celebrated and repulsive man. His invective has something of Biblical quality:

"Il vociférait comme un prophète antique, d'une voix furieuse, sous le ciel étoilé, criant, avec une rage de désespéré, la honte glorifiée de toutes les maîtresses des vieux monarques, la honte respectée de toutes les vierges qui acceptent des vieux époux, la honte tolérée de toutes le jeunes femmes qui cueillent, souriantes, des vieux baisers.

Je les voyais, depuis la naissance du monde, évoquées, appelées par lui, surgissant autour de nous dans cette nuit d'Orient, les filles, les belles filles à l'âme vile qui, comme les bêtes ignorant l'âge du mâle, furent dociles à des désirs séniles. Elles se levaient, servantes des patriarches chantées par la Bible! Agar, Ruth, les filles de Loth, la bonne Abigail, la vierge de Sennaar, qui de ses caresses ranimait David agonisant, et toutes les autres, jeunes, grasses, blanches, patriciennes ou plébéiennes, irresponsables femelles d'un maître, chair d'esclave soumise, éblouie ou payée ! "

And Maupassant, because he is a poet, although he knows nothing but matter and sense, and portrays nothing but the obscure tremblings of matter and the spasms of the senses, yet employs so much objective truth in his portrayal, that he makes present the ethical ideal, by means of pain, pity and displeasure; by means of the comical and laughter, the superiority of the sagacious intelligence; by means of desolation and desperation, the claim of religion. I see quite clearly why Tolstoi separated him at once from all the French artists of his time and held him to be moral in spite of appearances. He is moral in his

results, and his most audacious tales leave behind them an impression of purity, just because, as has been said, he is a poet. He distinguishes himself and emerges from the company of his contemporaries and compatriots, the Zolas, Daudets and their like, themselves endowed with noteworthy qualities and possessors of certain artistic forms, but not fundamentally and essentially poetical like him. Such he truly was born, pouring forth poetry with potent facility and consuming his short life. He entered and left the literary world (as he himself one day remarked when he was already infirm and meditating suicide) "like a meteor.”

XXV

CARDUCCI

I SHALL Conclude this series of notes with the name of Giosue Carducci. Some years ago I devoted an ample study to the consideration of his works, seeking the genesis, character and the various forms and periods of his poetry and examining his work as a historian and a critic. I have nothing now to change or to add to the portrait which I lovingly drew at that time, and consequently no reason to return to what has already been said. But I take the opportunity offered to me by these essays in European literature of the nineteenth century to reaffirm the place and the rank which belongs to Carducci in the ensemble of this literature, and to protest against common opinion which still looks upon him as little more than a respectable man of letters and an Italian patriot, worthy of the veneration of his fellowcountrymen but not such an one as to arouse interest in wider circles. He is in fact regarded as not really possessing the mind of a genius, as a poet of slender inspiration, a learned imitator of the ancient classics and of certain modern French and German poets. And since I have seen in some foreign reviews, in relation to what I have written about Manzoni and Balzac, the suspicion expressed that I have allowed myself to be carried away (these are the very words) by "the propagandist tendency to magnify the Italian

genius," I shall candidly say (and at the risk of being judged too candid) that when writing about philosophy and history I permit myself to be and to remain always free from political or national feelings. To conduct myself otherwise would seem to me shocking, because spiritual greatness is neither created nor destroyed by "propaganda " (as people believed to be possible during the war), and one only succeeds in destroying one's own seriousness and in finding oneself at last at variance with oneself. How and to what extent Carducci is known and appreciated outside Italy I shall not stay to expose, nor shall I offer a conclusion as to the obstacles big or little which oppose themselves to a greater diffusion of his work, nor shall I express hopes and anticipations as to their ⚫ removal. Poetical beauty, like philosophical truth, remains sound, whether it be known to few or to many, and speaking deeply, even where there are many who admire and who praise, there are always few who understand, and these alone have the full right of admiring and of praising. My present remarks are directed to those who know. Greater or lesser success, louder or lighter resonance of praise, vary with the variation of the times and with social conditions. It is an affair which concerns not that poetry or that philosophy, but the virtues and deficiencies, the wants and dispositions of that society and of those times. Even in Italy to-day, Carducci's poetry does not possess the soul of the new generations, which esteem that they give evidence of their exquisitely profound reactions from art by looking down upon the work of the rugged Bolognese professor not without disdain. And this is not the problem of Carducci, but entirely that of the new

generations and of the ethical and æsthetic discipline to which they should be submitted, with the view also of forming in them a more serious national and patriotic sentiment, which cannot exist without reverence for tradition and for history, and which thus understood, does not lead to a narrow nationalism, but to the vigilant care of an ideal patrimony to preserve, and links itself with a like care in the case of other nations. Exoticism, which is justly feared, is not so save when it acts capriciously, cutting off tradition; and when this base is widened, it should not be called exoticism, but (as Goethe well said) Weltliteratur.

So much by way of preface, but what, it may be asked, do I mean by the words "position and rank • to be assigned to Carducci in the European literature of the nineteenth century?" Something very simple. If we hold firmly to the criterion of what is pure poetry, classical poetry, and by the light of this regard the thousands of authors who arose in Europe in the course of that century, those thousands are thinned out and only a few dozens remain, a few dozen free intelligences, each one with his own physiognomy but all illumined with the common light of poetry. These alone should compose, in their various groupings and attitudes, the picture of that literature. The list is short too in our day of writers who can be described as great," yet nonpoets and feeble poets are usually mingled in it with the real ones short as it is, and the place of the real poets is sometimes filled by those who enjoyed fame and power for other reasons and owing to other qualities. Now in the case of the most rigorous selection (towards the making of which the brief