CARDUCCI AND DANTE Last year the Italian Government decided to found, in the University of Rome, a professorship of Dante exegesis, in addition to those which had existed for many hundred years in some of the provincial universities. The debates in Parliament showed that the idea of the founders was a political one, and that while this chair was intended to be the highest official literary position in Italy, it was at the same time to be a permanent protest against the claims of the Papacy to temporal power. With the immediate and unanimous applause of the whole country the appointment was given to Giosuè Carducci, not only because his anti-papal feelings were well known, but because-pace Mr. Howells he is the greatest poet of modern Italy, and at the same time (strange as it may seem) the greatest literary critic. At Bologna, where for many years Carducci has filled the chair of Italian Literature, and where he is the centre of a circle of poets and literary men who have great influence in Italy, strong objections were made to his departure, not only by the University, but also by the inhabitants and the municipal government. For a long time he seemed to hesitate, partly attracted by the position itself and the residence in the capital, partly kept back by the entreaties of his friends; but chiefly because the ideas which he had received after thirty years' study of Dante were different from those of the founders of the chair. He believed that Dante should be treated from the point of view of art, and not from that of contemporary politics. He therefore finally refused it. But the same reasons did not hold when it was decided to put the professorship for awhile into commission, and ask four leading Dante scholars to give short courses during the present year. While the others accepted, the Senator Francesco Perez not only refused, but wrote a very foolish letter to justify his refusal, on the ground that, as the author of "La Beatrice Svelata," he should have been offered the post originally. The first lecture of the course was given by Carducci on the 8th of January-"The Work of Dante." As might have been expected, occasion was taken to make a political demonstration, for Carducci was well known as a Republican by conviction (although he does not always carry his doc trines into his poems) and as a free-thinker. In the present delicate relations between the State and the Church almost anything may warrant a demonstration in the eyes of ultra patriots; and even the blindest could see that Dante was a determined opponent of the temporal power of the Popes. Ardent patriots in this century, from Balbo to Mazzini, twisting the meaning of Dante's words, had made his name the watchword in the struggle for Italian unity, although they might as well have chosen Sordello. The real claim of Petrarch, the great seer into the future, was forgotten. To such an extent was this carried that a great critic was able to write: "Dante had a strange destiny. He was a Monarchist, and has been made out a Republican; he was a Catholic, and has been made out a Protestant; he was a Virgilian, and has been made out a Romanticist; he wanted the German Empire, and has done more than any one else to found the Italian nationality. The Italians treated him as he treated Virgil: they have taken him as a guide, and have constrained him to march in front of them." This was, perhaps, allowable during the period of struggle, but it is time to restore Dante to the pure atmosphere of art. So Carducci thought when he felt obliged to refuse a professorship founded for political reasons, and so he found himself obliged to say in a strong passage of his dis course. He had explained his views with regard to Dante in some essays published as long ago as 1874, and his state of feeling may be seen from one of his best sonnets in his latest volume, the spirit of which may perhaps be given even in an unrhymed version: "Dante, whence comes it that my vows and voice, That o'er thy verse, which made thee lean and wan, For me Lucia prays not, nor prepares In vain ascends to God from star to star. I hate thy Holy Empire; with my sword I should have thrust the crown from off the head Of thy good Frederick in Olona's vale. O'er church and Empire, both now ruins sad, Thy song soars up, and high in heaven resounds- Carducci thus began his discourse: "From the rock where a few ruins on the surface of the soil show us the site of Canossa, from this white, bare, and lonely rock, enlivened neither by shades of groves, nor songs of birds, nor murmur of falling water, if we look about to mountain and valley, we perceive on one side a spur of the Apennines, the rock of Bismantua which Dante once climbed; on the other, in the pleasant Emilia, between Enza and Parma, the waste of Selva Piana, where the most beautiful canzoni of Petrarch were written; far off on another side Reggio, happy sojourn in youth of Ariosto; and, lower down towards the Po, Guastalla, the courtesy of whose princes lightened the sadness of Tasso. We cannot help thinking that it was not without some sort of fate that these memories of the poetic glory of Italy were collected around the rock and on the plain where the rupture between the Church and the Empire seemed to have the air of a fatal drama, the rupture from which came the liberty of the communes, that force of the Italian people which flowered in the arts and in poetry. Papacy and Empire, their discord and their power, were passing away when Dante was born-Dante who does not pass away." Carducci then goes on to relate in detail the characteristics of the period in which Dante lived; the expiring efforts of the Empire; the struggle of the Papacy under Boniface VIII. to become imperial, and the subsequent captivity of Avignon; the decline of chivalric poetry, French, Provençal, and German; the appearance of the two great Catholic theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, and of new saints like St. Francis of Assisi; the building of churches in Florence and elsewhere |