Here he met the German en, and wrote one of his finest
poems, "La Ginestra) (The Broom-flower).
poems, "La Ginestra) (The Broom-flower).
Warner - World's Best Literature - v15 - Kab to Les
And after all, what is this disquiet-
'
ude of universal mystery, of which the honor of discovery is
exclusively ascribed to the Slav novelists? This mystery ” can
only be that of our destiny, of our souls, of God, of the origin
and end of the universe. But who does not know that nearly
all our writers, from 1825 to 1850 especially, professed themselves
as disquieted over these things? Of this disquietude Victor
Hugo is full; he overflows with it.
If it is said that what is meant is less a philosophical dis-
quiet than a feeling of the formidable unknown which surrounds
us, a feeling which is perhaps evoked by some accidental sensa-
tion, I answer that I quite understand that there are moments
when this thought alone — that one is in the world, and that the
world exists, appears utterly incomprehensible and strikes us
dumb. But in the first place, this astonishment at living, this
sort of “sacred horror,” is inconsistent in its very nature with
any expression at all except the briefest, and can be prolonged
only by repeating itself. In the second place, we had assuredly
experienced this mysterious shudder before we ever opened a
Russian or Norwegian book. Tolstoi's phrase “The eternal
silence of infinite space affrights me,” is one which does not
date from yesterday.
If, then, all that we admire in the recent writers of the North
was already ours, how does it happen that, visible in them, it
## p. 8971 (#599) ###########################################
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
8971
I am
appears to so many of us new and original? Is it because
these writers are greater artists than ours, their literary form
superior to that of our poets and novelists? The question seems
to me insoluble: for he alone could discern the exact value of
literary form who should comprehend all the languages of Europe
as profoundly as he comprehends his own; that is, sufficiently
to perceive in its most delicate shades that which constitutes the
style of each writer. This, I imagine, can never be; for I find
that the most learned and accomplished of foreign linguists never
arrive at the power of feeling as we do the phrase of a Flaubert
or a Renan. The incapacity is made evident by their classifica-
tion of our authors, where they put together without discrimina-
tion the great and the inferior. In the same way the style of
foreign writers must always to a great extent escape us.
inclined to believe that a man may know several languages well,
but only one profoundly. It is certain that neither Eliot, nor
Ibsen, nor Tolstoi will ever afford to us that kind or degree of
pleasure which is aroused in us by the literary form of our own
great authors.
Norway has interminable winters almost without day, alter-
nating with short and violent summers almost without night:
marvelous conditions either for the slow and patient working
out of one's inner visions, or for the sudden and overpowering
impulses of passion.
London, compared with which Paris is but a pretty little town,
is the capital of effort and will; and an English fog seems to me
an excellent atmosphere for reflection. I have never
steppe; but to picture it to the eye of the mind, I multiply in
my imagination the melancholy stretches of heath, the pools and
woods of Sologne in winter.
To understand their literature we must add to these physical
characteristics the Past of Norway, England, and Russia; their
traditions, their public and private manners, their religions, and
the furrows traced by them all in the Norwegian, English, and
Russian brain.
Briefly, it may be said that the writers of the North return
to us (and this is the secret of their charm) the substance of
our own literature of forty or fifty years ago, modified, renewed,
and enriched by its passage through minds notably different
from our own. In rethinking our thoughts, they rediscover them
seen
a
for us.
## p. 8972 (#600) ###########################################
8972
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
.
more
They have, it seems to me, less art than we, less knowledge
of the rules of composition. Such works as Middlemarch' are
discouraging by their prolixity. Eight days of constant reading
are necessary for War and Peace'; and such dimensions are in
themselves inartistic.
Furthermore, I am by no means persuaded that these writers
have more emotion than ours: certainly they have no
general ideas. But they have to a greater degree than we the
perception of the inner religious life.
More patient than we; not perhaps more penetrating, but
capable of greater persistence, if I may say so, in meditation and
observation; more able than we to dispense with diversions,-
they address themselves to readers who have less need than we of
being amused. The long and monotonous conversations of Ibsen,
his indefatigable accumulation of familiar details, at first over-
whelm us, but little by little envelop us, and form around each
of his dramas an atmosphere peculiar to itself, by which the
appearance of truth in the characters is greatly augmented. We
see them living their slow mysterious lives. They are intensely
serious: and they exhibit this peculiarity,- that all the incidents
of their existence stir their soul's depths, and reveal these depths
to us; that their domestic dramas become dramas of conscience
in which their whole spiritual life is involved. A woman who
finds that her husband does not understand her, or that her
son is attacked by an incurable malady, instantly asks herself if
Martin Luther was not too conservative, whether paganism or
Christianity is really right, and if all our laws do not rest upon
falsehood and hypocrisy.
Perhaps the author forgets that these questions, absorbing
when discussed by a great philosopher or poet, can be solved only
in commonplace fashion by narrow townspeople and well-meaning
clergymen. Perhaps too he surfeits us with the restless meta-
physics of ordinary humanity, and its tendency to philosophize.
But as it is really his own thought that he thus translates, it is
possible after all to take in it a true and lively interest.
One dominating idea in the romances of George Eliot is the
idea of responsibility, accepted in its most rigid sense: the idea
that no act is indifferent or inoffensive; that all have infinite con-
sequences, and reverberations either within or without our own
souls, and that thus we are always more responsible, or responsi-
ble for more, than we realize. The consequence of this idea is
## p. 8973 (#601) ###########################################
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
8973
.
a moral surveillance constantly exercised by her characters over
themselves, or by the author over her characters. Most of them
hold the idea of sin, and of an inner life at least as fully devel-
oped as the life of their social relations. They make frequent
examinations of conscience; they repent, they improve. Certainly
all this is more
rare in
our romances, doubtless because it is
more rare in our conduct. I have noticed, on the other hand,
that George Sand's heroes almost never repent. If Mauprat ad-
vances in goodness, it is in virtue of his love for Edmée, and
not as the result of probing for his sins. Others learn the les-
sons of events, and grow better through experience. The nobler
characters of Sand and Hugo dwell more upon the happiness of
humanity than upon their own moral perfection. I grant at once
that they are inconsequent persons, apt to begin at the wrong
end of things, and that their gospel is often a gospel of revolu-
tion.
I must of course admit that the realism of these foreigners is
more chaste than ours has been. The deeds of the flesh hold
small place in their works, for which I willingly praise them. I
observe, however, that if the actual state of things in France is
less unblushing than it is made to appear in some of our realistic
novels, it is surely, throughout Europe, less refined than English
and Russian romances would lead us to believe. We are more
frank in these matters. I do not know that this is a mark of
superiority; but our realism, more sensual perhaps, is also more
disenchanting. Northern writers surely do not recoil from depict-
ing the suffering, cruelty, and squalor of human life; but it can-
not be denied that they diminish their own power by avoiding a
certain class of infamies. They do not tell the whole truth. You
will never find in them such pages as certain of those of Flau-
bert or Maupassant. They are well able to show us the world as
infinitely sad and pitiful; but hesitate to exhibit it as simply dis-
gusting, which nevertheless it often is. Their pessimism is never
as radical as they pretend.
This prudishness, this reserve, this incurable scrupulousness is
explained by that religious spirit with which they are still im-
pregnated; and thus we arrive at this truism, that the differences
of literatures are rooted in the fundamental differences of race.
The books of Ibsen and Eliot remain, in spite of the intel-
lectual emancipation of these writers, Protestant books. For to
abandon, after unrestricted examination, as Eliot and Ibsen have
## p. 8974 (#602) ###########################################
8974
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
-
done, a religion of which unrestricted examination is an inherent
attribute, is not, properly speaking, to abandon at all. Only that
can be really thrown off which is really a yoke: insurrection is
only veritably made against a religion which interdicts freedom of
spirit. In the other religions one may remain by expanding them.
It is only where prohibition is radical that schism can be abso-
lute. That which Protestant liberty forbids is not intellectual
enfranchisement, but if I may say so, enfranchisement of language
and manner. Among Protestant peoples, where the faithful soul
depends only upon his conscience, and allows no intermediary
between himself and God, the universal habits of thought and
discussion which result, cause a mingling of religious sentiment
and anxiety in all their literature,- even profane,- and unbe-
lievers retain at least the manner and tone of believers. On the
contrary, among us emancipated Catholics—or even practicing
Catholics whom sacramental confession absolves in part from the
care of administering our own conscience - there is a religious
or rather ecclesiastical literature with which we are but little
acquainted, and a literature entirely profane and laic; each one
playing its own part. To certain reflections on the inner nature
of souls, certain bits of moral casuistry, certain effusions of reli-
gious sentiment, which strike us in Eliot and Ibsen, we could
find analogous examples only in the works of priests and monks,
whom we ignore, or in Bossuet, Lacordaire, or Veuillot, where it
does not occur to us to look for them. Our two literatures do
not mingle, and thereby the secular loses something of moral
depth.
