Tuscan folk-lore and sketches, together with some other papers

“When, in the dark ilexes and new-flowered almond, revels the nuptial chorus of the birds, and the primroses on the sunny hills are eyes of old-world nymphs looking out on mortal men, and the sun greets the beds of flowers with youthful smile, and over the silent moor the sky bends piously, and the breath of April moves the flowering corn like a sigh of love stirring a young bride’s veil; then do the trunk of the vine and the heart of the maiden leap up with throbs; they feel their wounds. The vine breathes odorous buds into the cold twigs, the maiden darts desire in her virgin blushes. Everything ferments and grows languid in the tepor of the air: the blood within the veins, the wine within the casks. O, ruddy prisoner! thou yearnest for thy fatherland, and the breath of thy native hill raises a ferment within the tun. There is the joyous life of the vine twigs: here thou art a prisoner in the snare… Hurrah for liberty! Let us go, let us go to liberate the captive; let us call him back to life and make him sparkle in the glass, sparkle on the crest of the hill, sparkle to the sunlight; let the light breeze kiss him again; let him behold the young vines.”

And yet with all this revelling in nature, and especially the nature of spring-time, the melancholy despondent strain is never far distant. Even in the Greek spring songs there is nearly as much talk of chill mist and rain as of clear sky and sunlight; and the third song, the Alexandrine, goes so far as to even introduce a graveyard. In the little poem entitled “School Memories,” too, the poet, after describing the priest, makes a charming picture of the summer landscape and beckoning trees that he sees through the window: but everything is suddenly crossed and darkened by the thought of “death, and the formless nothing,” and this thought of death has haunted him ever since. He is too fond of graveyards; too apt, like some German poets at the beginning of last century, to look upon the world as a vast cemetery. It is perhaps to this same strain of pessimism, this same tendency to look at the ugly side of things, that we are to attribute the absolute repulsiveness of many of the images he employs. To compare trees, bald, dripping, and bent, to sextons over a grave is hardly poetical, but it is at any rate harmless; some of his other similitudes are too repulsive for translation, and we must think it a pity that so great a poet should encourage the tendency to dwell, quite gratuitously, on disagreeable non-poetical subjects.

Perhaps the poems which are most free from these defects are those contained in the first volume of the “Odi Barbare.” There we find the exquisite little piece entitled “Fantasia.”

“Thou speakest and thy voice’s soul, yielding languidly to the gentle breeze, floats out over the caressing waves, and sails to strange shores. It sails smiling in a tepor of setting sunlight, into the solitudes: white birds fly between sky and sea, green islands pass by, the temples on their rocky summits dart rays of Parian whiteness in the rosy sunset, the cypresses on the shores tremble, and the thick myrtles send forth their odour. The smell of the salt breezes wanders afar, and mingles with the slow singing of the sailors, whilst a ship within sight of the harbour peacefully furls its red sails. Maidens come down from the acropolis in long procession, and they have beautiful white peplums, they bear garlands on their heads, in their hands they have branches of laurel, they extend their arms and sing. His spear planted in the sand of his fatherland, a man leaps to earth, glittering in arms: is he perchance Alcæus come back from war to the Lesbian virgins.”

To see the charming way in which Carducci can blend history with nature, we must turn in the same volume to the poem entitled “Sull’ Adda.”

“Flow through the red fires of evening, flow, blue Adda: Lydia on the placid stream, with tender love, sails towards the setting sun. Behold, the memorable bridge fades behind us: the airy spring of the arches yields to the distance and sinks to the level of the liquid plain that widens and murmurs.”

And then the poet, in musical verse, traces the history of the battles between the Romans and barbarians; speaks of the “pale Corsican who passed the dubious bridge amid lightnings, bearing the fate of two centuries in his slight and youthful hand”; and in contrast with the smoke and clang and blood of battle we have the recurrence of the verse representing Lydia floating through the fires of evening towards the setting sun: “Beneath the Olympic smile of the air the earth palpitates: every wave glows and rises trembling, swelling with radiant love.” The smell of youthful meadows rises from either bank, the great trees sign to the skiff as it passes, and, descending from the trees and rising from the flowering hedges, the birds follow through the gold and rosy streaks (of sky and water), mingling joyful loves. Between rich meadows the Adda flows on to lose itself in the Eridano; the untiring sun sinks to its setting.

