Giosue Carducci as a Romantic

' I GIOSUE CARDUCCI AS A ROMANTIC MARIO PRAZ G IOSUE CARDUCCI was born at Valdicastello, in the district of Pietrasanta in Versilia, on July 27, I 835. The poet's centenary has been eelebrated in Italy with speeches and articles, and has seen the publication of the first volumes of the National Edition. of his works. The year 1935 was indeed an anna carducciana for Italy, and such it was thanks to one aspect, certainly the most typical of this poet, which makes him popular in Italy's present hour. This aspect may be summed up in two words: the romanita and the sanity of Carducci. I have had the opportunity of listening to several commemorations by Italians of different ages, and whether they were senior academicians such as Ugo Ojetti_,I or public figures of the Fascist era such as Arturo l\llarpicati,2 or young students, stress was laid over and over again on those two characteristics: the romanita . and the sanity of Carducci. Side by side with the public celebrations, tending to emphasize one sole aspect of Carducci, the ''out-and-out It'alian who made no concessions to any kind of exoticism"-as I\1arpicati puts it-, it may be enlightening to quote from an . article by Professor Attilio Momigliano, published in the Carriere della Sera of June 6, 1935, with the title Sanita di Carducci. This article, by an academic critic, is not written for a rhetorical ·effect like the speeches mentioned above: it aims 1Commemoration held at Bologna on June 25, 1935, reproduced in part in the Carriere della Sera as La romanita B lajcde di Giosue Carducci, and printed in its entirety in Pan (July, 1935) as Carducci e noi. 21naugural lecture at the University of Rome on the theme La passione politica di G. Carducci, partly reprinted in the Corrierc della Sera, March 9, 1935. 176 GIOSUE CARDUCCI AS A ROMANTIC at being an unimpassioned survey of Carducci's art. "After having scornfully censured romantic poetry," Momigliano says, "Carducci found, through a slow process of liberation from models, rhetorical effects, and attitudes, the kind of poetry which flashed across his mind as a contrast to the formlessness, sentimentality, and morbidity of romanticism." He goes on specifying: "It is significant that among so much historical poetry, there is never in Carducci the theme of ruins and silence as a note of melancholy and neglect." He gives instances from Dinanzi alle terme di Caracalla, etc., makes a com- .parison with D'Annunzio, the romantic singer of the Cities of Silence, and concludes: "Carducci has been able to sing the Communes and pagan Rome; he could not have sung Ravenna, a harbour whence the soul sails forth towards the realms of contemplation and death, nor the Venice of the forsaken canals, dripping with melancholy like a sonata of Chopin or a picture by Bocklin." This allusion to Bocklin, who was after all a 1nediocre painter, recalls to 1ny mind the essay of another professor, Cesare De Lollis, who in the now very distant I 9 I 2, in contrasting a famous passage from Allejonti del Clitunno with Leopardi's "Gia di candide Ninfe i rivi albergo..." ("Streams, once the abode of white Nymphs," from Alia Primavera o Delle Favole Antiche), remarked3 that the whole stan-za of Leopardi "is a miraculous selection of themes of the mythico-pastoral world interpreted with the concreteness which Bockljn brought to the interpretation ·of that world;" whereas in Carducci's lines, Egli dal cielo, autoctona virago ella... 3Appunti sui/a lingua poetica del Carducci, 1n Saggi sui/a forma poetica ita/irma dell' Ottocenlo, Bari, 1929. 177 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY ('' Fron1 heaven he, she an autochthonous heroine ..."), "there is nothing either seen by the poet or to be seen by the reader." For Mon1igliano, therefore, Bocklin stands for "the formlessness and n1orbidity of romanticism ;" for De Lollis, on the contrary, he signifies romantic "concreteness'.' as opposed to the abstractions of academic poetry. If two professors of th]s century, when romanticism has been ·so thoroughly explored, cannot see eye to eye upon · the subject, Carducci may vvell be excused for having formed no clear idea of it...