Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/416

398 poet of the people and the time. In 1865, the vigorous "Hymn to Satan" provoked the^ controversy which the poet had no doubt designed. His Satan, it hardly need be said, is not the monarch of the fallen seraphim, but the spirit of revolt against social, and ecclesiastical tyranny, more of a Luther than a Lucifer. Levia Gravia (1867) greatly extended the poet's reputation. Odi Barbare (1877) excited a literary controversy almost as virulent as the theological. The splendour of the diction was beyond question, but what was to be said to the novel or exotic forms in which the poet had thought fit to clothe it? To us, the naturalisation of the Alcaic and Sapphic metres appears most successful, although in the former the writer has permitted himself some deviation from the Horatian model, and the form is perhaps too deeply impressed with his own personality to become frequent in Italian literature. Most of the other forms, including the hexameters and pentameters, seem to us either too stiff or too intricate to be quite satisfactorily manipulated even by Carducci himself; but the study of them must be a valuable training for practitioners in more facile metres. If the form be sometimes too elaborate, there can be no dispute as to the weight and massive majesty of the sense. Carducci has solved the problem which baffled the Renaissance, of linking strength of thought to artifice of form. The Rime Nuove brought him new laurels, and his poetical career has paused for the present with a noble ode on the tercentenary of Tasso in 1895. The jubilee of his connection with the University of Bologna was celebrated by a great demonstration in 1896, and, reconciled with the monarchy which he once opposed, he enjoys the