“O sun, O flowing Adda!” exclaims the poet, “the soul floats through an elysium behind thee; where will it and mutual love lose themselves, O Lydia? I know not; but I would lose myself now far from men, in Lydia’s languid glance, where float unknown desires and mysteries.”

His power of blending historical scenes with descriptive poetry is also to be found in the poem entitled “At the Springs of the Clitunnus.” Umbrians, Tuscans, Romans, Carthaginians pass before the reader; then Catholicism appears with its black-robed priests, driving out ancient gods and tillage, but ousted in its turn by new developments of the human mind. “Before us the train, steaming and panting after new industries, whistles as it rushes along.” Strange as it may seem, all this history does not swamp the poetry, which is of the most purely idyllic character throughout.

We must not leave the subject of Carducci’s sympathy with nature without mentioning the pretty little dialogue between the poet and the great alley of cypress-trees at which he used to fling stones, and among which he used to go bird-nesting in his boyish days. The cypresses run to meet him like a double row of young giants, welcome him and beg him to remain with them, offering him the pastimes of years gone by. The poet answers that he cannot stop; he has grown to be a celebrity now, he reads Greek and Latin, writes and writes, is no longer an urchin, and, as to stones, he no longer throws them, especially at plants. A murmur runs through the doubting summits, the rosy light of the setting sun shines athwart the dark cypress green with a pitying smile, sun and trees seem to feel compassion for him, and the murmur embodies itself in words. The winds have told the poet’s old companions of his eternal unrest, of his eternal brooding over vexed questions which can never be settled. Let him come back to his old haunts, to the blue sea, the smile of the setting sun, the flights of birds, the chirping of the sparrows, the choruses which pass eternally between earth and sky. So only will he lay the evil spectres which rise from the black depths of man’s thought-beaten heart, as putrid flames rise before one walking in a cemetery. The poet will not stop, yet, as the train whirls him back to the problems of the world, he looks back at the quiet graveyard to which they lead up and where his grandmother lies, wondering whether they may not be right, and whether what he has sought for morning and evening so many years in vain, may not after all be hidden there. Yet as the train rushes on, the colts run racing beside it; and it is only a donkey, feeding on a thistle, that stands stolidly gazing on the busy scene before him.

A pilgrim to this cypress alley relates that its owner, Count Walfredo della Gherardesca, refuses to cut down the trees, many of which have suffered much from storms, and replant the alley. “Carducci loves them,” he said, “and therefore I respect them. Those that have suffered I shall replace little by little by young plants, and thus the alley will preserve its true and now celebrated appearance.”

As an expression of pure nature-sense, we may still quote, perhaps, the sonnet entitled “The Ox”: —

“I love thee, O pious ox; a gentle sentiment of strength and peace dost thou infuse into my heart, whether, solemn, monumental, thou lookest out over the free and fertile fields, or whether, bending to the yoke, thou secondest man’s swift work with grave content: he urges thee, he goads thee, and thou answerest with the slow turn of thy patient eyes. Thy breath streams from thy nostril large and damp and black, and thy lowing loses itself in the still air like a joyous hymn; and within the grave sweetness of thine eye, with its green-shadowed depths, the divine verdure of the plain lies reflected broadly and tranquilly.”

The conciseness and precision of Carducci’s language give him an extraordinary power of vivid representation of his subject. He “etches, sculptor-like,” as Emerson says of Dante. What can be more vivid, for instance, than the picture of rural life which opens the poem “At the Springs of the Clitunnus”? —

“Still do the flocks come down to thee, O Clitunnus, through the moist air of evening, from the mountain that waves with dusky ash-groves murmuring in the wind, and scatters afar its odours of wild sage and thyme; the Umbrian boy still plunges the struggling sheep into thy wave; whilst the babe at the breast of the sunburnt mother, sitting barefoot by the cottage door and singing, turns towards him, and smiles from its fair round face; thoughtfully does the father, his legs clad in goat-skins like the fauns of old, guide the painted ploughshare, and the strength of the beautiful heifers; the beautiful square-breasted heifers their heads erect with mooned horns, sweet-eyed, snowy, that gentle Virgil loved.”

