men now writing circumspectly of the problems, the developments, and the collective movement of Italian literature, the late Ruggero Bonghi (whom we specify as a representative critic) did not realize that the so-called "pagan" or "barbaric" movement headed by Carducci was, and is, one of those inevitable life-seeking movements which periodically occur in every literature, when old ways have become outworn; or, again, that a regenerative movement of this kind may have to turn backward in order to rediscover the forward way. A large part, possibly the greater and the more vital part, of contemporary Italian literature turns thus upon an apparently retrograde way, turns upon what is called the classical revival. The famous veteran at Bologna is its асcepted leader. But neither Carducci nor his adherents (who now comprise nearly all the younger writers of note) attempt a revival of the kind so often imputed. It is not mere imitation of the past that is the end in view, but, by discreetly following the same avenues of art as those by which the great poets of old reached their goal, to reach in turn the same or a still higher goal. To this end it was necessary to break away from the conventions which had so hampered, not to say devitalized, modern Italian literature. It was not thought or inspiration only that had to grow new wings; not poetry only, but metre itself had to shed its old chrysalis and break into a new life. In every new intellectual movement the feature of exaggeration is inevitable; without exaggeration no new energy is likely to force its way. It was long, and to some extent still is, the wont in Italy to impute to Carducci an almost perverse exaggeration, not only as to his intellectual standpoint (that of a modern man consistently looking backward), or as to his lifelong effort to recreate in the Italian vernacular the dignity and beauty of the vernacular of Horace and Catullus, but as to wilful obscurity in point of metrical diction. The obscurity of Carducci is not that of congested thought and crowded images, as in Browning; nor that of the dazzle of continual byplay, as in George Meredith; nor again that of careful and calculated occultism, as in Mallarmé. It is rather the "obscurity" of extreme light, such as that which the earliest critics of Leconte de Lisle, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Baudelaire and Hérédia, found in the classically pure diction of those writers. Carducci has little in common with writers like Mallarmé, with whom he is often ignorantly compared. He is rather the Italian confrère of Leconte de Lisle, of José Maria Hérédia, but is more "human," more of his day and hour, than the supreme French classicist in verse, and has a spiritual earnestness alien to the cold beauty of M. Hérédia's "perfected ivory." At the same time it cannot be denied that, both in remote allusion and in calculated Latinity of diction, he is occasionally pedantic; and it would be easy to cull from his writings lines and even quatrains or passages which would justify the complaint frequently heard in Italy that "Carducci is difficult, often even unintelligible.” Then, too, his Italian is so far from colloquial that even when clear to a compatriot it is difficult to render adequately in English, for sometimes the difference is a constitutional difference of racial genius as well as of speech, as, to choose at random an instance, the final quatrain of the lovely poem, "Su Monte Mario": Su le rovine de la basilica Di Zeno al sole sibili il colubro, Ancor canterai nel deserto I tedi insonni de l'infinito. But these occasional defects are mere specks on the polished mirror of Carducci's poetry, at once so beautiful, so distinguished, so antique, so modern, the only poetry of to-day which can be compared with that of Leconte de Lisle and Alfred de Vigny, with that of the poet's greater predecessors, above all with that of his chosen master, Catullus. Every great poet is in a sense a metrical inventor; and, with the exception of Mr. Swinburne, there is no living master of metre, particularly of classical metres, comparable with Giosuè Carducci. In a word, it is not by their exaggerations that we are to judge Carducci and the writers who follow his lead, or the intellectual fellowships typified by Antonio Fogazzaro, Arturo Graf, Ada Negri, Giovanni Pascoli, or Gabriele D'Annunzio and the D'Annunzieggianti. All these have to be judged by their range of thought, the object of their aim, and their actual achievement. The student of Italian literature, therefore, will do well to put aside as irrelevant nearly all that he reads or hears as to the "pseudo-classicism" of Carducci and the rest who participate in that vital movement at the head of which he stands. For it is a movement of life, not of an artificially stimulated erudition; a movement of fresh energy, not a spurred effort. It is in truth part of a "movement," of an uplifted life that is not confined to this or that leader and his following, nor to Italy, nor even to the Latin countries, but is co-extensive with the human mind. Already, we perceive, Italy has left behind the conditions indicated by Lamartine in a once notorious passage of the "Pèlerinage d'Harold," where she is alluded to as Poussière du passé, qu'un vent stérile agite, a phrase which, with the added "Je vais chercher ailleurs . . . des hommes et non pas de la poussière hu maine," brought the French poet a "cartel" from an indignant Italian patriot, the once celebrated General Pepe. In a broad classification, then, as already indicated, Antonio Fogazzaro and Arturo Graf