Finally, we see in what measure these foreigners have been of
service to us. We have welcomed their idealism through weari-
ness or disgust with naturalism. It is true that they have led us
to put more exactness and sincerity into the expression of ideas
and sentiments which were formerly familiar to us; to give pre-
cision to our romanticism, and at the same time to moderate our
realism.
But once again, if we have heartily and readily accepted this
foreign literature, is it not proved that in reality we possess, if
not the cosmopolitan spirit, at least the cosmopolitan manners ?
An Englishman travels over the whole world, and remains every-
where an Englishman. We do not quit our own firesides; but
from this corner we adapt ourselves without difficulty to the
moods and manner of thought of all nations, even the most
## p. 8975 (#603) ###########################################
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
8975
-
remote. Yes! ours are the writers whom I term the true cos.
mopolitans; for a cosmopolitan — that is to say, a European -- lit-
erature should be common and intelligible to all the people of
Europe, and can only become cosmopolitan by the order, sym-
metry, and lucidity which have for centuries been accepted as our
national qualities. They are so still; as is proved by the large
human sympathy which we are to-day supposing that we discover
among foreigners, but which nevertheless has always been one of
our most eminent characteristics. We love to approve; ours is
perhaps the only nation disposed to prefer others to itself. But
this very enthusiasm with which we have fostered and extolled
the tender humanity of the Russian romance and the Norwegian
drama - does it not prove that we ourselves possess the same
quality, and that in them we have only recognized it ?
These exchanges — this give-and-take of ideas between na-
tions — have existed in all times, more especially since the close-
ness of commercial relations has involved that of intellectual
relations as well. At times we have borrowed from other peo-
ples, and have impressed upon that which we took a European
character. Such are the appropriations of Corneille or Le Sage
from the Spaniards. At times, and oftener, being inquisitive
and kindly, we have taken from them unconsciously that which
we ourselves had previously loaned them. Thus, in the eigh-
teenth century we discovered the novels of Richardson, who had
imitated Marivaux. Thus we have found again in Lessing that
which was in Diderot, and in Goethe much that was in Jean
Jacques; and we have believed that we owed to the Germans
and English the romanticism which we ourselves had originated.
For is not romanticism more than mediæval decoration, or in the
drama more than the suppression of the three unities, or the
mingling of tragedy and comedy ? It is the feeling for nature,
the recognition of the rights of passion; it is the spirit of revolt,
the exaltation of the individual: all, things of which the germs
and more than the germs were in the Nouvelle Héloise,' in the
'Confessions, and in the Lettres de la Montagne. '
In this constant circulation of ideas, we are less and less cer-
tain to whom they belong. Each nation imposes upon them its
own character, and each of the characters seems necessarily the
most original and the best.
It is only of the present moment that I write, and who knows
how fleeting that may be? This restless septentriomania — how
## p. 8976 (#604) ###########################################
8976
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
-
long will it endure ? Does it not already begin to languish ?
And as to the rest,- to come to the regulating of this debit
and credit account opened between races, does it not remain to
be seen whether the pietism of George Eliot, the contradictory
and rebellious idealism of Ibsen, the mystic fatalism of Tolstoi,
are necessarily superior to the humanitarianism or the realism of
French authors ? Who can affirm that the ardor of our scientific
faith and revolutionizing charity, moderately subjective as they
are and inclined rather to social reform, do not compensate in
the sight of God for the greater aptitude of the Northern races
for meditation and subjective perfection ? Who will swear that
largely and humanly understood, the positive philosophy, to call
it by its name, - the philosophy of Taine, that which is held to
be responsible for the brutalities and aridities of naturalistic lit-
erature,- does not represent a more advanced moment in human
development than Protestant and septentrional religiosity? Do
not books like those of J. H. Rosny, to cite no others, presage
the reconciliation of two sorts of intelligence which among us
have been too often separated ? And do we not recognize in
them both the enthusiasm for science and the enthusiasm for
moral beauty, and see already how these two religions accord
and become fruitful ? Who lives shall see! Meantime, make
haste to enjoy these writers from regions of snows and fogs;
enjoy them while they are in favor, while they are believed in,
and while they can still influence you,- as it is best to avail one's
self of the methods in vogue, so long as they can cure.
For it may be that a reaction of the Latin spirit is at hand.
Translated for (A Library of the World's Best Literature. '
## p. 8976 (#605) ###########################################
## p. 8976 (#606) ###########################################
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## p. 8976 (#608) ###########################################
## p. 8977 (#609) ###########################################
8977
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
(1798-1837)
BY KATHARINE HILLARD
PIKE Byron, Leopardi came of an ancient and patrician but im-
poverished family. His mother, who seems to have been the
real head of the house, had so absorbed herself in the task
of repairing its fallen fortunes, that she had little time and less ten-
derness left to lavish upon her children. His father, Count Monaldo
Leopardi, was a mere figure-head in his own household, and spent
most of his time shut up in his library. He lived at Recanati, a little
mountain village of Tuscany, high up in the Apennines, near Loreto;
and there, in the stifling dullness of a small provincial town, Giacomo
Leopardi was born, on the 29th of June, 1798. His father was as con-
servative as an ordinary mind bred up under the restraints of a little
village in the Italy of that day naturally would be. He was bigoted,
narrow-minded, bitterly opposed to progress, seeing nothing good out-
side of the precincts of the Church. He even preferred the costume
of an earlier period, and dressed himself and his wife in mediæval
attire. The young Leopardi, nervous, sickly, and deformed, was
brought up in his father's library, having no companions except his
sister and his brothers. He spent his time among dictionaries and
grammars; and with little or no assistance contrived to make him-
self master of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and English,
by the time he was sixteen.
At that age he composed a Latin treatise on the Roman rhetori-
cians of the second century, a history of astronomy, and a Latin
translation and comment on Plotinus, of which Sainte-Beuve said that
“one who had studied Plotinus his whole life could find something
useful in this work of a boy. ” At seventeen he wrote on the popular
errors of the ancients, and quoted more than four hundred authors.
His next achievement was two odes in the manner of Anacreon,
which imposed upon the first scholars in Italy. At eighteen he wrote
a long poem called “The Approach of Death,' which was lost for
many years, but finally discovered and published. It is a vision of
the omnipotence of death, that offers a remarkable resemblance in
many ways to Shelley's “Triumph of Life,' written six years later.
Then in 1819, when the young poet was but twenty years old, came
the two poems which gave him his place among the Italian classics:
XV—562
## p. 8978 (#610) ###########################################
8978
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
the Ode to Italy,' and that to the Dante monument then being
erected in Florence.
These poems were so full of the spirit of the hour, and gave such
complete expression to the anguish of a country awakened from the
sleep of centuries to find herself among the despised and rejected
nations of the world, — her political prestige gone, her intellectual
standing lost, even her poetry' and her art sunk into the lowest
depths of degradation,- that they fired the Italian people like a voice
from their glorious past. Leopardi had emerged from the seclusion
of his father's library a perfect Greek in spirit and in style; and only
Landor could compare with him for classic purity, precision, and
force. The rich harmonies of the Italian language lent to his poetry
a charm that no English translation can possibly give, and the un-
rhymed lines fall cold and dead upon the ear in our less musical
tongue.
The revolutionary spirit of these odes and the bitter disappoint-
ment that they breathed made the bigoted and narrow-minded father
furious, and he denied his son almost the necessaries of life. Because
the poet refused to become a priest, he was loaded with labors that
his frail health was not able to support; nor would the father allow
him to leave Recanati, where ennui, to use Leopardi's own words, not
merely oppressed and wearied him, but agonized and lacerated like a
cruel pain. He had suffered there a disappointment in love; having
cherished a romantic passion for a young girl whom he scarcely knew,
but whose voice he heard continually as she sang at her work in a
house opposite his father's palace. Probably had he known her bet-
ter he might have loved her less; but the count promptly crushed the
dawning passion, and shortly afterwards the young girl died. Her
memory represented for the poet all that he ever knew of love.