Does not one see before one, too, the Bionda Maria (fair-haired Maria) of the “Idillio Maremmano” in the following verses?

“How lovely wert thou, O maiden, emerging from the long waving furrows, with fresh-plucked flowers in thy hand, tall and smiling; and under thy glowing brows thou opened’st the blue of thy large deep eyes darting untamed fire. Like the cornflower among the yellowing gold of the corn-ears did the blue of that eye blossom forth among thy tawny hair; and before and around thee the height of summer flamed; the sun laughed, broken by the green branches of the pomegranate, sparkling in red. At thy passing, as at that of a goddess, the gorgeous peacock opened his eyed tail, beholding thee, and sent up to thee a harsh cry.”

Of a different kind, but equally effective, is the following description, drawn from a scene in the hall of a thirteenth-century lord. The storm is raging outside; the greyhound bays at the thunder, and stretches out his taper head, with erect ears and restless eyes, towards the marchioness who sits amid her women and maidens; a fire, smelling of the pine forest, blazes in the midst, and, upright before it, Malaspina rises a whole head above the minor barons: —

“A fine trained goshawk perched on the knight’s fist, and, when the hail struck the windows now here now there according to the shifting wind, and the swift-passing lightning whitened the flashing arms hanging on the walls, the bird beat its wings, stretching out its snakelike neck, and gave out a hoarse cry of joy: the love of his native, free Apuan heights burnt in his piercing eye; he longed, the noble bird, to direct his flight through the thunder athwart the clouds.”

Diverse once more, yet none the less apt to remain impressed upon the memory, is the opening picture of the poem for the fifth anniversary of the battle of Mentana, where, it will be remembered, Garibaldi’s troops were defeated by the combined French and Papal forces: —

“Every year when the sad hour of Mentana’s rout sounds over the conscious hills, plains and hills heave, and proudly upright stands the band of the dead on the tumuli of Nomentum. They are no hideous skeletons; they are tall and beautiful forms, around which waves the rosy veil of twilight: through their wounds laugh the pious, virgin stars; the clouds of the sky wreathe lightly round their locks.”

No doubt it is Carducci’s classicism (in a poem entitled “Classicism and Romanticism” he holds up the latter to utter ridicule) which gives him this marked power of word-painting; it also informs his poem with a paganism of which we shall have presently to speak. Yet it is classicism deeply coloured by nineteenth-century life. Take, for instance, the little poem “Ruit Hora,” and see how the modern unrest comes across the calm of the classic scene. Horace’s Lydia would not have understood a lover of this sort for all his passion: —

“O green solitude for which I have yearned, far from the noise of men! hither come two divine friends with us, O Lydia, Wine and Love. See how Lycæus, the eternal youth, laughs in the shining crystal: as in thine eyes, O glorious Lydia, Love rides in triumph and unbinds his eyes. The sun shines low through the trellis and breaks, rosy, against my glass; he glances and trembles golden among thy locks, O Lydia. Among the blackness of thy locks, O snowy Lydia, a pallid rose languishes, and a gentle sudden sadness tempers the fires of love in my heart. Tell me: why does the sea down there send up mysterious groanings under the flaming evening? What songs, O Lydia, do those pines sing to each other? See with what desire those hills stretch out their arms to the setting sun: the shadow grows and embraces them: it seems as though they were begging the last kiss, O Lydia. I beg thy kisses, if the shade envelops me, O Lycæus, giver of joy; I beg thine eyes, O shining Lydia, if Hyperion sinks. And time is rushing by. O rosy mouth, unclose! O flower of the soul, O flower of desire, open thy cup! O loved arms, open!”

