Ave Maria.’

A soft melody of flutes passes unseen between earth and heaven; spirits perhaps that were, that are, and are to be. A soft forgetfulness of wearisome life, a thoughtful sighing after rest, a gentle yearning for tears, steals over the soul. Men and beasts and things are silent, the sun sets in rose-coloured vapours, and the lofty waving heights murmur ‘Ave Maria.’

An overpowering sense of such things—the vaguest word is the best—is the unmistakable token of the poetic temperament; and a power like this to express that sense in an artistic form would alone mark Carducci as a genuine poet.

We venture to doubt, however, whether, outside Italy, he will ever acquire widespread poetic fame. The exceptional difficulty of his Italian is not an insuperable hindrance; Dante, most obscure of Italian poets, is also the most widely read. Still, this difficulty is a hindrance to many English people, even to such as have a working knowledge of the language. These may be advised to begin on a translation of selected poems, with the Italian on the opposite page, lately brought out by Mrs Francis Holland. Mrs Holland has hampered herself by a resolution to adhere to the original metres, and, perhaps for that reason, her renderings will hardly give the English reader much idea of the beauty of Carducci's work. But they will be a useful help to those who know a little Italian and wish to make acquaintance with Carducci. For her book, which opens with a short introductory study, includes several of the poet's finest pieces. And indeed it is a good illustration of the wealth of really striking work he produced that Mrs Holland's selections scarcely anywhere overlap the quotations here given. There are, however, other causes besides the difficulty of his language which have hampered his reputation abroad and also suggest misgivings as to its permanence at home, at least in its present extent. Everywhere the average reader of poetry reads it for the matter, not for the manner; and Carducci will cease in time to give that reader what he seeks, the reflection and interpretation of his own feelings. In pure literature what makes for lasting popularity is individual human interest. ‘Maud’ is read for the hero's love story, not for the author's opinions on the Crimean war and the Manchester school in economics; the emotional crises in the life of Jean Valjean make us bear with the political disquisitions in ‘Les Misérables.’ Now this human interest, present in Tennyson and Victor Hugo, is absent from Carducci. He never attempted the creation of character; and his own feelings expressed in verse are seldom of lyric intensity or such that all mankind can share them. His own reference in his ‘Intermezzo’ to

‘Questo cuor, che amor mai non richiese,
                    Se non forse a le idee,’

This heart which no love ever claimed, save perhaps for ideas.

is rather too suggestive of Goethe's saying about Platen, that he had every other gift but wanted love. To enjoy what is best in the Odi Barbare requires historic imagination and the knowledge that alone gives that imagination scope. In the marmoreal ode ‘Sul' Adda,’ for instance, there is an impressive reverie over departed conquerors not unworthy of Omar Khayyam; there is no throb of human passion as in Browning's ‘Love among the Ruins.’

Carducci's fame will endure, but with the few, not with the many. His appeal in the future will be to those endowed with historic imagination and the still rarer literary perception needed to appreciate his mastery of poetic form. For readers so gifted, nowhere very numerous, the Odi Barbare will become a classic in the truest sense, and Carducci will continue to be what Signor d' Annunzio has called him, in the ‘Greeting to the Master’ that closes the ‘Laus Vitæ,’ ‘the mediator between two worlds,’ that of ancient Rome and that of modern Italy.