And his way of speaking about Love elsewhere is less that of the pessimist philosopher than of the Platonist poet who sees in it a clue to real vision. The pessimist in him does full justice to the havoc wrought in the world in Love’s name; but after the gods had watched the working of the lower love, their cynical gift, Jove sent down another Love, ‘child of Venus Urania,’ in pity of the noble hearts who were worthy of it, yet rarely permitting even to them the happiness it brings as ‘surpassed in too small a measure by that of heaven.’[46] Love above all else irradiates the waste of life, it is ‘the source of good, of the highest joy found in the ocean of existence’; it alone holds equal bliss for man with Death, which for ever allays his ills. ‘Love and Death’ are twin brothers, and the fairest things on the earth or under the stars.[47] Even the memory of love can make ‘abhorred old age’ endurable, and send a man willingly to the scourge or the wheel, as the face of Beatrice could make her lover ‘happy in the flames.’[48] Hence Love makes the heart ‘wise,’ for it inspires men with the contempt of life:
‘For no other lord do men face peril
With such alacrity as for him.’
Where thou dost help, O Love, courage is born
Or wakens; and, against its wont, mankind
Grows wise in action, not lost in idle thought.[49]
This is not the language of pessimism; and this ‘wisdom’ inspired by love, which reconciles men to courageous death, is something quite other than the calculation that death is a release from life’s ills. That is the suicide’s wisdom, not the hero’s. Leopardi’s conception of Love has taken up nobler elements than his pessimism could supply; he describes a Triumph of Love over Death, not a shrewd perception that Death is the easiest way out, or even a blessed port after stormy seas.
Yet Love in its noblest form was given, he knows, but to few; and he himself had known it only as a fleeting experience. He knew as a continual possession, on the other hand, his own intellectual nature, the sovran thought which stripped off the illusive shows of things and disclosed to him the naked horror of reality undisguised, but filled him none the less with the exultation of power, and the lofty joy which belongs to discovery even of a tragic truth.
Such exaltation finds its most powerful expression in the great hymn to ‘Thought the Master.’ His restless and piercing intellect was a double-edged instrument. It was not the source of his pessimism, but it furnished the remorseless analysis of the glories and shows of life which gave its air of inevitable logic to his temperamental despair. Yet the exercise of the instrument was itself a vivid joy, and, like love, created for the wielder a lonely earthly paradise within the vast waste of this earthly hell.[50] There he wanders, in an enchanted light, which blots out his earthly state; thither he returns from the dry and harsh converse with the world as from the naked crags of the Apennines to a joyous garden smiling afar. Is this ‘terrible but precious gift of heaven’ also an illusion? Perhaps; but it is one ‘by nature divine,’ and capable of possessing us with the secure tenacity of truth itself, as long as life endures.[51]
In any case it created for him definite and wonderful values in the world which detracted dangerously from the consistency of his faith in the world’s fundamental badness. ‘Thought’ was the only civilizer; by thought mankind had actually risen out of their primeval barbarism;[52] it was the sole agent in advancing the public welfare. His towering disdain for the frivolity and utilitarianism of his own age sprang from no mere excess of self-esteem; it was the scorn of one whom ‘thought’ had lifted to a standpoint of ideal excellence beside which all alien impulses seemed intolerable.[53] It armed him with a magnanimity which the sight of any cowardly or ignoble act stung to the quick, which laughed at danger or at death,[54] which could endure with resolute Stoicism and antique valour the passage through the miseries of life.[55]