sketched village characters, his sister, his memories-these, used again and again, always with simplicity, sweetness, and frank enjoyment, are Pascoli's poetic subjects. A world of small, vivid, present actualities, a child's world. And presented, as we realize on reflection, with almost a child's want of discrimination. Dogs, flowers and human beings are in the same plane. The likeness is not accidental; for when in 1907, completing a study he had published in part ten years earlier, he issued his literary manifesto, stated his poetic platform, its core and center was precisely the statement that the poet's world is the child's world.

So the poet who was said by Stevenson to have died young in all of us is a little child, a fanciullino, as Pascoli calls him. And what things interest him? Not romantic love, certainly, nor his own psychology, nor philosophy. It is external objects that attract him, especially the near and the little; and these, according to Pascoli, are the subjectmatter of your true poet. Homer, says Pascoli, was such a poet. We are to think of him as an old blind man whom a little child led by the hand. The child tells him what it sees, and he sings of it. It is not love," says Pascoli, in a long passage in which he describes the fanciullino, "it is not women, however fair and goddess-like, that interest little children, but bronze shields and war-chariots and distant journeys and storms at sea. So such things were recounted to Homer by his fanciullino, and he made his report in his own infantile speech. He returned from villages perhaps no more distant than the hamlet which lies up nearest the shepherds on the mountainside; but he talked of it to other children who had never been there at all. He talked at length, with enthusiasm, telling the particulars one after another, omitting nothing. For to him everything that he had seen appeared new and beautiful, and it seemed to him must appear to his auditors beautiful and new. He was always engraving upon his discourse a mark to know each thing by. He would say that the ships were black, that they had their prows painted, that the sea was of diverse colors, was always in motion, was salty, was foamy. So as not to be misunderstood, he would repeat the same thought under another form, and say,' very little, by no means much,'

He can never be too clear: The chicks were eight, nine with the mother, who had made the chicks." For the blind man's fanciullino did not seek to do himself honor, but only

to be understood; he never exaggerated, because the facts which he recounted seemed to him wonderful enough just as they were."

His Homeric fanciullino had a profound influence upon Pascoli's language. For if one sets out to present as many objects as a child sees, one must have names for them, and Pascoli found Italian poetry still bound under the classical tradition of a "poetic " vocabulary. Specific words, names of things familiar to prose, were excluded. There had been some argument on this before Pascoli. D'Amicis had recommended, in a volume on language (L'idioma gentile), that young poets study the special vocabularies of the carpenter's shop and the smithy, of the garden and the dairy and the kitchen; and Croce had attacked this theory very bitterly, asking if it were intended that young Italians should become cooks in order to become poets. But few English readers will disagree with Pascoli's desire to extend the vocabulary of poetry. Indeed, one of the great difficulties at first for the English reader of Italian verse (with the bright exception of Dante) is its too generalized vocabulary. Even such personal lyrists as Petrarch and Leopardi, although they deal minutely with their own psychology, generalize external objects to excess. Once, it is true, Leopardi does specify roses and violets as combined in the nosegay of his village beauty, and Pascoli maliciously inquires whether we are to suppose Leopardi believed them to be in blossom at the same season.

Now Pascoli was not a stranger to anything that bloomed or sang near his study. From his books might be compiled a manual of the flora and fauna of the Lunigiana. His bird names defy the Italian Unabridged, perhaps even the Italian bird books. As a reviewer said of the late Madison Cawein, he" wrote with exactness of dittany and the yellow puckworth [or their Italian equivalents] of mallow, ironweed, bluet and jewel-weed, the cohosh, oxalis and Indian pipe." To be sure, he overdid his search for the mot juste; he ransacked the dialects of all the localities where he lived, borrowed from the queer Americanized Italian of returned emigrants, and invented onomatopoetic vocabularies for the birds and the frogs, for pots and pans and brooms, for the bicycle-bell and the church-bell, and was driven at last to insert glossaries in his volumes of verse. But English readers, since the Romantic Movement banished our own classical

canon, are not to be abashed by the homely, and it is hard for us to sympathize with Croce's rather savage criticism of Pascoli's use in poetry of the Bolognese dialect form of his own name Giovanni-Zvanì. It occurs in the poem entitled The Voice, wherein he tells how his mother's remembered voice at critical moments has recalled him to duty by speaking in his ear his pet-name, "Zvanì." What, says Croce, use a trivial dialect word to represent the high speech of the dead? He thinks it almost irreverent, certainly in bad taste. Yet Dante does not disdain to repeat fragments of baby-talk in the august circles of the Inferno; and if our dead came back to us speaking only the stately idiom of Heaven, would they not more embarrass us than comfort?

