INTRODUCTION
setting a pessimistic example at the moment when his country needed optimism above all things; but this reproof is moral, not aesthetic. After all, the bias of a poet's mind towards joy or sorrow ultimately matters very little; the important thing is the quality, not the kind, of his poetic emotion; the one thing needful is that he should feel deeply and express his feelings perfectly. If optimism was an essential of greatness, the world's literature would be considerably thinned. Leopardi's voice is the voice of disillusion, but even disillusion is one of life's realities; he may not help us along the rough road of the world with the steady hand of Whitman or Browning, but he reveals the secrets of a tormented soul in language of incomparable beauty; touching new chords of emotion in all who read him rightly; arousing the soul, as every great poet must arouse it;—leading it to a keener vitality through the revelation, even, of weakness and despair.
The union of the Classic and Romantic elements is continued in Carducci, the last great poet of the nineteenth century, whose profound knowledge of his country's literature has made every lover of Italy his debtor. He, at any rate, is a shining example of the fact that it is possible to be a professor without becoming a pedant or ceasing to be a poet; his lyrics, from the early extravagances of the Inno a Satana to the experiments in classical form of his last volumes, possess a most unacademic vigour and originality. With him this brief survey of the most obvious tendencies of the art that he loved may appropriately close, for the exuberant genius of Gabriele D'Annunzio is yet happily in mid-career,