stand for the North, Giosuè Carducci and Giovanni Pascoli for the Centre (and this not only in the geographical sense), and Gabriele D'Annunzio for the South, as well as for that neo-paganism, neoHellenism, and very modern (and, we may add, world-old) hedonism which too often is the dignified verbal raiment of a very unworthy thing, generally more crudely designated. But, Although Fogazzaro and Graf are the most distinctive of the northerners, they differ materially. The elder and more famous is the François Millet of Italian literature, but a Millet of a far wider intellectual and æsthetic range than the great Frenchman. The pathos and dignity of suffering, of sorrow, of the heavy burden bravely borne; the nobility of faith and courage; the beauty of simplicity in life and art; the charm of tenderness and the sustaining power of love -these are the sources of this writer's genius, both in prose and verse. pure as is his Italian, virile and idiomatic, the color of his mind is distinctively northern, Teutonic. So might a Scandinavian, an Englishman, a German, write, were he equally gifted, and were he an adopted Italian, settled in that northern Alpine region of the lakes, so well loved, sung, and praised by Fogazzaro. That gentle but allpervading melancholy of his, too-so different from the disdainful stoicism of Carducci, the baffled despair of writers such as Ada Negri, the lifeweariness of Graf, the ennui of D'Annunzio, the hard pessimism of Rapisardi and Verga-is likewise northern. But it would be a mistake to think of Fogazzaro as a sentimentalist, not withstanding the some of his work. sentimentality of He stands for what is finest in the Italian nature; and the love and reverence in which he is held afford the best proof of his high significance in contemporary literature. "Valsolda" (in whose beautiful valley he has passed the better part of his life) has become a signal-word in Italy, for it is now identified with some of the loveliest verse and much of the noblest prose of the day, is, indeed, associated with a noble personal ideal, the ideal of a simple, strong, much-suffering, yet ever brave and serene life. "Our Walter Scott," Giacosa has called Antonio Fogazzaro. But he, too, like Arturo Graf— though not as a fascinated victim, rather as one greatly dreading yet sustained by faith-has looked at times overfearfully in the face of that new tragic muse of the modern world, "Madre Dolorosa." In his remarkable study on "Sadness in Art," Fogazzaro writes: 5 Senza tenerezza, senza fiamma . . . la potenza sua fascinatrice è nella grandiosità del suo dolore stesso, è l'idea pura, fatta marmo, dell' universale dolore, del dolore che oscura presto o tradi ogni vita umana. The words have the color of Fogazzaro's mind, and show, as a tinted map, the color of a vast region in the Italian thought of to-day. In the same essay he speaks of "la innocenza magnifica della natura"; but he and those of his spiritual fellowship trust little to this "magnificent innocence," and for the most part look habitually into life, not only as in a glass darkly, but as into a dark pool, heavy with the shadow of ancient sorrow and obscure menace. True, Fogazzaro is not a pessimist; he has not the steel-bound gloom of Graf, whose impeccable verse is forged rather than moulded. But 5 Il Dolore nell' Arte." (Milan, 1901.) "A. Fogazzaro. La Sua Vita, le Sue Opere, i in his poems and novels, notably in "Il Mistero del Poeta," and in the excellent monograph on his life-work by Sebastiano Rumor, and, above all, in his always intimate and profoundly sincere "addresses"-as, for example, when he spoke in Rome in 1893 on "The Origin of Man and the Religious Sentiment," or, recently, at the Collegio Romano, on "I Misteri dello Spirito Umano"-a deep and native melancholy pervades even the most ardent words of faith and hope, and underlies all but the sunniest and most debonair of his poems. Nevertheless, his influence is wholly for good-the foremost moral influence now moulding Young Italy. Seldom is the biographer more literally truthful than Sebastiano Rumor in writing, "In tutta Italia il nome di Antonio Fogazzaro, poeta e romanziere, è riverito ed amato." Though all the poetry of Fogazzaro is worth familiarity (particularly for those who feel the underlying charm of his prose romances), the foreign reader may be content with the "Selected Poems," published in Milan in 1898; the more so as it is not in the longer poetical compositions, such as the versified novel "Miranda," but in the shorter poems that he is to be found at his best. One of these, a poem representative of the author's mastery over the cadence of simple Italian prosody, may fitly be quoted here: LA SERA. (Le Campane di Oria) (Le Campane di Osteno) Pur noi su l' onde Moviam da queste solitarie sponde Voci profonde. Suoi Critici." By Sebastiano Rumor. (Milan, 1896.) Da gli spiriti mali, Oriamo. (Le Campane di Furia) Pur noi remote ed alte Fra le buie montagne Odi, Signore. Da gli spiriti mali Guarda i mortali! Oriamo. (Echi delle Valli) Oriamo. (Tutte le Campane) Il lume nasce e muore; Che riman dei tramonti e delle aurore? Tutto, Signore, Tranne l'Eterno, al mondo E vano. (Echi delle Valli) E vano. (Tutte le Campane) Oriamo, oriamo in pianto, Pei morti e pei viventi, Per tanta colpa occulta e dolor tanto Pietà, Signore! Tutto il dolore Che non ti prega, Tutto l'errore Che ti diniega, Tutto l'amore Che a te non piega, (Echi delle Valli) O Santo. (Tutte le Campane) Oriam per i dormienti Del cimitero Che dicon rei, che dicono innocenti, 7 Evening. (The Bells of Oria)-In the west