i had been brought into more fraternal contact with the aims of
the younger generation by the efforts of Angelo Sommaruga who became,
about 1880, the publisher of a group of young unknown writers all
destined to some, and a few to great, accomplishment. The period of his
prosperity was a strange one for Italy. The first ten years of the newly
constituted kingdom had passed more in stupor than activity; original
contributions to literature had been scarce, and publishers had
preferred bringing out inferior translations of not always admirable
French authors to encouraging the original work of Italians--work which
it must be confessed was generally mediocre and entirely lifeless.
Sommaruga's creation, a literary review called _La Cronaca Bizantina_,
gathered together such beginners as Giovanni Marradi, Matilde Serao,
Edoardo Scarfoglio, Guido Magnoni and Gabriele d'Annunzio. In order to
obtain the sanction of what he considered an enduring name, the founder
turned to Giosue Carducci, then living in retirement at Bologna,
discontented with his fate, and still not generally known by the public
of his own country. The activity of Sommaruga exercised a great
influence on Giosue Carducci. Within the next few years he published the
three admirable volumes of his _Confessioni e Batlaglie_, the _Ca Ira_
sonnets, the _Nuove Odi Barbare_, and a considerable number of articles,
pamphlets and essays, which in their collected edition form the most
living part of his work. His lyrical production, too, seemed to reach
its perfection in those five years of tense, unrelenting work; for the
_Canzone di Legnano_, the Odes to Rome and to Monte Mario, the Elegy on
the urn of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the ringing rhymes of the _Intermezzo_,
in which he happily blended the satire of Heine with the lyrical form of
his native poetry--all belong to this period, together with the essays
on Leopardi and on Parini, the admirable discussions in defence of his
_Ca Ira_, and the pamphlet called _Eterno Femminino regale_, a kind of
self-defence, undertaken to explain the origin of the Alcaic metre to
the queen of Italy, which marks the beginning of the last evolution in
Carducci's work (1881). The revolutionary spirits of the day, who had
always looked upon Giosue Carducci as their bard and champion, fell
away from him after this poem written in honour of a queen, and the
poet, wounded by the attitude of his party, wrote what he intended to be
his defence and