SOURCE: Roberts, J. Slingsby. “Giosue Carducci.” Quarterly Review 208, no. 415 (April 1908): 293-321.

In the following essay, Roberts analyzes the accessibility of Carducci's work, particularly to non-Italians.

There are certain writers whose privilege it seems to give to the contemporary genius of their country an adequate expression in literature. They neither follow public opinion nor lead it, for their minds are so constituted that they are almost certain to find themselves in accord with their countrymen. Tennyson is an instance in England, and in France Victor Hugo. Tennyson united the gifts of an incomparable literary artist with the convictions of an average Englishman under Queen Victoria. In boyhood he rang the church bells to celebrate the first Reform Act, and he lived long enough to become an ardent Imperialist. Victor Hugo, even while he denounced the bourgeois, was never really out of touch with the French middle class. Brought up...