lurking in the depths of his heart, shows that he is, in reality, far removed from the poignancy of Heine's: 'Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen ' Love appears in Carducci's poetry neither as a divinity nor as a symbol, but simply as a sensuous enjoyment to be placed beside other pleasures, as a bassarid in Bacchus' train. His Delias, Lydias, and Lalages are not abstractions—indeed, they are too obviously flesh and blood; they are not objects of immortal passion, but instances of bonnes fortunes. As Carducci penitently wrote to his wife after a quarrel: 'Le altre 'sono cose fuggitive, per fantasia, per chiasso.' This explains his easy passage from the pagan ecstasies of the glittering 'Primavera Dorica' and the bacchic' Ruit Hora' to mockironic regrets after Heine or the petulance of 'Alla Stazione,' where the poet describes a farewell at a railway station in alcaics that are a tour de force of versification. Carducci preserved his serenity in love; the passionate exhibition of a bleeding heart to the world seemed to him nothing but a morbid and decadent fashion, as he humorously proclaimed in the 'Intermezzo.' Carducci kept his dear heart' severely to himself, or he spoke of it with a playful smile as in the Idillio Maremmano' and 'Davanti San Guido.' These two beautiful poems express more sweetly than any the wistful tenderness with which he regarded the place of his childhood: their beauty, moreover, is due to a delicate personal emotion, perfectly suggested; but when the poet speaks of himself, he masks his shyness in an embarrassed irony imitated from Heine, which seems to waft into the peaceful atmosphere of the rolling Maremma, where the double row of cypresses goes down to Bolgheri, and where 'Nonna Lucia' told her fairy tale, an acrid breath that is vaguely unpleasant. Only in two poems has Carducci completely put off this shyness: in the proud ode on his daughter's marriage, when he muses on the years that have passed since he first beat 'on the gates of the future,' and in the short elegy, 'Pianto 'Antico,' which bears witness to the bitter tragedy of his life, the death of his three-year-old son. Here indeed is poignancy of feeling, the utter misery of personal bereavement, which compels the poet to call mankind to come and see if VOL. CCXIX. NO. CCCCXLVIII. 2 c there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow. Then indeed from his great grief he made a little song, yet it was in no Heinesque attitude that he threw aside his reserve: rather, he laid bare his heart, inconsolable, unconquered, with the calm despair of the Greek Anthology. 'L'albero a cui tendevi La pargoletta mano, Nel muto orto solingo Te fior de la mia pianta Sei ne la terra fredda, This is the real Carducci, in whose eyes all the psychological heritage of modern civilisation, from Rousseau onwards, was but a tasteless decoration obscuring the pure classical grace of poetry's temple. He took the form of his art from the great masters of Italian poetry, but the form of his thought, though it was strictly conditioned by the circumstances of his time, came from Horace and Virgil, from Homer and the Greek tragedians. Herein lies a double obstacle to his universal appreciation. Acting on his poetic theory, 'Sol nel passato è 'il bello,' he consciously broke from the development of European thought, and urged by this very antagonism and by his irredentist nationalism he reflected, as a rule, not the universe, not all mortality, but the particular state of a particular nation. Critics of a newer generation have already espied the limits of Carducci's genius. They point out that he ignored the elementary inspirations of the lyrist, such as passion and pain, that he was no philosopher, that much of his work was below the highest standard, that there is often artificiality in the erudition of his historical odes. Such criticism is true so far as it goes. A poet reaches universality in two chief ways: either by delineating with convincing purity of line the passions of all humanity, or by rising from a particular feeling to an all-embracing conception of ultimate truth. Heine and Catullus were universal in the one way, Dante in the other, Shakespeare in both, but Carducci seldom in either. His antipathy to romantic egotism barred to him the first way, his hatred for mysticism the second. Thus admirers of Carducci cannot be indignant with his critics, since their particular judgments may be admitted while their adverse conclusions are rejected. It is, moreover, futile to insist, as a defence, on the value of Carducci's classicism in stemming an unhealthy literary tendency, or on the historic greatness of the poet who fulfilled the imperious needs of his time in reforming literary taste. The only questions to ask are whether, in spite of his historical preoccupation, his psychological shyness, and his economy of emotion, he was a true poet and whether he wrote beautiful poetry. These questions can be answered with an emphatic affirmative. Apart from all consideration of content, Carducci was a master of form. Nowhere in all Italian