Chapter II (3)

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]

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
or more daughter, the sister, gently serious;
she—sweet, and grave and pious—
corrects, consoles and counsels;

Presses his hair, embraces him
care-burdened; speaks:—“_What is it?_”
Conceals her face against his breast,
Speaks, in confusion:—“_Know’st not?_”

She keeps on her pale face
and in her eyes quick glancing,
ah! for when he leaves, the smile;
the tears for his return.

Two principal influences, then, have gone to the moulding of Pascoli’s genius: one, the potent attraction of the Augustan poets; the other, the shock, strain and struggle which have fixed his thoughts on the most painful problems of existence; which have, by the very breaking up of his home, accentuated the longing for the domestic affections above that for amorous passion; and have tinged the whole of his work with an autumn-like sadness.

Both these influences reveal themselves in Pascoli’s first published work; a small volume of little poems entitled _Myricæ_, and bearing the legend _Arbusta juvant, humilesque myricæ_. The shock was at that time, however, still too near to have exerted its full influence on the poet’s character. It kept his mind fixed not so much on the philosophical as on the sentimental and physical side of death: on the churchyard with its cypresses, its driving showers and gleams of golden sunshine, its rainbow, its groups of merry children playing “Touch” round the great cross—but, also, with its dead lying through the long nights of rain and wind. Even here, however, where triteness would seem inevitable, Pascoli is individual. He never contemplates physical decay: worms and skulls are not so much as hinted at. It is the loneliness of his dead that rivets the poet’s thoughts, their vain longing for news of those they left on earth:—

Oh, children—groans the father ’mid the black
swish of the water—ye whom I hear no more
for many years! Another churchyard

perhaps received you, and maybe you call
your mother as you shiver naked
’neath the black hissing rainstorms.

And from your far-off dwelling you stretch out
your arms to me, as I do mine to you,
oh sons, in vain despair.

Oh, children, children! Could I only see you!
For I would tell you how in that one instant
for an entire eternity I loved you.

In that one minute ere I died
I raised my hand up to my bleeding head,
and blessed you all, my children.

And again:—

They weep. I see, see, see. They form
a circle, wrapped in the ceaseless booming.
They still wait, and they must wait.

The dead sons cling about the father
unavenged. Sits in a tomb,
I see, I see in midst of them, my mother.

_Sunt lacrymae rerum._ Pascoli returns to his father’s death more than once in these early poems: never with impotent cries against man or destiny, but with a sense as it were of wide-eyed wonder at the pity of the thing. Here are a few verses characteristic of his attitude; characteristic, too, of his daring simplicity of expression, relieved, just as there is a fear of its sinking into mere prose, by some equally daring conception that throws a vivid light over all that has gone before.

August 10th.

St. Laurence’ day. I know’t, because so many
stars through the quiet air
burn, fall; because so great a weeping
gleams in the concave sky.

A swallow was returning to her roof;
they killed her; ’mid the thorns she fell
She had an insect in her beak:
the supper for her nestlings.

Now she lies there as on a cross, and holds
that worm out to that far-off sky;
and in the shadow waits for her her nest;
its chirping fainter comes and fainter.

A man, too, was returning to his nest.
They killed him; he spoke: Pardon!
And in his open eyes remained a cry.
He bore two dolls as gifts....

There in the lonely cottage, now,
in vain they wait and wait for him:
He motionless, astonished, shows
the dolls to the far-off sky.

And thou, oh sky, from far above the worlds
serene—infinite sky, immortal—
oh! with thick-falling tears of stars inundate
this atom dark of Evil.

Such poems bear, however, but a small proportion to the rest of the work even in the first edition of the _Myricæ_, and a still smaller proportion in the later editions. The note is struck and left for a time: heard again, it has been developed into a theme whose harmonies are rich and deep.

The _Myricæ_, now in its fifth edition, is a collection of the shortest of poems. Many of them are but a few lines long, that pass in Italian like the brush of wings and cannot be rendered in our heavier English. Now it is a little picture, cut like a sixteenth century cameo, of some detail of the country or of country life, generally with just a touch at the end that relieves the feeling of pure objectiveness, and suggests the Infinite which lies around and behind the fragment presented; now it is some philosophical maxim or reflection which has evidently become part of the poet’s individuality; now an impression of infancy, childhood, girlhood, old age; now a fine-wrought point of irony to prick the ignorance and arrogance of the Philistine.

