cou!” But history, even when viewed by a poet, is history and not poetry: that is to say, it is an artistic representation of events, but it is at the same time a meditation on events. That lyric liberty which is independent of subjects and of anecdotes, as we of today maintain, cannot be expected from one who, like Oriani, writes and rewrites a historical discourse on Italy and the Italians.
To my mind, the greatness of Oriani lies in his syntheses, long or short, of the remote or the recent past, and in the marvelous portraits which enliven those syntheses. The only men to whom you can compare him are Carlyle in England, Michelet in France, and Giuseppe Ferrari in Italy. And in some respects he was their superior. He lacked the Englishman’s humor and originality; his scholarly preparation was less than that of the Frenchman; the Italian surpassed him in philosophic genius. But no one of the three wrote pages as clean-cut and impressive as those of Oriani—pages in which the poet’s sense of life, the philosopher’s sense of space, the keenness of the historian, and the filial love of the citizen are fused in a synthesis which wins us completely. Fortunately, too, he did not have the apocalyptic moralizing of Carlyle, the democratic emphasis of Michelet, or the mechanistic and mathematical mania of Ferrari. He equals them in their best qualities, and surpasses them in others.