At the age of twenty-four he broke away at last from his paternal
prison-house and went to Rome; only to carry his melancholy with
him, his morbid contempt for his fellows, his physical weakness and
sufferings. Rome proved to him only a larger Recanati, where fri-
volity and dissipation reigned supreme. A few foreigners, principally
Germans, and among them Niebuhr, alone redeemed the social degra-
dation. Niebuhr, who considered Leopardi by far the first, if not the
only, Greek philologist in Italy, would have procured him a profes-
sorship of Greek philosophy in Berlin; but Leopardi would not leave
his own country. For some years he drifted about rather aimlessly,
always the prey of ill health, from Rome to Milan, to Bologna, to
Recanati again, to Pisa, and to Florence. Many men loved him; nota-
bly Antonio Ranieri, a young Neapolitan whose acquaintance Leopardi
made in 1832, and at whose house at Capodimonte, carefully tended
by Ranieri and his sister, the poet spent the last years of his unhappy
## p. 8979 (#611) ###########################################
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
8979
life.
Here he met the German en, and wrote one of his finest
poems, "La Ginestra) (The Broom-flower). It was at Naples also that
Leopardi wrote a satire in ottava rima upon the abortive Neapolitan
revolution of 1820; a poem clever in its way, but like much of the
verse of Giusti, too full of local allusions to be comprehensible except
by the Neapolitans of the early thirties. After four years of hopeless
invalidism, Leopardi died very suddenly, on the eve of departure for
the country, on June 15th, 1837. His remains were deposited at a
little church on the road to Pozzuoli.
That genial critic, De Sanctis, tells us that “love, inexhaustible
and almost ideal, was the supreme craving of Leopardi's heart, and
never left it through life); and that it may in truth be said that
pain and love form the twofold poetry of his existence. ” Except for
the society of his commonplace brothers and sisters he was absolutely
without companionship until he went to Rome. The pettiness of its
social ambitions swept away his last illusion. To quote De Sanctis
again: “The objects of our desire he called idols; our labors, idleness;
and everything, vanity.
Inertia — rust, as it were — even more
than pain consumed his life, alone in what he called 'this formidable
desert of the world. " » Like most pessimists, he demanded everything
and gave nothing. He desired the love of mankind, but he hated
and despised his fellows; and insisted upon what they owed him, for-
getting his debt to them. Like another Prometheus, Leopardi lay
bound to the rock of suffering, with a vulture gnawing at his heart;
but the vulture was of his own nurture, and his tortures were self-
imposed. It is to his praise however as a patriot, that his voice was
one of the first to arouse Italy from her shameful sleep to the desire
of better things. As a poet the beautiful purity of his style, and the
exquisite melody of his unrhymed or irregularly rhymed verse, have
never been surpassed.
Opinions differ as to the crowning expression of his genius; but
the popular verdict seems to settle upon (Sylvia,' and the noble
poem “La Ginestra,' or the Broom-flower. The lyric beauty of (Syl-
via' can never be rendered in English irregular verse: it belongs to
the Italian language. The Night-Song of a Wandering Shepherd of
Asia' is one of the most charming of his longer poems; though it
may be considered doubtful whether any wandering shepherd ever
felt that the crowning happiness of his flocks was their incapacity
for feeling bored. Other fine poems of Leopardi are Aspasia,' (The
Song-Sparrow,' Bento Minore,' and The Dominant Thought. '
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## p. 8980 (#612) ###########################################
8980
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
SYLVIA
S
YLVIA, canst thou still remember
That time in thy brief existence
When a beauty all-resplendent
Shone from thine eyes, with their fleeting, smiling glances,
What time, pensive yet gay, thou wert crossing
The boundaries of thy youth?
Resounded all thy quiet
Dwelling, and the lanes around it,
With the music of thy singing,
As intent on the tasks of women
Thou wert pond'ring, lost in contentment,
All the vague future fancy held before thee.
It was May, the month of fragrance; and thus ever
Didst thou dream out the hours.
And I, my fairest studies
At times forsaking, and the well-thumbed volumes
Over whose weary pages
I spent myself, and the best part of my youth,
Leaned from the terrace of my father's dwelling,
To listen to the music of thy voice;
And to watch thy busy fingers
As they flew o'er the tiresome sewing.
While I gazed on the placid heavens,
The golden lanes and the gardens,
And there the far-off sea, and here the mountains,–
No mortal tongue could utter
The feelings that rose in me.
O Sylvia mine, what visions,
What hopes, what hearts, were ours!
Under what beautiful seeming
Lay human life and fate!
When I remember those fancies,
I am seized by a mortal sorrow,
Bitter, devoid of comfort,
And I return to grieve over all my misfortune.
O Nature, O Mother Nature,
Why dost thou never give us
That we were promised at first ? Alas, why so often
Dost thou deceive thy children?
Thee, ere the grass had faded with winter,
Insidious death had vanquished;
Thy tender beauty perished. And never saw'st thou
## p. 8981 (#613) ###########################################
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
8981
The flower of thy maiden years.
Thy heart was never melted
Or by the praises of thy raven tresses,
Or of thy loving glances, swift and bashful.
Nor at their feast-days with thy young companions,
Could'st thou discourse of love.
And shortly also perished
The sweet hope that treasured; even youth itself
The cruel fates denied me.
Alas, alas! how utterly has vanished
The dear companion of my early years,
The hope I mourn forever!
Is this the world we pictured? Can these be
The dear delights, the love, the deeds, the events,
That long ago we talked about so fondly?
Is this the destiny of all mankind ?
When the truth dawned upon thee,
Poor child, thou sank'st before it; thy cold hand pointing
To where the naked tomb and pallid Death
Waited me from afar.
Translation of Katharine Hillard.
NIGHT-SONG
OF A WANDERING ASIAN SHEPHERD
WHAT
HAT dost thou, moon in heaven; tell me, what dost thou,
O silent moon ?
Rising with evening, and slowly pacing
The skies, contemplating the desert; then setting.
Oh, art thou not yet weary
Of still retracing the everlasting pathways?
Art thou not yet rebellious ? dost still delight
In gazing at these valleys ?
Like thy life
The shepherd's life, methinks.
With earliest dawn he rises,
Drives his flock far afield, and watches
The flock, the brooks, the pastures;
Then wearied out, lies down to rest at evening.
Nor to aught else aspires.
Tell me, () moon, what value
Such a life to the shepherd,
## p. 8982 (#614) ###########################################
8982
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
Such a life, moon, to thee? tell me where leadeth
This brief existence of mine,
And thy eternal journeys?
An old man hoary and delicate,
Half clad, and going barefoot,
Bearing a heavy burden upon his shoulders, -
Over mountains and over valleys,
Over sharp rocks, deep sands, and thorny places,
In wind, in tempest, or when the lightning
Flashes, or the hailstones strike him,-
Still hurries on, hurries on panting,
Traverses torrents and marshes,
Falls and rises again, and faster and faster hastens;
Without or rest or refreshment,
Torn and bleeding he goes: and at last arriveth
There where the pathway
And his struggles alike have ending;
Where yawns the abyss, bottomless, terrible,-
There he Alings himself down, and findeth oblivion.
Such, O virgin noon,
Such is mortal existence.
Often, thus gazing upon thee,
Standing so silent above these, the desert regions,
Whereto with distant arch the heavens confine thee,
Or as my flock I follow,
Step by step, as we travel slowly together,
And when I gaze at the stars, that above me are burning,
I say to myself, as I'm thinking,
Why all these starry fires ?
What means this infinite air, and what the
Depths of the heavens? What is the meaning
Of all this solitude boundless? And I, what am I?
Thus I discourse with myself, and of all my surroundings,
Sky and earth, endless and splendid,
With all their offspring unnumbered;
Of all their relations and movements,
Of all things celestial, terrestrial,
Sweeping on still, without resting,
Ever returning to fill their places appointed.
Of all things, no purpose,
No real fruit can I see.
But thou at least, maiden immortal, thou
Knowest all things.
## p. 8983 (#615) ###########################################
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
8983
This thing I know, and I feel it:
That out of this endless motion,
Out of this frail human nature,
Some slight good and contentment
Others may get, perchance; to me our life is but evil.
O flock of mine, at rest here! O happy creatures,
That know not your fate, I believe you unconscious of sorrow!
What envy to you I bear!
Not only that even of suff'ring
Almost unheeding ye go,—
That hunger or terror
Seizing upon you, is ever as swiftly forgotten, -
But still more because tedium never o'ertakes you.
And when ye rest in the shade on sweet grasses,
Content and quiet bide with you.
