A situation analogous to that of Lucretius arises, therefore, in their case. Their world offered no foothold to the optimist: was it equally bare of support for the poet? Bacon’s assertion that poetry submits the shows of things to man’s desires might imply that; but Bacon (who, incidentally, thought slightly of Lucretius) ignores the poetry born of a conviction that the shows of things are finally unalterable by man’s desires, and it is Leopardi, even more than Lucretius, who has shown us how sublime the poetry which rests on this lonely stoicism may be. One might even, in certain moods, be tempted to attach a yet higher value to the temper of this lonely heroism, which faces a blankly hostile universe utterly without support, than to that which exults in conscious Oneness with a universe pervaded by Love or Beauty, by benign Nature or God. The loneliness of Prometheus is more moving as poetry than his rapturous union with Asia. Why is this?
I take it that it is because the lonely Prometheus, the heroic striver with a loveless world, makes us more vividly aware of the Spirit of Man, and that what moves us most in the great poetry is the revelation of the Spirit of Man even more than the revelation of the glory of the universe. We have seen that these two are natural poles of poetic faith, that is, conclusions upon which the thinking of any poet who thinks as a poet, will tend to converge; and if he is thwarted in the one aim he will fall back with the more energy upon the other.
Now this vivid consciousness of spirit, whether shown in heroism or in love, is ultimately inconsistent with a creed which strips the universe of all ideal elements; and where this is in possession, undermines and disintegrates it. The ‘Everlasting No’ yields ground to the Everlasting Yea; or negation itself is impregnated with divinity, as when Leconte de Lisle glories in his néant divin. To imagine heroism intensely is to be convinced that whatever else is illusory, heroism is not an illusion, that the valour of man has a kinship and support somehow, somewhere, in the nature of things. And if heroism is not an illusion, human society is no illusion either. For the heroic struggler with infinite odds is no longer alone; the army of saints and martyrs are with him; and it was the poet for whom loneliness opened ways into infinity beyond any companionship who cried to one such heroic struggler, fallen in the fight—
Thou hast great allies.
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And Love, and Man’s unconquerable mind.
I propose to illustrate the working of the forces which thus qualified a creed of negations, from the impressive case of Leopardi.
In Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) we have a poet in whom astonishing power and wealth of mind were united to a complete rejection of the theological and philosophical apparatus of consolation. The mental revolution which left him in early manhood entirely denuded of the beliefs in which he had been reared, was final, and left no trace of reaction or regret, of hesitation or doubt. An absolute calm of secure conviction marks the entire subsequent course of his short life. Few men who have ‘found religion,’ once for all, have been brought by it into an anchorage so secure from inner or outer assault as this man who at twenty-two discovered that religion was a dream.
With supernatural belief fell from him also every form of secular faith and hope for man. Religion was but one among the crowd of cherished illusions which cheat men with the expectation of happiness. Human happiness was always founded on illusion, and the pursuit of it was therefore vain. Hence all the organized energies of civilization, the activities of business or politics, of science or art, of the professions, of state administration, counted in his eyes at best as distractions which blinded those who engaged in them to the deadly vision of truth. For himself these distractions and the relief they brought were impossible, for he had seen the truth; and the remorseless analysis which shattered the basis of illusion on which they rested, sapped the impulse to share in them. Of the state, and the patriotisms which bind its members together, he was as sceptical as Ibsen, without sharing his idealizing homage to the man who stands alone. In the Storia del Genero Umano he makes Jove introduce the diversities of peoples and tongues among men, seeds of emulation and discord, and send forth among them the ‘phantoms’ known by the names of Justice, Virtue, Glory, and Love of Country. ‘Humanity’ itself was an illusory bond, and the ‘nations’ of the world were ultimately its individual men.
Yet Leopardi does not denounce crime. Man is for him more unhappy than criminal; and his evil qualities are to be laid to the charge of the Nature that made him. He is more sinned against than sinning, and Leopardi’s profound pity, if often derisive and scornful, never passes into invective. His passionate upbraidings of his countrymen in the boyish canzone Italy, like his ardent aspiration after national glory for his country and poetic fame for himself, disappear from the melancholy calm of the Bruto Minore and the Ginestra.