A consideration of Pascoli’s relation to Nature and the peasantry immediately suggests a comparison with Wordsworth. It is, however, a curious fact that the more one attempts to fix the similarity between the two, the more elusive does it prove to be. We might say, tentatively, that Pascoli is both more pagan and more human, notwithstanding _Margaret_ and _Michael_, than Wordsworth. He is more pagan in that his delight in the beauty of a natural object is more self-sufficing, therefore more intense; it is a delight that suggests no defined religious or quasi-religious ideas, though there is always a feeling, conscious or sub-conscious, that the object is an organic part of the Universe. He is more human in that the peasants too attract him more for their own sakes than for the moral reflections to which they may give rise. They are, moreover, peasants in the full sense of the word. They are an inseparable part of their surroundings, and their interest derives from their unbroken contact with Nature, who now favours, now destroys their toil. A carefully thought out parallel study of the two poets would without doubt be interesting: it would have to set out from the fact that the fundamentals of the philosophy of the two men are essentially different: the Christianity and Platonism of the English poet being replaced in the Italian—citizen of a nation which is rapidly casting off metaphysical speculation—by a frank facing of the possibilities and probabilities opened up by modern scientific research, by a passionate longing for truth built upon the rock of scientific fact. A reference to the poet’s lecture entitled _L’Era Nuova_ (The New Era) will put this point beyond dispute.

Among the poems which mark most strongly this fundamental difference and this elusive similarity between Wordsworth and Pascoli is that published in the _Marzocco_ of August 19th, and entitled _Inno del Mendico_. The simplicity of the diction, the spaciousness of the atmosphere, the patient resignation of the beggar-man, his harmony with the upland and the lake which form a setting for him, at once suggest Wordsworth; but the details of the poem are so totally different from any conception of Wordsworth’s that a second reading shows the likeness to be superficial. Pascoli is too thoroughly modern in his scientific attitude, notwithstanding his Latin affinities (or perhaps if the matter be well thought out partly in consequence of them), to have many points of contact with any of the early Victorian English poets.

As for the _Myricæ_, the poems are so varied that it is difficult to characterise or to illustrate them. Some of the most individual and attractive—“_Dialogue_” (between sparrows and swallows), “_Hoof-beats_,” and others—are very delicate word-imitations of movements, of sounds, of mental states even: and the verbal imitation is quite inseparable from the conception. The poet himself groups his little “swallow-flights of song” under a number of heads; but is nevertheless constrained to leave many standing alone. Thus we have a set of ten headed “_From Dawn to Sunset_,” in which occurs the “_Hoof-beats_” already mentioned; another group entitled “_Remembrances_” in which is the little poem above quoted on the anniversary of his mother’s death; another headed “_Thoughts_”—short but pregnant reflections of a philosophical character; “_Young Things_”—five tiny pieces which reveal a tender sympathy with young illusions, springing from a deep sense of the contrast between the world of the children and the reality into which they have been born. We may perhaps quote a couple as they emphasize the feeling for contrasts visible in other parts of Pascoli’s work.

FIDES.

When evening was glowing all ruddy,
and the cypresses seemed made of fine gold,
the mother spoke to her boy-child:—
“a whole garden’s up there, made like that.”
The baby sleeps and dreams of golden boughs,
of golden trees, of forests of pure gold:
meanwhile the cypress in the murky night
weeps in the rainstorm, fights against the wind.

ORPHAN.

Slowly the snow falls, flake on flake:
listen, a cradle rocks so gently.
A baby cries, with tiny thumb in mouth;
an old dame sings with chin in hand.
The old dame sings:—“Around thy little bed
roses and lilies grow, a lovely garden.”
The baby in the cradle falls asleep:
the snow falls slowly, flake on flake.

It will be perceived that it is not only the child in age whose illusions are touched on. The wider symbolism is at once apparent.

From the sixteen poems included in “_The Last Walk_,” we may perhaps quote one that illustrates Pascoli’s tendency to parable.

THE DOG.

We, while the world goes on its road
eat out our hearts, and double is our torment,
because it moves, because it moves so slowly.

So, when the lumb’ring waggon passes by
the cottage, and the heavy dray-horse
imprints the soil with thudding hoofs,

the dog springs from the hedgerow, swift as wind,
runs after it, before it; whines and bays.
The waggon has passed onward slowly, slowly;

the dog comes sneezing back to the farm-yard.

“_In the Country_” includes eighteen charming little pieces in which the precision of the poet’s wording reveals itself with striking clearness. One tiny picture we may translate. Each object in it is distinct; and a feeling of aerial perspective is given to it by the long-drawn notes of the _stornello_ which are suggested at its close.

OCTOBER EVENING.

