By so ignoble causes kindled and put out?[44]
Not less acutely he feels the paradox of artistic creation. Like Abt Vogler he contemplates the ‘palace of music’ reared by the performer’s hand:
Desires infinite
And visions sublime
It begets in the kindled thought, ...
Where along a sea of delight the spirit of man
Ranges unseen, as some bold swimmer
For his diversion the deep....
But a single discord shatters this paradise in a moment. Abt Vogler’s creation is not shattered; he has played to the end, and put the last stone in its place. But it has vanished, and he calls in, to save it, his high doctrine of the eternity of created beauty. Leopardi has no such faith, and he puts the doctrine to a severer test by dissolving the spell of beauty before it is complete. Yet he feels as acutely as Browning the marvel of the musical creation, and that its abrupt dissolution does not cancel the significance of its having been there at all. He does not openly confess that significance, but it stirs in him a tormenting sense of anomaly.
He comes nearer to such confession when he speaks of love. His own experience of love was that of a virginal passion; the ideal exaltations which make every lover something of a poet had their way in this great poet unclouded by vulgar satiety. He knows well enough that love arrays the woman, for the lover, in ideal charms not her own; but instead of lamenting or deriding this illusion, as illogically he should have done, he glories in it. Love, like music, ‘reveals the mystery of unknown Elysiums,’[45] but these ‘lofty images’ are accessible only to the man; woman cannot understand them; for such conceptions there is no room in her narrow brow. The stern derider of illusions has here no praise for the sex which sees things as they are: the unconscious idealist in Leopardi takes the side of the ‘illusions.’