Such, then, is Pascoli's theory of poetry, and at first thought it is a seductive one. The fanciullino describes what it sees-describes the beautiful externals of the world and the minute things of the hearthside, and we remember and are glad. But on second thought we remember how many things we are interested in that our fanciullino knows nothing of. Love and philosophy do interest us; are we to hear nothing of them in our poetry? No, says Pascoli, love is not poetic, but dramatic, and he cites as an example Roland, who in Roland Enamoured is merely dramatic, not poetic as he was in the old French epic. Very true. But the difference lies less in the subject-matter than in the manner of presenting it. Thuroldus the minstrel was in earnest, Boiardo in the same degree was not. And we may argue that the analogy with Homer breaks down at the same point. He sang of a world that was comparatively new to everybody, to auditors who had not yet seen it reflected in literature. He had the delight of giving things their first literary shape. To name them in poetry for the first time was in some measure to create them. He and his hearers were all young together, as young as the fanciullino. But for a modern poet to strive to denude himself of all we have since acquired of sophistication and sublety, to try consciously to be as naïve as Homer, is to adopt so limited a point of view as to make himself almost a poseur. Is this what Croce meant, perhaps, by the breath of insincerity? At any rate, it partly explains that form of insincerity, sentimentality, for whose presence we were prepared. For if we rule out from the realm of poetry passion and thought, we must throw an undue weight of feeling into the more purely idyllic aspects of human life

-family affection, childhood, the sweet minutiae of country life. More emotion will find its way into such things than they will hold. It is clear that if we are to have poetry written exclusively by the fanciullino, it must be small in scope. Very beautiful in kind, no doubt; it might have included the Faerie Queene, "Tiger, tiger, burning bright!" SnowBound, The Lake Isle of Innisfree; but the fanciullino could never have written the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, Adonaïs, The Hound of Heaven, or The Blot in the Scutcheon. Matthew Arnold, Milton, Austin Dobson, to name but three, could hardly have written at all if they had had to listen to their fanciullino, for it is much to be doubted whether they had one. The fanciullino could not write dramatic poetry, nor meditative poetry, nor love poetry; he could not even write lyric poetry, because for this it is not enough to be personal: one must be personal about one's emotions, and Pascoli is content to remember incidents without telling, as Petrarch did, how they made him feel. "All recollection," he says in one of his prefaces, "is poetry. Poetry is only recollection." But in such a poem as A Memory, it is more than recollection, it is " total recall." For the fanciullino is no artist; his memory is no more selective than a child's. Even in A Memory the translator would prefer to suppress certain lines as being too strained, too sentimental. What is an English translator to make of a line of blank verse which runs: "No, no! Papa! No, no! Papa! No, no!" Or take this poem, The Elder Sister, written of Margherita, who died at sixteen:

She rocked to sleep the baby brother,

She mended what the rest had torn;
She knew not, little maiden-mother,
How we are born.

She'd sit and careful stitches set,
In her small corner, busy, wise,

For babies Mother was to get
From the skies.

But now the sparrows chirp their lay
Around a little cross near by,

For well she learned, poor child, one day

How we die.

'Allowing for the drawbacks of translation, is not this perfect in construction, as well as poetic in feeling? But the

fanciullino has no feeling for construction, he does not know how much is enough, so he goes on writing until his little poem runs to three times this length.

If, then, the fanciullino be too literal to write acceptably of his own life, too young for philosophy or love, what kind of poetry can he write? What kind can be written on Pascoli's theory? The epic, perhaps,-though not such epics as Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy; but certainly the nature poem and the idyl; for these, the fanciullino's eye for little things, his very literalness, are qualities and not defects. And for these, Pascoli's gifts were of the first order— the fidelity of his memory, his minute powers of observation, more than all, perhaps, his feeling for place. This, we have been told recently by an English poet, is deeply characteristic of English poets. One of their great accomplishments, according to Mr. John Masefield, has been their consecration of place; "they made places interesting simply by mentioning them." This has not been a quality of Italian poets. Their poetry has never had a strongly native hue. They seem not to feel the poetry of Italy as Englishmen feel the poetry of England, and when they do, it is of some part that is a little strange to them; the Piedmontese will thrill to the beauty of Naples, a Central Italian pay a compliment to Venice. But Pascoli has a truly English love for his own corner, his own Romagna, his own village, which he succeeds in communicating to us. The poetic carte du tendre must hereafter have marked upon it San Mauro, Castelvecchio, the church of San Niccolò, the village of San Pietro in Campo. When Pascoli says "halfway between San Mauro and Savignano," he evokes at once the glare of long white road, the procession of small shapely hills to one side and the rows of mulberries looped with grape-vines stretching away to the other, with far ahead a tiny walled city of rose-tinged gray fitting a hill-top like a coronet, that the traveler to Italy remembers with love.

Pascoli's most delightful and most successful work is to be found in the idyls of the volumes called Poemetti, in which he treats his material in a manner somewhat more impersonal and objectified than in Myricae and the Songs of Castelvecchio. It is the poets in this world who have chiefly taught us our expectations; and if life does not often meet them, we do not therefore bear any grudge against the poets; rather we love to be so deceived, and are grateful to each new