the heavens redden; the hour of darkness comes. From all evil spirits, Lord, guard Thy children. Let us pray! (The Bells of Osteno)-We also, by the waters lift up our deep voices from these lonely shores. From all evil spirits, Lord, guard Thy children. Let us pray! (The Bells of Furia) -Us, too, remote and high among the shadowy hills, hear us, Lord! From all evil spirits guard Thy children. Let us pray! (Echoes from the Valleys)-Let us pray! (All the Bells)-The light is born, and dies; what remains of sunsets or dawns? All, Lord, all of this world, all save the eternal, is vain. (Echoes from the Valleys)-Is vain! (All the Bells)-Let pray, let us pray, from mountain-height and shadowy vale, for the living and for the dead, us There is perhaps no stranger apparition in contemporary Italian literature than Arturo Graf. Called the Hérédia of Italy, because of the classic ideal and impeccable form of his verse, he is the son of an Italian mother by a German father. He was born at Athens, nurtured in Greece-that Greece whose art he has mastered, but whose temperament he has not inherited, having been endowed instead with the world-sadness of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche-and transplanted while still young to Roumania, whence in early manhood he came to Milan. In the insensity of his irremediable pessimism he can be compared with no French poet save the anonymous author of the "Chants de Maldoror," with no English poet save James Thomson of "The City of Dreadful Night"; and nothing in the for all secret wrong and sorrow, have pity, Lord! All sorrow that doth not come to Thee in prayer, all error that denieth Thee, all love that doth not seek Thee, have pity upon it, O Holy One! (Echoes from the Valleys)- Holy One! (All the Bells)-Let us pray for those sleeping the long sleep of the grave; for those who are accounted sinners, and for those ac counted without sin! For Thou alone, Mysterious Spirit, Thou only knowest all. (Echoes from the Valleys)-Thou only knowest all. (All the Bells)-Let us implore for the deep suffering of the world, which lives and feels, loves and grieves, the hidden judgment of the Almighty. Let there be peace upon the hill-side, by the waters! On the bells themselves, peace! (Echo from the Valleys)-Peace! fantastically sombre verse of Nietz- E una dolce a me in cuor tristezza sche suggests the same profound depths of gloom. But Graf's terrible sadness, his almost elemental melancholy, has never the suggestion of anything ignoble, as in "Maldoror" or Baudelaire; it is never the mere rhetoric of spiritual collapse and despair, as sometimes in James Thomson; nor is it the outcome of intellectual fever, or of the tortured nerves, or of a powerful mind habitually apt to lose its equilibrium, as with the author of "Thus spake Zarathustra." He gathers up all the hopelessness of Italy, of the world, of the human soul; moulds it in tears and longing, and the unutterable sadness of sorrow without hope; and reveals it to us in lovely image after image, in chiselled verse of perfect form, in a beauty rendered almost unnaturally poignant. In a far deeper sense than the somewhat blatant "Lucifer" of Mario Rapisardi, than the magnificently rhetorical "Hymn to Satan" of Carducci, Graf's "Buried Titan" (in the very remarkable poem "La Cittá dei Titani," in the volume called "Le Danaidi") may be said to symbolize the bewildered attitude of the modern mind. So absolutely does he differ from the Latin temperament that he remains cold even before the inspiration of woman. Neither the beautiful actuality nor the seductive visionary type moves this modern St Anthony. In all his writings we remember no verse in the slightest degree recalling these eminently Carduccian lines (from "Ruit Hora," perhaps the loveliest poem in the first "Odi Barbare"): Fra le tue nere chiome, o bianca Lidia, Langue una rosa pallida; In thy dark hair, O white Lidia, a pale rose languishes; in my heart suddenly a sweet sadness softens the flame of love. O longed-for green solitude, far from the rumor of men; hither have come with us Our two divine friends, Wine and Love, O Lidia. 10 Near by was a garden, sad and austere; for subita Tempra d'amor gl' incendii Nor has he ever any such cry to the lesser destinies as- O desïata verde solitudine If once or twice we think we hear the cry of passion, it is only that of disillusion or brooding incertitude. O woman, the darkness in thine eyes is the darkness of night; Thy soul, too, is obscure and mysteri ous as the sea, as this obscure sea Which engulfs in its flowing side the plunging prow. I see thy dark hair; in thy pale, beautiful face I see the wandering fires of thine eyes; I see thy laughter-parted rosy lips; But into thy soul, into that darkness, no, I do not see. And yet this is the poet who, in his beautiful reminiscences ("Dal Libro dei Ricordi"), writes thus of his dear home at the foot of the slope where the Parthenon rears its sacred outline ("la dolce casa . . . sulla altero il Partenon drizza la mole"): cui cima sacra Avea presso un giardin, triste e severo, Benchè di rose pieno e di viole, E un gran cipresso, avviluppato e nero, Aduggiava di fredda ombra le ajuole. V' era, pien d'acqua, e di figure adorno, Un sarcofago antico, alla cui sponda Alto silenzio tenea l' aria intorno, all that it was full of roses and violets; perhaps because of the great cypress, a pyramid of green darkness, which cast its chill shadow athwart the garden-ways. There, too, with carven figures and full of water, stood an antique sarcophagus, where the swallows loved to dip and drink. |