Had I wings like a bird, peradventure,
To bear me on high through the heavens,
And one by one to number the planets,
Or, like the thunder, leap from one peak to another,
Happier I'd be, sweet my flock,
Happier I'd be, fairest moon.
Perchance, though, my wandering fancy
Strays from the truth, in dreaming of fortunes not mine.
Perchance in every fate, in every form,
Whether within the cradle or the fold,
To all the fatal day is that of birth.
Translation of Katharine Hillard.
## p. 8984 (#616) ###########################################
8984
ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE
(1668-1747)
BY JANE GROSVENOR COOKE
N FRANCE the seventeenth century was a time of dreams.
Imagination reveled in the grotesque and fantastic, and
craved the exuberant sentiment, the ideal emotion, expressed
in the romances of d'Urfé and Madame de La Fayette. Toward the
end of the century this mood was followed by reaction. People
stopped dreaming to study the real life before their eyes; and litera-
ture reflected the change. The first great realist in fiction was Alain
Le Sage.
Le Sage was a sturdy, self-willed Breton, with keen interest in
human affairs, and more than usual skill in drawing conclusions from
them. He was an optimist, taught by experience to distrust men's
motives. Left an orphan at fourteen, under guardianship of an
uncle who squandered his small patrimony, he accepted poverty with
characteristic cheerfulness. His seems to have been a sensible, con-
trolled nature, with slight inclination towards irregular ways. At
twenty-six he married a pretty girl of the bourgeoisie, went to writing,
and was the first Frenchman to earn a living by authorship.
Unlike the authors who preceded him, this honest bourgeois had
no powerful patronage to insure his success. He knew little of court
and salon, depended on his own exertions, and hence experienced
many disappointments before he found his place. His need of money
forced him to inferior production, and much of his work is now
valueless.
He had studied law; but Antoine Danchet a successful young
dramatist, and his chum and fellow-student of the Quartier Latin
urged him to write. Undoubtedly he liked the suggestion, although
his was
no evident vocation nor immediate success. His early at-
tempts were pot-boilers, efforts toward self-discovery; and the first-
a translation from the Greek, Letters of Aristænetus)
a failure.
But he was warmly encouraged by the Abbé de Lyonne,- eccentric
drinker of twenty-two daily pints of Seine water, and probable original
of the Sangrado of Gil Blas. ' He took Le Sage under his protec-
tion; made his perseverance in authorship possible by bestowing upon
him a pension of six hundred livres; and is said to have interested
)
## p. 8984 (#617) ###########################################
:
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## p. 8984 (#618) ###########################################
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## p. 8984 (#619) ###########################################
LE SAGE.
## p. 8984 (#620) ###########################################
## p. 8985 (#621) ###########################################
ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE
8985
him in Spanish literature, to which he may also have been attracted
by the fact that his wife's mother was a Spaniard. For years he
groped on, translating Spanish plays and stories, - unoriginal plodder.
Le Sage was curiously unambitious. His aspirations never seem
to have been of a highly emotional order, and he had no kinship
with the exalted sentiment of French classic drama and romance.
Sainte-Beuve calls him a man without any ideality; but it is truer to
define his ideal as the rule of good sense. He scorned to affect emo-
tion which he ignored, and was quick to detect and expose social
hypocrisies. Kindly in spite of many disillusions, he is the genius
of the commonplace; picturing with humorous satire and dramatic
force the actuating sentiments of ordinary men and women.
He required the stimulus of outside suggestion; and like Shake-
speare, loved to transform a ready-made tale. The plot and scene
remain Spanish, like the originals from which he borrowed; the atmo-
sphere and characterization are French.
When nearly forty he won his first brilliant success with two
dramas,— Crispin Rival de son Maître,' and Don César Ursin,'—
which were played upon one occasion at the Théâtre Français. The
first was a lively improbable one-act lever de rideau, in which a valet
in masquerade courts his master's daughter. The audience applauded
it enthusiastically, but were indifferent to the longer play. Oddly
enough, the situation was reversed at Versailles, where Don César
succeeded and the lever de rideau failed. The Parisians had shown
the keener judgment, for "Crispin' has become a classic.
(Turcaret,' his one great drama, was refused by the Théâtre
Français under its first title, Les Étrennes'; but when remodeled
introduced a daring innovation in stage tradition. Turcaret, shrewd
and unscrupulous, has made money as a government contractor and
come to Paris to enjoy it, ordering his countrified wife to remain at
home. He falls in love with a baroness, who flatters and fleeces him
and promptly bestows his gifts upon a younger lover. The valets
and grisettes flatter their master's foibles, pilfer when they can, and
better their condition by all clever knavery. The keen exposure of
human pettiness ends in the discomfiture of the vulgar hero. His
low-bred wife claims him at an evening reception; his coarse-grained
sister comes to sell finery to the baroness; he is swindled out of his
ill-gotten wealth and bundled off to prison. In the period of the
Spanish war, this typical portrayal of a class whose unscrupulous
dealings stirred up wrath and fear was even more daring than the
realism of Le Sage's great predecessor, Molière. For a time the play
was in danger of suppression, which it only escaped through the
intervention of royal authority. Even then the ridiculed class reviled
it hotly, hired men to hiss it down, and offered the author large
>
## p. 8986 (#622) ###########################################
8986
ALAIN RENE LE SAGE
bribes for its withdrawal: an opposition which only determined Le
Sage to continue it.
In spite of this success, he did not go on producing regular drama,
but devoted himself to the more profitable work of writing little
plays and operettas to be acted out of doors at the fairs of Paris.
These pièces de la foire, given in booths set up along the streets,
attracted a humbler audience, which received his satire more cor-
dially and offered him more certain recompense than the regular
theatres. In one of these plays he introduced a woman doctor; and
the idea of such an anomaly was greatly enjoyed as an impossible
burlesque.
His first noteworthy story, Le Diable Boiteux,'— founded on the
Spanish (Diablo Cojuelo' of Guevara, to whom it was dedicated,
appeared in 1707, and was the most immediately popular of Le Sage's
works. The spirit, liberated from a bottle in a magician's laboratory,
entertains his rescuer with the secret sights of a great city at night;
and unroofing the buildings, explains the sufferings, transports, and
agitations revealed. On this thread of story is strung a succession of
vivid satiric little dramas. Often compared with "Les Caractères of
La Bruyère in general idea, Le Diable' has greater continuity; for
while the foriner is a series of detached sketches, the latter continu-
ally recalls the interest to a central plot.
English readers know Le Sage best from his great novel, Gil
Blas,' over which he worked for more than twenty years. After a
long and bitter controversy as to his indebtedness to Spanish liter-
ature, the idea of a romance of which (Gil Blas) is a translation was
disproved. The central idea is Spanish, as often in his work; the
development his own.
Le Sage had no exalted opinion of reason as a controlling power;
but regarded a human being as an impressionable mass, capable of
recording and of being transformed by sensation. Gil Blas, the young
Spaniard who starts out to seek his fortune, is not remarkable for
vice or virtue. He is a shrewd, good-hearted youth, easily influenced
by his surroundings. But the power of good is impressed upon him
without conscious moralizing; and in middle life, after many follies
and mistakes, he becomes a staid, trustworthy citizen. He tells the
story of his adventures with witty candor and good-humor. He is a
shifty politic fellow, with a racquet for every ball. ” When he hears
of a relative whom he had never met — «Yet nature will prevail: as
soon as I had heard that he was in a fair way, I was tempted to call
upon him. ” While a valet, Gil Blas finds it necessary to leave his
place at short notice. "I made a bundle of my own goods, incident-
ally slipping in some odd articles belonging to my master. ”
He is
a knave certainly, but never a serious villain. Society, he finds, is
## p. 8987 (#623) ###########################################
ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE
8987
composed of people who live by their wits, and who think a great
deal about good things to eat and drink. So he scrambles with the
others. In the four volumes of Gil Blas's adventures, with the long
digressions about his acquaintances, there is no more plot than in a
man's life. There is no preaching. Yet the effect is of unity, and
the tale as moral as experience itself. ”
The distinctive quality of Le Sage is unprejudiced exposition.
“My purpose was to represent human life historically as it exists,"
he says in the preface to Gil Blas. «God forbid I should hold myself
out as a portrait-painter. Nevertheless he is a portrait-painter, seiz-
”
ing the outward visible fact with little psychological effort. His is
the hearty spontaneity of the simple story-teller.
In spite of his love of Spanish models, Le Sage breaks away from
the popular picaresque literature,- sensational tales recording the suc-
cess of low-born, witty rogues. He represents plenty of knavery; but
after all, Gil Blas finds honesty the best policy.