Perhaps, too, Carducci, for all his classic forms, is the only living poet who could make a detailed description of a railway station, the arrival of the train, clipping of the ticket, banging of the doors, etc., without once falling into triviality or bombast; yet such a feat has he performed in the poem entitled, “At the Station on an Autumn Morning.”

Especially marked in Carducci’s poems, and particularly in his early ones, is his rebellion against the Church. The poet’s paganism has been much discussed. It is a paganism based not on any repugnance for the teaching and character of Christ (on the contrary, the poet makes a most attractive picture of Christ in one of his poems), but upon the unfeigned joy in nature with which, as an antidote to his own pessimism, the classic poets presented him. It takes the form of a violent revolt against the creed that, in his opinion, had neglected if not opposed art, had raved of “atrocious unions of God with Pain,” had substituted gloom and sadness for the happy life of freedom and nature (see the poem entitled “In a Gothic Church”), had for centuries been a barrier to human progress, had constantly been found in alliance with the enemies of Italy, and had, in these later years of ardent strife for the unification of the Fatherland, systematically, with violence and with cunning, opposed the heroes who were giving their lives in the cause of freedom. The Romish Church was for him the symbol of retrogression, gloom, and antipatriotism; and in the violence of his reaction against it he confounded it with the whole of Christianity, even going so far as to personify progress and liberty, by antithesis, under the title of “Satan.”

The “Hymn to Satan,” published for the first time in 1865 at Pistoia under the pseudonym of “Enotrio Romano,” may be said, indeed, to be the beginning of his fame. Launched on the world without any explanation, the misleading title caused it to be understood only by a few careful readers. The world at large saw in it, according to the opinion of one critic, “an intellectual orgy,” a blasphemous rebellion against everything that the nation, and even the world, had hitherto considered sacred and necessary for the existence of society. Its publication excited great controversy, afterwards given to the world under the title of the “Polemiche Sataniche,” which gave Carducci the opportunity of responding to the attacks of the critics, and explaining the intimate sense of the poem; but even after his explanations, even when we know from his own lips that for him, taking up, as he believes, the standpoint of the modern Roman Catholic Church, “Satan is beauty, love, wellbeing, happiness”; that “Satan is thought that flies, science that experiments, the heart that blazes up, the forehead on which is written ‘I will not abase myself’; that Satanic were the revolutions that brought men out of the middle ages; Satanic the Italian communes; the German Reformation; Holland embodying liberty in deed; England vindicating and avenging it; France spreading it abroad to all orders and all peoples,” – even after the poet himself has told us this, the poem still jars in many places for the unwonted violence of its expressions. It is a battle-hymn, with all the fire and energy of the battle-charge in it. The metre rushes like the swift running of horses, sweeping the reader along with irresistible force. The poem opens with the following invocation: —

“Towards thee, boundless principle of being, matter and spirit, reason and sense, whilst the wine sparkles in the cups like the soul in the eye; while the earth and sun smile and interchange words of love, and a murmur of mysterious nuptials runs through the mountains, and the fruitful plain palpitates, – towards thee does the bold verse break forth; I invoke thee, O Satan, king of the feast. Away, O priest, with your aspersorium and your chant! No, priest, Satan turns not back. See, rust eats away Michael’s mystic brand; and the faithful archangel, plucked of his feathers, falls into space. Cold is the thunderbolt in Jehovah’s hand. Like pallid meteors, extinguished planets, do the angels rain down from the firmaments. In never-sleeping matter, king of phenomena, king of forms, Satan lives alone.”

Satan lurks in beauty, love, and wine, so the poem goes on; and Satan breathes “from my verse if, bursting forth from my breast and defying the god of guilty priests, of bloody kings, it shakes the minds of men like a thunderbolt.” It was Satan who breathed in the nature-worship of ancient times; Satan that, driven out by the barbarous Nazarene fury of the love-feasts whose sacred torches were used to burn down temples, took refuge among the hearth-gods of the people, and shook the breasts of witches, who, pale with eternal care, drew their inspiration from nature and him. He opens the cloister gate before the alchemist, revealing new and radiant skies. In vain monks and nuns try to shut him out from their lives; he inspires Heloïse, he murmurs the verses of Ovid and Horace among David’s psalms and tears of repentance. But Satan often peoples the sleepless cell with images of a better age. He arouses, from the pages of Livy, eager tribunes, consuls, agitated shouting crowds. Wiclif and Huss, Savonarola, Luther secure the triumph of human thought: matter, rise again! Satan has conquered.