Along the road, see, on the hedge
laugh bunches of red berries;
in the ploughed fields move homewards to the stall
slowly the oxen.

Comes down the road a beggar-man who drags
his slow step through sharp-rustling leaves:
in the fields a maiden raises to the wind her song:
_Flower of the thornbush!_

Two specially charming collections occur under the heading “_Primavera_” and “_Dolcezze_.” One little touch in the latter may perhaps be given.

WITH THE ANGELS.

They were in flower, the lilacs and the olives:
and she sat sewing at a bridal dress:
nor had the air yet opened buds of stars,
nor the mimosa folded yet a leaf,
when she laughed out; yea, laughed, oh small black swallows;
laughed suddenly. But with whom, at what?
She laughed, so, with the angels, with those
clouds of gold, those clouds of rose-colour.

Girls sewing or weaving, it may be remarked in passing, occur often in Pascoli’s verse: one feels in them the pulse of the strong domestic affections that course through the poet’s inner life.

In “_Tristezze_” Nature breathes different suggestions: it has the sweet languidness of a fine autumn day, with recollections of a gentle melancholy. A good many people have written about empty nests; but the touch, in the following quotation, of the feather on the point of being blown away, yet clinging on, is surely individual.

THE NEST.

From the wild rose-bush, just a skeleton,
there hangs a nest. How in the spring
bursts from it, filling all the air,
the twitter of the chattering housemates!

Now there’s but one small feather. At the wooing
of the wind it hesitates, beats lightly;
like to some ancient dream in soul severe
that ever flies and yet is never fled.

And now the eye turns downward from the heavens—
the heavens to which one last full harmony
rose glorious, and died into the air—

and fixes on the earth, on which the leaves
lie rotting; whilst in waves the wind
weeps through the lonely country.

We must not close this most inadequate notice of the _Myricæ_ without mentioning the refined tenderness of one of the closing poems, too long to quote, entitled “_Colloquio_.” The poet’s mother, a figure of infinite sweetness, mute and shadowy, yet real, revisits the familiar house-places with her son; and a few incidental touches put before us an idyllic sketch of the home with its plants and the two housewifely sisters, so different in character.

As a contrast to the details of the _Myricæ_ we may here quote a poem that appeared (December 1897) in the _Nuova Antologia_. Breadth of silent space has as great a fascination for Pascoli as have the tender details of home and country life. He had already in one of the “_Poemetti_” dwelt with longing on the northern regions whither the wild swans fly, where the _aurora borealis_ lights up the infinite polar gloom, where mountains of eternal ice rest on the sea as on a pavement; and Andrée’s balloon expedition to the Pole especially fired his imagination. The poem that bears the traveller’s name was written when, after long silence, there was a report that human cries had been heard on the Sofjord. In the Italian, the first part, broken by questionings and doubtings has an effect of uncertainty, like the uneasy straining of the balloon at its rope; from it the second part rises with a sure, strong leap and sinks gently at the end.

ANDRÉE.

I.

No, no. The voice borne faint athwart the gloomy
air from the realms of ice, like human cries,
was but the petrel’s screech,
that loves the lonely rocks, the storms
unheard. Or maybe (was it not like children’s
wailing?) maybe the sea-gull’s.
A sound uplifts itself of wailful limboes
far in remotest shade untrodden:
that is the gulls, they say. Or divers, maybe?
Or the skua? Perhaps the skua—for when it flies
above the icefields, from a thousand nests
rises a strident cry; since with it draws a-near
Death’s self. Or was’t vain voiceless crying
in thine own heart? Nay, but the look-out heard them;
and in the look-out’s ear thou trustest.
Yea, but ’twas, sure, the roar of breakers,
crashing of rocks, howling of wind, the pant
of storms far off, yet nearing,
the sky, the sea, oh Norman seafarer!

II.

Andrée was’t not. Centaur, to whose swift course
the cloud is mud, the empty wind firm ground,
towards the Great Bear he flew.
Followed his flight the hornèd elks at first;
then no one more; so that there was at last
but his great heart beating above the Pole.
For he had reached the confines of the evening,
and on the Polar peak immovable
stood, as on rock black eagle.
High overhead the ocean’s star burnt on
pendent, eternal lamp—
and in the lofty shadow seemed to sway.
And fixèd on his heart saw he, from this
wave, and from that, of every savage sea,
amid the calm, amid the roar of the tempest,
millions of eyes illumèd in the ray
that burned above his head; and instantly
cried he to all those eyes of that vast mirage
_I reach my goal!_