The work of Le Sage marks the transition from the spirit of the
seventeenth to that of the eighteenth century. In his large and gen-
eral view of life, of society en masse, and in his taste for foreign lit-
erature, he belongs to the seventeenth century. But his realism is
more modern; and in his lack of conscious moral motive, and in his
fatalistic acceptance of the conditions of human life, a grain of Vol-
tairean unbelief is already germinating:
Curiously enough, Le Sage exercised more influence abroad than
at home. Before his fellow-countrymen had learned to appreciate
him, Smollett had translated Gil Blas into English; and it had become
the model after which Fielding and his contemporaries sought to
shape the English novel.
The great charm of Le Sage lies in the strong and rapid style of
his witty narration. Occasionally he shows an appreciation of nature,
but his interest in life is almost wholly social. Whatever he has to
say is expressed with characteristic grace and strength. The words
are so ready and so apt, the phrase so just yet easy, the whole effect
so animated, that in his instinctive pleasure the reader hardly realizes
the great literary skill which created this masterpiece of precise and
vigorous French.
'
ude of universal mystery, of which the honor of discovery is
exclusively ascribed to the Slav novelists? This mystery ” can
only be that of our destiny, of our souls, of God, of the origin
and end of the universe. But who does not know that nearly
all our writers, from 1825 to 1850 especially, professed themselves
as disquieted over these things? Of this disquietude Victor
Hugo is full; he overflows with it.
If it is said that what is meant is less a philosophical dis-
quiet than a feeling of the formidable unknown which surrounds
us, a feeling which is perhaps evoked by some accidental sensa-
tion, I answer that I quite understand that there are moments
when this thought alone — that one is in the world, and that the
world exists, appears utterly incomprehensible and strikes us
dumb. But in the first place, this astonishment at living, this
sort of “sacred horror,” is inconsistent in its very nature with
any expression at all except the briefest, and can be prolonged
only by repeating itself. In the second place, we had assuredly
experienced this mysterious shudder before we ever opened a
Russian or Norwegian book. Tolstoi's phrase “The eternal
silence of infinite space affrights me,” is one which does not
date from yesterday.
If, then, all that we admire in the recent writers of the North
was already ours, how does it happen that, visible in them, it
## p. 8971 (#599) ###########################################
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
8971
I am
appears to so many of us new and original? Is it because
these writers are greater artists than ours, their literary form
superior to that of our poets and novelists? The question seems
to me insoluble: for he alone could discern the exact value of
literary form who should comprehend all the languages of Europe
as profoundly as he comprehends his own; that is, sufficiently
to perceive in its most delicate shades that which constitutes the
style of each writer. This, I imagine, can never be; for I find
that the most learned and accomplished of foreign linguists never
arrive at the power of feeling as we do the phrase of a Flaubert
or a Renan. The incapacity is made evident by their classifica-
tion of our authors, where they put together without discrimina-
tion the great and the inferior. In the same way the style of
foreign writers must always to a great extent escape us.
inclined to believe that a man may know several languages well,
but only one profoundly. It is certain that neither Eliot, nor
Ibsen, nor Tolstoi will ever afford to us that kind or degree of
pleasure which is aroused in us by the literary form of our own
great authors.
Norway has interminable winters almost without day, alter-
nating with short and violent summers almost without night:
marvelous conditions either for the slow and patient working
out of one's inner visions, or for the sudden and overpowering
impulses of passion.
London, compared with which Paris is but a pretty little town,
is the capital of effort and will; and an English fog seems to me
an excellent atmosphere for reflection. I have never
steppe; but to picture it to the eye of the mind, I multiply in
my imagination the melancholy stretches of heath, the pools and
woods of Sologne in winter.
To understand their literature we must add to these physical
characteristics the Past of Norway, England, and Russia; their
traditions, their public and private manners, their religions, and
the furrows traced by them all in the Norwegian, English, and
Russian brain.
Briefly, it may be said that the writers of the North return
to us (and this is the secret of their charm) the substance of
our own literature of forty or fifty years ago, modified, renewed,
and enriched by its passage through minds notably different
from our own. In rethinking our thoughts, they rediscover them
seen
a
for us.
## p. 8972 (#600) ###########################################
8972
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
.
more
They have, it seems to me, less art than we, less knowledge
of the rules of composition. Such works as Middlemarch' are
discouraging by their prolixity. Eight days of constant reading
are necessary for War and Peace'; and such dimensions are in
themselves inartistic.
Furthermore, I am by no means persuaded that these writers
have more emotion than ours: certainly they have no
general ideas. But they have to a greater degree than we the
perception of the inner religious life.
More patient than we; not perhaps more penetrating, but
capable of greater persistence, if I may say so, in meditation and
observation; more able than we to dispense with diversions,-
they address themselves to readers who have less need than we of
being amused. The long and monotonous conversations of Ibsen,
his indefatigable accumulation of familiar details, at first over-
whelm us, but little by little envelop us, and form around each
of his dramas an atmosphere peculiar to itself, by which the
appearance of truth in the characters is greatly augmented. We
see them living their slow mysterious lives. They are intensely
serious: and they exhibit this peculiarity,- that all the incidents
of their existence stir their soul's depths, and reveal these depths
to us; that their domestic dramas become dramas of conscience
in which their whole spiritual life is involved. A woman who
finds that her husband does not understand her, or that her
son is attacked by an incurable malady, instantly asks herself if
Martin Luther was not too conservative, whether paganism or
Christianity is really right, and if all our laws do not rest upon
falsehood and hypocrisy.
Perhaps the author forgets that these questions, absorbing
when discussed by a great philosopher or poet, can be solved only
in commonplace fashion by narrow townspeople and well-meaning
clergymen. Perhaps too he surfeits us with the restless meta-
physics of ordinary humanity, and its tendency to philosophize.
But as it is really his own thought that he thus translates, it is
possible after all to take in it a true and lively interest.
One dominating idea in the romances of George Eliot is the
idea of responsibility, accepted in its most rigid sense: the idea
that no act is indifferent or inoffensive; that all have infinite con-
sequences, and reverberations either within or without our own
souls, and that thus we are always more responsible, or responsi-
ble for more, than we realize. The consequence of this idea is
## p. 8973 (#601) ###########################################
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
8973
.
a moral surveillance constantly exercised by her characters over
themselves, or by the author over her characters. Most of them
hold the idea of sin, and of an inner life at least as fully devel-
oped as the life of their social relations. They make frequent
examinations of conscience; they repent, they improve. Certainly
all this is more
rare in
our romances, doubtless because it is
more rare in our conduct. I have noticed, on the other hand,
that George Sand's heroes almost never repent. If Mauprat ad-
vances in goodness, it is in virtue of his love for Edmée, and
not as the result of probing for his sins. Others learn the les-
sons of events, and grow better through experience. The nobler
characters of Sand and Hugo dwell more upon the happiness of
humanity than upon their own moral perfection. I grant at once
that they are inconsequent persons, apt to begin at the wrong
end of things, and that their gospel is often a gospel of revolu-
tion.
I must of course admit that the realism of these foreigners is
more chaste than ours has been. The deeds of the flesh hold
small place in their works, for which I willingly praise them. I
observe, however, that if the actual state of things in France is
less unblushing than it is made to appear in some of our realistic
novels, it is surely, throughout Europe, less refined than English
and Russian romances would lead us to believe. We are more
frank in these matters. I do not know that this is a mark of
superiority; but our realism, more sensual perhaps, is also more
disenchanting. Northern writers surely do not recoil from depict-
ing the suffering, cruelty, and squalor of human life; but it can-
not be denied that they diminish their own power by avoiding a
certain class of infamies. They do not tell the whole truth. You
will never find in them such pages as certain of those of Flau-
bert or Maupassant. They are well able to show us the world as
infinitely sad and pitiful; but hesitate to exhibit it as simply dis-
gusting, which nevertheless it often is. Their pessimism is never
as radical as they pretend.
This prudishness, this reserve, this incurable scrupulousness is
explained by that religious spirit with which they are still im-
pregnated; and thus we arrive at this truism, that the differences
of literatures are rooted in the fundamental differences of race.
The books of Ibsen and Eliot remain, in spite of the intel-
lectual emancipation of these writers, Protestant books. For to
abandon, after unrestricted examination, as Eliot and Ibsen have
## p. 8974 (#602) ###########################################
8974
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
-
done, a religion of which unrestricted examination is an inherent
attribute, is not, properly speaking, to abandon at all. Only that
can be really thrown off which is really a yoke: insurrection is
only veritably made against a religion which interdicts freedom of
spirit. In the other religions one may remain by expanding them.