“A beautiful and terrible monster breaks loose, traverses the ocean, traverses the land: shining and smoke-wreathed like the volcano, it climbs mountains, devours plains, leaps gulfs; then hides in nameless caves traversing deep-hidden paths; and issues forth; and untamed sends out its cry like a whirlwind from shore to shore, like a whirlwind scatters abroad its breath: he passes, O peoples, Satan the Great, – passes beneficent from place to place on the resistless chariot of fire. Hail, O Satan, O rebellion, O avenging force of reason! Sacred are the vows and the incense that rise to thee. Thou hast conquered the Jehovah of the priest.”

The metre of the “Inno a Satana” is, as we have said, swinging and free. It is not in this poem that Carducci has “measured the lyric buskins on to Italian Muse”; and indeed he himself, in the “Polemiche Sataniche,” severely criticises its form. It was the expression of the poet’s inmost soul, written at white-heat in a single night. Carducci’s real work as a lyric poet is to be found in his other poems, in the three volumes of “Odi Barbare,” for instance, the “Levia Gravia,” the “Rime Nuove,” the “Giambi ed Epodi.”

“I have called these odes barbarous,” he tells us, “because they would sound so in the ears and judgment of the Greeks and Romans, although I have attempted to compose them in the metrical form of their lyric poetry. I felt,” he goes on to say in substance, “that I had different things to say from those sung by Dante, Petrarch, Politian, Tasso, and other classic lyric poets, and could not see why, since Horace and Catullus were allowed to enrich Latin verse with Greek forms, since Dante might adapt Provençal rhymes to Italian poetry, why I should not be pardoned for doing that for which those great poets received praise.”

Neither is Carducci alone in his attempts to adapt Latin measures to Italian verse. Other poets (among them Chiabrera) had written Poesia Barbara before him, and his contemporary Cavallotti has tried it too; but they have produced Poesia Barbara of a different kind. The essential difference between these poets and Carducci lies in this: that whereas they copied the mechanism of the Latin metre, with its complicated system of long and short syllables, Carducci, with finer intuition of the genius of his mother-tongue, has aimed at catching and reproducing the music, the rhythm of the Latin verse. He is hence no copyist but a musician of most delicate ear, whose keen sense of harmony has procured him success where others have failed, and are likely to fail miserably. Modern Italian is not fitted, any more than modern English, for the formal construction of verse on the basis of long and short feet, – on the basis, that is, of metre. Indeed many Italian critics think that even in Latin this form of verse-construction was gradually giving way, or assimilating itself to the rhythmical verse – the verse whose movement struck the ear, as does the rhythm of music or dance, without awakening grammatical considerations of length or shortness of syllables. It is this reproduction of rhythm instead of metre that renders Carducci so eminently and pleasurably readable where other poets, even great ones, are insupportable. All readers of Tennyson, for instance, know the rage with which one tries to infuse a little music into his “experiments.” One struggles with “Boadicea,” trying vainly to discover some sort of melody in it, but, on coming to such a line as this —

