But thought had its peculiar joys also, less equivocal than these. It fed on the sublimity even of the desolate world, on the loneliness of nature, on the infinity of the starry depths. In the lines on ‘The Infinite’ he describes a favourite haunt—a lonely hill, from which the horizon is on all sides cut off. ‘There I sit and gaze, fashioning in thought boundless distances, superhuman silences, and profoundest rest.... In this immensity my thought is drowned, and shipwreck in that ocean is a joy.’
And converse with thought gives him, too, the vision of ideal beauty—a vision which quickens the ecstasy of his most rapturous moments. It is no pallid dream; the fairest face he meets seems but a feigned image of its countenance, a derivative streamlet from the one sole source.[56] That ideal beauty is his lady, but he had never seen her face, for nothing on the earth is like her, or were it like in feature, or in voice, it would be less in beauty.[57] Leopardi is here very near to Shelley. The visionary ideal of beauty and love was not less vividly present to him; but the sterner temper of his pessimism was less easily persuaded that it had projected itself into the being of any earthly Emilia. The ‘Intellectual Beauty’ of Shelley’s hymn had its seat and stronghold in a like glow of inner vision, but its ‘awful loveliness’ was more abundantly hinted or disclosed in the world of nature and of man, giving ‘grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream,’ and luring the sensitive poet on to the pursuit of a thousand fugitive embodiments of its eternal essence. Leopardi’s language, marmoreally clear-cut and austere, seems to bear the impress of a mind powerfully self-contained, exempt from all seductions of the senses, even of colour and melody, calm with the resolution of despair. Shelley’s language, dissolving form and outline in an ethereal radiance, seems the mirror of a self-diffusive genius which saw all things through the veil of its own effulgence. Leopardi has been called ‘the most classical of the romantics’; Shelley was in some sense the very soul of romanticism. But as this very comparison implies, the romantic temper glowed in both. In both, the long travail of existence was crossed by the exultations of the visionary and the idealist. With Leopardi, martyred in his prime by painful disease, the gloomy shades closed in more and more impenetrably upon the world of man and nature, and death was happy because it was the end of life. With Shelley the universe grew more and more visibly transfigured by a spirit deeply responsive to his own; all things worked and moved in beauty, and were woven through and through with love. In Leopardi’s more tenacious intellect the negations of a corroding criticism were less easily overcome. But nature, which had armed his brain with that corroding criticism flung across it also the rapturous delight in beauty, in love, in the creative energy of thought itself, and there were moments when poetry transported him beyond the iron limits of his creed, to the belief that love and beauty and thought are neither illusory nor the sources of illusion, but signs and symptoms of an ideal reality.
IV
The poetry of negations strives instinctively towards fuller affirmation: that is the purport of our survey hitherto. We have seen in a previous essay how Lucretius the poet saw this mechanical universe through a transfiguring atmosphere of passion and pathos, attachment, regret, not dreamt of in his philosophy.[58] And there are signs enough that had that philosophy admitted, what it fiercely denied, those ideas of a living and personal or even divine Nature, or of a universe pervaded by God, which respond to poetic apprehension at the point where the Epicurean naturalism left it, as it were in the lurch, he would have eagerly embraced them.
Now it was precisely those ideas of life and personality present in Nature, or even pervading the universe, which prevailed among philosophic thinkers of the second type, who inquired (to put it in the roughest way) not how the world might have come about, but what it meant. For the answer, infinitely varied in its terms, uniformly postulated that the idealism of man reflected something answering to it in the very nature of reality. Two profound suggestions towards an ideal conception of the world, thrown out by the genius of Greece, could still intoxicate the intellect of early nineteenth-century Germany:—the Heracleitean idea of the harmony of opposites, and the Platonic and Stoic doctrine of the soul of the world. Of the first I say nothing more here; for Heracleitus, pregnant as his dark sayings are with poetry, has never had his Lucretius.[59] The doctrine of a world-soul, on the other hand, has again and again helped poetry to articulate her rapturous apprehension of the glory of the world. For European speculation, at least, the conception had its origin in the Timæus, where the last perfecting touch of the divinely-appointed artificer who constructs the world is to give it a ‘soul’ and make it ‘a blessed god.’
In the pantheism of the Stoics, the idea of a divine world-soul set forth in this grandiose myth became a radical dogma, one of the chief sources of their significance as an intellectual and moral force. At Rome the Stoic pantheism softened the rigour of national and social distinctions. The humanity of the Roman law lies in the direct line of its influence. In the mind of the most sensitive and tender of Roman poets, on the other hand, the Stoic idea fell upon a soil rich in qualities uncongenial, if not unknown, to its native habitat. Stoic thought in Vergil, no less than Epicurean in Lucretius, has taken the colour of that richer soil. The sublime verses which he puts in the mouth of Anchises have riveted this solution, if such it be, of the world-riddle upon the mind of posterity; but the real contribution of Vergil is less in any expressive phrase or image than in the diffused magic of a temperament in which all subtle and delicate attachments wonderfully throve; where, more than in any other Roman mind, the ‘threefold reverence’ of Goethe, the reverence for what is above us, for what is below us, and for our fellow-men, found its congenial home.
And it is not hard to see how sheer poetic instinct drew him this way. His two great masters in poetry, Homer and Lucretius, had inspired and helped to mould a genius fundamentally unlike either. The majestic pageant of the Olympians was not at bottom more consonant to his poetry than the scorn which tramples on all fear of divinity and puts the roar of Acheron under its feet. The Jupiter and Venus and Juno and Pallas who so efficiently order the changing fortunes of Æneas are but a splendid decoration, like the Olympian figures in Raphael’s frescoes at the Farnesina. And well as he understands the bliss of the triumphant intellect, of Man become the master of things, he is himself content with the humbler joys of one who has acquaintance with Pan and the Nymphs, with the gods of the woodland and the fountain-spring. These were real for him, not it may be with the matter-of-fact reality of the senses, but as speaking symbols of something more deeply interfused, less articulate than man, but more articulate to man’s spirit than the fountains or the flowers.
The great pantheistic phrases of Vergil have echoed, we know, throughout the after-history of poetry. We might even be tempted to say that pantheism, in some sense, must be the substance of any ‘poetic view of the world.’ But if so, it must be a pantheism which owes at least as much to the entranced intuition of the poets as to the abstract thinking of philosophy. Their ecstasy of the senses, their feasting joy in the moment, and in the spot, have enabled them not merely to express the creed of pantheism with greater freshness and sincerity, but to give it interpretations and applications of which theoretic speculation never dreamed. We should not prize the great lines of Tintern Abbey so far above the eloquent platitudes of the Essay on Man if we did not feel that Pope was merely putting philosophy at second-hand into brilliant verse, while Wordsworth had not only reached his thought through his own impassioned contemplation, but actually given it a new compass and profundity not attainable by any logical process. He found his ‘something more deeply interfused’ as he looked with emotion too deep for tears upon the humble flower and the simple village child, or remembered the experiences of his own wonderful boyhood; and these were for him not merely portions of a body of which God was the soul, but themselves luminous points, or running springs, of spiritual light and life. So that if his poetry touches doctrinal pantheism (which he never names) at one pole, at the other it is nearer to the spiritual fetishism of St. Francis’s hymns to Brother Sun and Brother Rain.
It is easier to distinguish definite philosophic ideas at work in the poetic apprehension of Shelley. We know in any case that they played an immensely greater part in his intellectual growth. Plato and Dante have helped him to those wonderful phrases in which he seeks to make articulate his rapturous cosmic vision of
That light, whose smile kindles the universe,