It is only where prohibition is radical that schism can be abso-
lute. That which Protestant liberty forbids is not intellectual
enfranchisement, but if I may say so, enfranchisement of language
and manner. Among Protestant peoples, where the faithful soul
depends only upon his conscience, and allows no intermediary
between himself and God, the universal habits of thought and
discussion which result, cause a mingling of religious sentiment
and anxiety in all their literature,- even profane,- and unbe-
lievers retain at least the manner and tone of believers. On the
contrary, among us emancipated Catholics—or even practicing
Catholics whom sacramental confession absolves in part from the
care of administering our own conscience - there is a religious
or rather ecclesiastical literature with which we are but little
acquainted, and a literature entirely profane and laic; each one
playing its own part. To certain reflections on the inner nature
of souls, certain bits of moral casuistry, certain effusions of reli-
gious sentiment, which strike us in Eliot and Ibsen, we could
find analogous examples only in the works of priests and monks,
whom we ignore, or in Bossuet, Lacordaire, or Veuillot, where it
does not occur to us to look for them. Our two literatures do
not mingle, and thereby the secular loses something of moral
depth.
Finally, we see in what measure these foreigners have been of
service to us. We have welcomed their idealism through weari-
ness or disgust with naturalism. It is true that they have led us
to put more exactness and sincerity into the expression of ideas
and sentiments which were formerly familiar to us; to give pre-
cision to our romanticism, and at the same time to moderate our
realism.
But once again, if we have heartily and readily accepted this
foreign literature, is it not proved that in reality we possess, if
not the cosmopolitan spirit, at least the cosmopolitan manners ?
An Englishman travels over the whole world, and remains every-
where an Englishman. We do not quit our own firesides; but
from this corner we adapt ourselves without difficulty to the
moods and manner of thought of all nations, even the most
## p. 8975 (#603) ###########################################
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
8975
-
remote. Yes! ours are the writers whom I term the true cos.
mopolitans; for a cosmopolitan — that is to say, a European -- lit-
erature should be common and intelligible to all the people of
Europe, and can only become cosmopolitan by the order, sym-
metry, and lucidity which have for centuries been accepted as our
national qualities. They are so still; as is proved by the large
human sympathy which we are to-day supposing that we discover
among foreigners, but which nevertheless has always been one of
our most eminent characteristics. We love to approve; ours is
perhaps the only nation disposed to prefer others to itself. But
this very enthusiasm with which we have fostered and extolled
the tender humanity of the Russian romance and the Norwegian
drama - does it not prove that we ourselves possess the same
quality, and that in them we have only recognized it ?
These exchanges — this give-and-take of ideas between na-
tions — have existed in all times, more especially since the close-
ness of commercial relations has involved that of intellectual
relations as well. At times we have borrowed from other peo-
ples, and have impressed upon that which we took a European
character. Such are the appropriations of Corneille or Le Sage
from the Spaniards. At times, and oftener, being inquisitive
and kindly, we have taken from them unconsciously that which
we ourselves had previously loaned them. Thus, in the eigh-
teenth century we discovered the novels of Richardson, who had
imitated Marivaux. Thus we have found again in Lessing that
which was in Diderot, and in Goethe much that was in Jean
Jacques; and we have believed that we owed to the Germans
and English the romanticism which we ourselves had originated.
For is not romanticism more than mediæval decoration, or in the
drama more than the suppression of the three unities, or the
mingling of tragedy and comedy ? It is the feeling for nature,
the recognition of the rights of passion; it is the spirit of revolt,
the exaltation of the individual: all, things of which the germs
and more than the germs were in the Nouvelle Héloise,' in the
'Confessions, and in the Lettres de la Montagne. '
In this constant circulation of ideas, we are less and less cer-
tain to whom they belong. Each nation imposes upon them its
own character, and each of the characters seems necessarily the
most original and the best.
It is only of the present moment that I write, and who knows
how fleeting that may be? This restless septentriomania — how
## p. 8976 (#604) ###########################################
8976
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
-
long will it endure ? Does it not already begin to languish ?
And as to the rest,- to come to the regulating of this debit
and credit account opened between races, does it not remain to
be seen whether the pietism of George Eliot, the contradictory
and rebellious idealism of Ibsen, the mystic fatalism of Tolstoi,
are necessarily superior to the humanitarianism or the realism of
French authors ? Who can affirm that the ardor of our scientific
faith and revolutionizing charity, moderately subjective as they
are and inclined rather to social reform, do not compensate in
the sight of God for the greater aptitude of the Northern races
for meditation and subjective perfection ? Who will swear that
largely and humanly understood, the positive philosophy, to call
it by its name, - the philosophy of Taine, that which is held to
be responsible for the brutalities and aridities of naturalistic lit-
erature,- does not represent a more advanced moment in human
development than Protestant and septentrional religiosity? Do
not books like those of J. H. Rosny, to cite no others, presage
the reconciliation of two sorts of intelligence which among us
have been too often separated ? And do we not recognize in
them both the enthusiasm for science and the enthusiasm for
moral beauty, and see already how these two religions accord
and become fruitful ? Who lives shall see! Meantime, make
haste to enjoy these writers from regions of snows and fogs;
enjoy them while they are in favor, while they are believed in,
and while they can still influence you,- as it is best to avail one's
self of the methods in vogue, so long as they can cure.
For it may be that a reaction of the Latin spirit is at hand.
Translated for (A Library of the World's Best Literature. '
## p. 8976 (#605) ###########################################
## p. 8976 (#606) ###########################################
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## p. 8977 (#609) ###########################################
8977
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
(1798-1837)
BY KATHARINE HILLARD
PIKE Byron, Leopardi came of an ancient and patrician but im-
poverished family. His mother, who seems to have been the
real head of the house, had so absorbed herself in the task
of repairing its fallen fortunes, that she had little time and less ten-
derness left to lavish upon her children. His father, Count Monaldo
Leopardi, was a mere figure-head in his own household, and spent
most of his time shut up in his library. He lived at Recanati, a little
mountain village of Tuscany, high up in the Apennines, near Loreto;
and there, in the stifling dullness of a small provincial town, Giacomo
Leopardi was born, on the 29th of June, 1798. His father was as con-
servative as an ordinary mind bred up under the restraints of a little
village in the Italy of that day naturally would be. He was bigoted,
narrow-minded, bitterly opposed to progress, seeing nothing good out-
side of the precincts of the Church. He even preferred the costume
of an earlier period, and dressed himself and his wife in mediæval
attire. The young Leopardi, nervous, sickly, and deformed, was
brought up in his father's library, having no companions except his
sister and his brothers. He spent his time among dictionaries and
grammars; and with little or no assistance contrived to make him-
self master of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and English,
by the time he was sixteen.
At that age he composed a Latin treatise on the Roman rhetori-
cians of the second century, a history of astronomy, and a Latin
translation and comment on Plotinus, of which Sainte-Beuve said that
“one who had studied Plotinus his whole life could find something
useful in this work of a boy. ” At seventeen he wrote on the popular
errors of the ancients, and quoted more than four hundred authors.
His next achievement was two odes in the manner of Anacreon,
which imposed upon the first scholars in Italy. At eighteen he wrote
a long poem called “The Approach of Death,' which was lost for
many years, but finally discovered and published. It is a vision of
the omnipotence of death, that offers a remarkable resemblance in
many ways to Shelley's “Triumph of Life,' written six years later.
Then in 1819, when the young poet was but twenty years old, came
the two poems which gave him his place among the Italian classics:
XV—562
## p. 8978 (#610) ###########################################
8978
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
the Ode to Italy,' and that to the Dante monument then being
erected in Florence.
These poems were so full of the spirit of the hour, and gave such
complete expression to the anguish of a country awakened from the
sleep of centuries to find herself among the despised and rejected
nations of the world, — her political prestige gone, her intellectual
standing lost, even her poetry' and her art sunk into the lowest
depths of degradation,- that they fired the Italian people like a voice
from their glorious past. Leopardi had emerged from the seclusion
of his father's library a perfect Greek in spirit and in style; and only
Landor could compare with him for classic purity, precision, and
force. The rich harmonies of the Italian language lent to his poetry
a charm that no English translation can possibly give, and the un-
rhymed lines fall cold and dead upon the ear in our less musical
tongue.
