III
These pieces fairly indicate the range of Leopardi, and I confess that
they and the rest that I have read leave me somewhat puzzled in the
presence of his reputation. This, to be sure, is largely based upon
his prose writings--his dialogues, full of irony and sarcasm--and his
unquestionable scholarship. But the poetry is the heart of his fame,
and is it enough to justify it? I suppose that such poetry owes very
much of its peculiar influence to that awful love we all have
of hovering about the idea of death--of playing with the great
catastrophe of our several tragedies and farces, and of marveling what
it can be. There are moods which the languid despair of Leopardi's
poetry can always evoke, and in which it seems that the most life can
do is to leave us, and let us lie down and cease. But I fancy we all
agree that these are not very wise or healthful moods, and that their
indulgence does not fit us particularly well for the duties of life,
though I never heard that they interfered with its pleasures; on the
contrary, they add a sort of zest to enjoyment. Of course the whole
transaction is illogical, but if a poet will end every pensive strain
with an appeal or apostrophe to death--not the real death, that comes
with a sharp, quick agony, or "after long lying in bed", after many
days or many years of squalid misery and slowly dying hopes and
medicines that cease even to relieve at last; not this death, that
comes in all the horror of undertaking, but a picturesque and
impressive abstraction, whose business it is to relieve us in the most
effective way of all our troubles, and at the same time to avenge
us somehow upon the indefinitely ungrateful and unworthy world we
abandon--if a poet will do this, we are very apt to like him.
Pages:
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293