“Mad and maddening, all that heard her in her fierce volubility,”

really throws away the book in utter despair. Not so with Carducci. It is rare to find a harsh verse in his work, though such, of course, do occur here and there, and the ease with which his poetry can be translated into Latin (as much of it has been) proves its close affinity with this language.[19 - Compare, for instance, the Italian and Latin versions of the following verse, taken from a short poem on a laurel branch which the poet, having plucked on the Appian Way, presented to a lady friend who bore the name of Daphne; and compare these again with the well-known Horatian ode “Integer Vitæ”: —“Io son, Daphne, la tua greca sorella:Che vergin bionda sul Peneo fuggia,E verdeggiai pur ieri arbore snellaPer l’Appia Via.En soror, Daphne, tua quæ fugaciJam pede ad Peneum pudibunda adibam;Appiæ et nuper virui tenellaMargine laurus.Integer vitæ scelerisque purusNon eget Mauris jaculis neque arcuNec venenatis gravida sagittis,Fusce, pharetra.”See also “Sei Odi Barbare di Giosué Carducci, con la versione Latina di Amedeo Crivellucci.” Citta di Castello, 1885.It must be observed in this connection that Carducci is very apt to change a descending Horatian rhythm into an ascending Italian one, beginning his line with an unaccented and rising to an accented syllable. In this way he obtains much movement and swing.]

As will be seen from the foregoing sketch, Carducci is no easy-going poet. He bears out in his everyday work the dislike he has expressed at seeing the Lyric in dressing-gown and slippers, and has given us, in a little poem at the end of the “Rime Nuove,” his idea of what a poet should be – the true poietes (ποιητής) of the Greeks. For him the poet is a great artificer, with muscles hardened into iron at his trade: he holds his head high, his neck is strong, his breast bare, his eye bright. Hardly do the birds begin to chirp, and the dawn to smile over the hills than he, with his bellows, rouses the joy of the leaping flames in his smithy. Into the blazing furnace he throws the elements of love and thought, and the memories and glory of his fathers and his people. Past and future does he fuse in the incandescent mass. Then with his hammer he works it on the anvil, and in the splendour of the newly risen sun, sings as he fashions swords to strive for liberty, wreaths to crown victory and glory, and diadems to deck out beauty. “And for himself the poor workman makes a golden arrow, which he shoots towards the sun: his eye follows its shining upward flight, follows it and rejoices, and desires nothing more.”

GIOVANNI PASCOLI

Thoroughly Italian and of the best period is Pascoli in the exquisite propriety of his words; in the sharpness with which he outlines the little pictures, which are characteristic, especially, of his earlier work. In these respects one feels his close affinity with the Latin poets – above all Virgil – who are his Gods, and from whom the early Italian poets immediately derive. Less Italian – using the word in the stereotyped sense which would exclude Leopardi altogether from Italian song – less Italian is he in the mode and direction of his thought. No gay love-songs, no easy sentimentality have come from his pen: the passion of love is in fact strangely absent from his work. He is a child not so much of Italy, as of his age, in his attitude of enquiry towards the great questions of life and death; in the gravity, the earnestness resulting, especially in his later works, from this attitude.

Nor is this individuality to be wondered at; for Pascoli’s muse was cradled in sorrow. He was but a lad when his father, returning home, among the hills of Romagna and within sight of the mediæval republic of S. Marino, was treacherously murdered by an unknown hand. His mother died not very long after, having never really recovered from the shock; then three brothers and a sister; so that Giovanni found himself at a very early age head of a family of a brother and two sisters.

A hard struggle enabled him to form a home for them. One of the little poems to his mother which mark, year after year, the anniversary of her death, refers to this struggle as follows: —

Know – and perhaps thou dost know in the churchyard —
the child with long gold ringlets
and that other for whom thy last tear fell —
know that I fostered them, that I adore them.

For them I gathered up my shattered courage
and I wiped clear my soul for them;
they have a roof, they have a nest – my boast:
my love it is that feeds them, and my toil.

They are not happy, know it, but serene;
theirs is the smile but of a pious sadness:
I look on them – my sole, lone family —

and ever to my eyes I feel there comes
that last unfinished tear that wet thy lids
in the death-agony.

He now lives either at Messina, where he is Professor of Latin, or among the chestnut woods that clothe the hills round Barga near Lucca, with one of his sisters. This is Maria, the careful, winning housewife whom all readers of her brother’s poems love – herself known also in the world of letters as a graceful poetess and an accomplished Latin scholar. Two or three verses of the little poem entitled “Sorella” reflect the bond that unites them.

I know not if she be to him more mother