The revolutionary spirit of these odes and the bitter disappoint-
ment that they breathed made the bigoted and narrow-minded father
furious, and he denied his son almost the necessaries of life. Because
the poet refused to become a priest, he was loaded with labors that
his frail health was not able to support; nor would the father allow
him to leave Recanati, where ennui, to use Leopardi's own words, not
merely oppressed and wearied him, but agonized and lacerated like a
cruel pain. He had suffered there a disappointment in love; having
cherished a romantic passion for a young girl whom he scarcely knew,
but whose voice he heard continually as she sang at her work in a
house opposite his father's palace. Probably had he known her bet-
ter he might have loved her less; but the count promptly crushed the
dawning passion, and shortly afterwards the young girl died. Her
memory represented for the poet all that he ever knew of love.
At the age of twenty-four he broke away at last from his paternal
prison-house and went to Rome; only to carry his melancholy with
him, his morbid contempt for his fellows, his physical weakness and
sufferings. Rome proved to him only a larger Recanati, where fri-
volity and dissipation reigned supreme. A few foreigners, principally
Germans, and among them Niebuhr, alone redeemed the social degra-
dation. Niebuhr, who considered Leopardi by far the first, if not the
only, Greek philologist in Italy, would have procured him a profes-
sorship of Greek philosophy in Berlin; but Leopardi would not leave
his own country. For some years he drifted about rather aimlessly,
always the prey of ill health, from Rome to Milan, to Bologna, to
Recanati again, to Pisa, and to Florence. Many men loved him; nota-
bly Antonio Ranieri, a young Neapolitan whose acquaintance Leopardi
made in 1832, and at whose house at Capodimonte, carefully tended
by Ranieri and his sister, the poet spent the last years of his unhappy
## p. 8979 (#611) ###########################################
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
8979
life.
Here he met the German en, and wrote one of his finest
poems, "La Ginestra) (The Broom-flower). It was at Naples also that
Leopardi wrote a satire in ottava rima upon the abortive Neapolitan
revolution of 1820; a poem clever in its way, but like much of the
verse of Giusti, too full of local allusions to be comprehensible except
by the Neapolitans of the early thirties. After four years of hopeless
invalidism, Leopardi died very suddenly, on the eve of departure for
the country, on June 15th, 1837. His remains were deposited at a
little church on the road to Pozzuoli.
That genial critic, De Sanctis, tells us that “love, inexhaustible
and almost ideal, was the supreme craving of Leopardi's heart, and
never left it through life); and that it may in truth be said that
pain and love form the twofold poetry of his existence. ” Except for
the society of his commonplace brothers and sisters he was absolutely
without companionship until he went to Rome. The pettiness of its
social ambitions swept away his last illusion. To quote De Sanctis
again: “The objects of our desire he called idols; our labors, idleness;
and everything, vanity.
Inertia — rust, as it were — even more
than pain consumed his life, alone in what he called 'this formidable
desert of the world. " » Like most pessimists, he demanded everything
and gave nothing. He desired the love of mankind, but he hated
and despised his fellows; and insisted upon what they owed him, for-
getting his debt to them. Like another Prometheus, Leopardi lay
bound to the rock of suffering, with a vulture gnawing at his heart;
but the vulture was of his own nurture, and his tortures were self-
imposed. It is to his praise however as a patriot, that his voice was
one of the first to arouse Italy from her shameful sleep to the desire
of better things. As a poet the beautiful purity of his style, and the
exquisite melody of his unrhymed or irregularly rhymed verse, have
never been surpassed.
Opinions differ as to the crowning expression of his genius; but
the popular verdict seems to settle upon (Sylvia,' and the noble
poem “La Ginestra,' or the Broom-flower. The lyric beauty of (Syl-
via' can never be rendered in English irregular verse: it belongs to
the Italian language. The Night-Song of a Wandering Shepherd of
Asia' is one of the most charming of his longer poems; though it
may be considered doubtful whether any wandering shepherd ever
felt that the crowning happiness of his flocks was their incapacity
for feeling bored. Other fine poems of Leopardi are Aspasia,' (The
Song-Sparrow,' Bento Minore,' and The Dominant Thought. '
>
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1
## p. 8980 (#612) ###########################################
8980
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
SYLVIA
S
YLVIA, canst thou still remember
That time in thy brief existence
When a beauty all-resplendent
Shone from thine eyes, with their fleeting, smiling glances,
What time, pensive yet gay, thou wert crossing
The boundaries of thy youth?
Resounded all thy quiet
Dwelling, and the lanes around it,
With the music of thy singing,
As intent on the tasks of women
Thou wert pond'ring, lost in contentment,
All the vague future fancy held before thee.
It was May, the month of fragrance; and thus ever
Didst thou dream out the hours.
And I, my fairest studies
At times forsaking, and the well-thumbed volumes
Over whose weary pages
I spent myself, and the best part of my youth,
Leaned from the terrace of my father's dwelling,
To listen to the music of thy voice;
And to watch thy busy fingers
As they flew o'er the tiresome sewing.
While I gazed on the placid heavens,
The golden lanes and the gardens,
And there the far-off sea, and here the mountains,–
No mortal tongue could utter
The feelings that rose in me.
O Sylvia mine, what visions,
What hopes, what hearts, were ours!
Under what beautiful seeming
Lay human life and fate!
When I remember those fancies,
I am seized by a mortal sorrow,
Bitter, devoid of comfort,
And I return to grieve over all my misfortune.
O Nature, O Mother Nature,
Why dost thou never give us
That we were promised at first ? Alas, why so often
Dost thou deceive thy children?
Thee, ere the grass had faded with winter,
Insidious death had vanquished;
Thy tender beauty perished. And never saw'st thou
## p. 8981 (#613) ###########################################
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
8981
The flower of thy maiden years.
Thy heart was never melted
Or by the praises of thy raven tresses,
Or of thy loving glances, swift and bashful.
Nor at their feast-days with thy young companions,
Could'st thou discourse of love.
And shortly also perished
The sweet hope that treasured; even youth itself
The cruel fates denied me.
Alas, alas! how utterly has vanished
The dear companion of my early years,
The hope I mourn forever!
Is this the world we pictured? Can these be
The dear delights, the love, the deeds, the events,
That long ago we talked about so fondly?
Is this the destiny of all mankind ?
When the truth dawned upon thee,
Poor child, thou sank'st before it; thy cold hand pointing
To where the naked tomb and pallid Death
Waited me from afar.
Translation of Katharine Hillard.
NIGHT-SONG
OF A WANDERING ASIAN SHEPHERD
WHAT
HAT dost thou, moon in heaven; tell me, what dost thou,
O silent moon ?
Rising with evening, and slowly pacing
The skies, contemplating the desert; then setting.
Oh, art thou not yet weary
Of still retracing the everlasting pathways?
Art thou not yet rebellious ? dost still delight
In gazing at these valleys ?
Like thy life
The shepherd's life, methinks.
With earliest dawn he rises,
Drives his flock far afield, and watches
The flock, the brooks, the pastures;
Then wearied out, lies down to rest at evening.
Nor to aught else aspires.
Tell me, () moon, what value
Such a life to the shepherd,
## p. 8982 (#614) ###########################################
8982
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
Such a life, moon, to thee? tell me where leadeth
This brief existence of mine,
And thy eternal journeys?
An old man hoary and delicate,
Half clad, and going barefoot,
Bearing a heavy burden upon his shoulders, -
Over mountains and over valleys,
Over sharp rocks, deep sands, and thorny places,
In wind, in tempest, or when the lightning
Flashes, or the hailstones strike him,-
Still hurries on, hurries on panting,
Traverses torrents and marshes,
Falls and rises again, and faster and faster hastens;
Without or rest or refreshment,
Torn and bleeding he goes: and at last arriveth
There where the pathway
And his struggles alike have ending;
Where yawns the abyss, bottomless, terrible,-
There he Alings himself down, and findeth oblivion.
Such, O virgin noon,
Such is mortal existence.
Often, thus gazing upon thee,
Standing so silent above these, the desert regions,
Whereto with distant arch the heavens confine thee,
Or as my flock I follow,
Step by step, as we travel slowly together,
And when I gaze at the stars, that above me are burning,
I say to myself, as I'm thinking,
Why all these starry fires ?
What means this infinite air, and what the
Depths of the heavens? What is the meaning
Of all this solitude boundless? And I, what am I?
Thus I discourse with myself, and of all my surroundings,
Sky and earth, endless and splendid,
With all their offspring unnumbered;
Of all their relations and movements,
Of all things celestial, terrestrial,
Sweeping on still, without resting,
Ever returning to fill their places appointed.