poetry is greater perfection to be found, whether it be in rhyme or in the classical metres of the Odi Barbare.' The gusty vapourings that arose over the 'Odi Barbare' have now completely died down, and there is no need to discuss at length these reproductions of Horatian metres. Carducci solved the problem of adaptation with extraordinary completeness, and it may be suggested that this part of his work should find especial appreciation in England, where the classics still play so great a part in education. Nobody who admires Horace can withhold his admiration from the Odes of Carducci, for in both there is the same dignity, sonority, and terseness of expression. Criticism cannot say more than that all the metres are not proved equally adaptable. The sapphic, the alcaic, and the third asclepiad are perfect instruments for Tuscan verse, so is the elegiac distich; the pythiambic and archilochian metres fail. On the other hand, Carducci constructed some beautiful combinations of his own. Nothing could be more lovely than the quatrains of 'Colli 'toscani, e voi pacefiche selve d'olivi,' where three hexameters are followed by an iambic trimeter; or than the scheme of Press Tta Sea's two rhymed Ionics a minore VEČ NE D'un of a semant straccicio (the ottomari ng trung the form stanzas. By Cardon does not only chant the solemn music of Rome; st ter as prore melody goes he can bold his own with any more see dots poet of to-day The Visione already quoted, Cam: á MerzoMammata and Notte di Maggio' ma f the ncbet harmony. Carford at his best is benzer mi ar 7. He is passionate in his very archaism, and be amwas the more primitive personal emotions, ten in her emotaces of pity, of patriotism, of reverence, i va be scars to a versality neither pathetic nor pal expand but plasto-the versality of the Parthenon I the Tamed Victory. 1 Carducci had been an exile, wandering and persecuted if a great passion of the heart had been the religion had stirred his soul, he would have Wendy more baly, but in no case could tes of bereavement have wrung from the poet's beat & more brou cry the 'Planto Antico.' It can hardly be monemed that sach poetry should die, though much of Carers work is not at coce compelling. Yet even if I samé de the poet bas let us know that he viewed such a possibly serenely. Secure in the success of his struggle with the present, be locked upon the future with such large hope that instead of thanting a triumphant 'Exegi monube contemplated with equanimity his extinction a the giendoms of posterity: Esme del mu lavoro poetico rimarrà a pena qualche scaglia, e suc a corredo à modemode se mase della storia letteraria: nè é the blegur me to embero e per sempre anche nell' arte da me retrosamente veerata sento a dir vero, dolore ed orrore } 125 per a coscenza che bo quello che fu e sarà grande, guardo marble sal and dela ma ragione a cotesto dissolvimento, e in cospecto al eta augurate sosporo anch' io, come l'antico santo: Jaga issime & isse cum Christ." ORLO WILLIAMS. MAGIC OR RELIGION? The Golden Bough. By J. G. FRAZER. In Seven Parts. Third edition. Macmillan. 1910-13. WENTY-THREE years ago a handsome pair of volumes TWE was offered to the learned world by a scholar of the highest academic credentials. Naturally, the book was received with every mark of respect. If a serious student of the classics-one who might aspire eventually to produce a standard commentary on a text-chose to amuse himself with folklore, well and good. But that this was a revolutionary manifesto, an heretical tract for the times, no one suspected for an instant. Otherwise, in sheer self-preservation, the united body of the erudite might well have treated the author of these disturbing speculations as a backslider and an outcast. Another school of thought, of course, there was, which might perhaps be expected to provide sanctuary for the offender. Tylor and the other anthropologists would realise that European folklore, with its corollaries bearing on the classics, was no child's play, no idle occupation of a winter's evening, but matter for sober science, something capable of being elaborately explained in terms of savages and survivals. As it was, however, official anthropology was at first inclined to stand aloof. This seemed to be literary rather than truly scientific work. The author might have rendered the spirit of our old wives' tales very nicely. But had he hobnobbed with cannibals, had he measured heads at the risk of losing his own, had he, in fact, spent a single working day outside the four walls of his study, so as to learn how to discriminate between the smell of his lamp and the genuine reek of uncultivated humanity? Tylor's revelations in regard to the primitive mind were not, after all, excessively startling. Animism, to be sure, proved a freakish affair when carried to extremes. Yet most people believe in souls and spirits to some extent. Or again, that a sacrifice is typically a gift, or that prayer in its earliest form is just such a request as might be addressed to a great chief—all this verged on the obvious for anyone who had studied his Old |