Of all things, no purpose,
No real fruit can I see.
But thou at least, maiden immortal, thou
Knowest all things.
## p. 8983 (#615) ###########################################
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
8983
This thing I know, and I feel it:
That out of this endless motion,
Out of this frail human nature,
Some slight good and contentment
Others may get, perchance; to me our life is but evil.
O flock of mine, at rest here! O happy creatures,
That know not your fate, I believe you unconscious of sorrow!
What envy to you I bear!
Not only that even of suff'ring
Almost unheeding ye go,—
That hunger or terror
Seizing upon you, is ever as swiftly forgotten, -
But still more because tedium never o'ertakes you.
And when ye rest in the shade on sweet grasses,
Content and quiet bide with you.
Had I wings like a bird, peradventure,
To bear me on high through the heavens,
And one by one to number the planets,
Or, like the thunder, leap from one peak to another,
Happier I'd be, sweet my flock,
Happier I'd be, fairest moon.
Perchance, though, my wandering fancy
Strays from the truth, in dreaming of fortunes not mine.
Perchance in every fate, in every form,
Whether within the cradle or the fold,
To all the fatal day is that of birth.
Translation of Katharine Hillard.
## p. 8984 (#616) ###########################################
8984
ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE
(1668-1747)
BY JANE GROSVENOR COOKE
N FRANCE the seventeenth century was a time of dreams.
Imagination reveled in the grotesque and fantastic, and
craved the exuberant sentiment, the ideal emotion, expressed
in the romances of d'Urfé and Madame de La Fayette. Toward the
end of the century this mood was followed by reaction. People
stopped dreaming to study the real life before their eyes; and litera-
ture reflected the change. The first great realist in fiction was Alain
Le Sage.
Le Sage was a sturdy, self-willed Breton, with keen interest in
human affairs, and more than usual skill in drawing conclusions from
them. He was an optimist, taught by experience to distrust men's
motives. Left an orphan at fourteen, under guardianship of an
uncle who squandered his small patrimony, he accepted poverty with
characteristic cheerfulness. His seems to have been a sensible, con-
trolled nature, with slight inclination towards irregular ways. At
twenty-six he married a pretty girl of the bourgeoisie, went to writing,
and was the first Frenchman to earn a living by authorship.
Unlike the authors who preceded him, this honest bourgeois had
no powerful patronage to insure his success. He knew little of court
and salon, depended on his own exertions, and hence experienced
many disappointments before he found his place. His need of money
forced him to inferior production, and much of his work is now
valueless.
He had studied law; but Antoine Danchet a successful young
dramatist, and his chum and fellow-student of the Quartier Latin
urged him to write. Undoubtedly he liked the suggestion, although
his was
no evident vocation nor immediate success. His early at-
tempts were pot-boilers, efforts toward self-discovery; and the first-
a translation from the Greek, Letters of Aristænetus)
a failure.
But he was warmly encouraged by the Abbé de Lyonne,- eccentric
drinker of twenty-two daily pints of Seine water, and probable original
of the Sangrado of Gil Blas. ' He took Le Sage under his protec-
tion; made his perseverance in authorship possible by bestowing upon
him a pension of six hundred livres; and is said to have interested
)
## p. 8984 (#617) ###########################################
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## p. 8984 (#619) ###########################################
LE SAGE.
## p. 8984 (#620) ###########################################
## p. 8985 (#621) ###########################################
ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE
8985
him in Spanish literature, to which he may also have been attracted
by the fact that his wife's mother was a Spaniard. For years he
groped on, translating Spanish plays and stories, - unoriginal plodder.
Le Sage was curiously unambitious. His aspirations never seem
to have been of a highly emotional order, and he had no kinship
with the exalted sentiment of French classic drama and romance.
Sainte-Beuve calls him a man without any ideality; but it is truer to
define his ideal as the rule of good sense. He scorned to affect emo-
tion which he ignored, and was quick to detect and expose social
hypocrisies. Kindly in spite of many disillusions, he is the genius
of the commonplace; picturing with humorous satire and dramatic
force the actuating sentiments of ordinary men and women.
He required the stimulus of outside suggestion; and like Shake-
speare, loved to transform a ready-made tale. The plot and scene
remain Spanish, like the originals from which he borrowed; the atmo-
sphere and characterization are French.
When nearly forty he won his first brilliant success with two
dramas,— Crispin Rival de son Maître,' and Don César Ursin,'—
which were played upon one occasion at the Théâtre Français. The
first was a lively improbable one-act lever de rideau, in which a valet
in masquerade courts his master's daughter. The audience applauded
it enthusiastically, but were indifferent to the longer play. Oddly
enough, the situation was reversed at Versailles, where Don César
succeeded and the lever de rideau failed. The Parisians had shown
the keener judgment, for "Crispin' has become a classic.
(Turcaret,' his one great drama, was refused by the Théâtre
Français under its first title, Les Étrennes'; but when remodeled
introduced a daring innovation in stage tradition. Turcaret, shrewd
and unscrupulous, has made money as a government contractor and
come to Paris to enjoy it, ordering his countrified wife to remain at
home. He falls in love with a baroness, who flatters and fleeces him
and promptly bestows his gifts upon a younger lover. The valets
and grisettes flatter their master's foibles, pilfer when they can, and
better their condition by all clever knavery. The keen exposure of
human pettiness ends in the discomfiture of the vulgar hero. His
low-bred wife claims him at an evening reception; his coarse-grained
sister comes to sell finery to the baroness; he is swindled out of his
ill-gotten wealth and bundled off to prison. In the period of the
Spanish war, this typical portrayal of a class whose unscrupulous
dealings stirred up wrath and fear was even more daring than the
realism of Le Sage's great predecessor, Molière. For a time the play
was in danger of suppression, which it only escaped through the
intervention of royal authority. Even then the ridiculed class reviled
it hotly, hired men to hiss it down, and offered the author large
>
## p. 8986 (#622) ###########################################
8986
ALAIN RENE LE SAGE
bribes for its withdrawal: an opposition which only determined Le
Sage to continue it.
In spite of this success, he did not go on producing regular drama,
but devoted himself to the more profitable work of writing little
plays and operettas to be acted out of doors at the fairs of Paris.
These pièces de la foire, given in booths set up along the streets,
attracted a humbler audience, which received his satire more cor-
dially and offered him more certain recompense than the regular
theatres. In one of these plays he introduced a woman doctor; and
the idea of such an anomaly was greatly enjoyed as an impossible
burlesque.
His first noteworthy story, Le Diable Boiteux,'— founded on the
Spanish (Diablo Cojuelo' of Guevara, to whom it was dedicated,
appeared in 1707, and was the most immediately popular of Le Sage's
works. The spirit, liberated from a bottle in a magician's laboratory,
entertains his rescuer with the secret sights of a great city at night;
and unroofing the buildings, explains the sufferings, transports, and
agitations revealed. On this thread of story is strung a succession of
vivid satiric little dramas. Often compared with "Les Caractères of
La Bruyère in general idea, Le Diable' has greater continuity; for
while the foriner is a series of detached sketches, the latter continu-
ally recalls the interest to a central plot.
English readers know Le Sage best from his great novel, Gil
Blas,' over which he worked for more than twenty years. After a
long and bitter controversy as to his indebtedness to Spanish liter-
ature, the idea of a romance of which (Gil Blas) is a translation was
disproved. The central idea is Spanish, as often in his work; the
development his own.
Le Sage had no exalted opinion of reason as a controlling power;
but regarded a human being as an impressionable mass, capable of
recording and of being transformed by sensation. Gil Blas, the young
Spaniard who starts out to seek his fortune, is not remarkable for
vice or virtue. He is a shrewd, good-hearted youth, easily influenced
by his surroundings. But the power of good is impressed upon him
without conscious moralizing; and in middle life, after many follies
and mistakes, he becomes a staid, trustworthy citizen. He tells the
story of his adventures with witty candor and good-humor. He is a
shifty politic fellow, with a racquet for every ball. ” When he hears
of a relative whom he had never met — «Yet nature will prevail: as
soon as I had heard that he was in a fair way, I was tempted to call
upon him. ” While a valet, Gil Blas finds it necessary to leave his
place at short notice. "I made a bundle of my own goods, incident-
ally slipping in some odd articles belonging to my master. ”
He is
a knave certainly, but never a serious villain. Society, he finds, is
## p. 8987 (#623) ###########################################
ALAIN RENÉ LE SAGE
8987
composed of people who live by their wits, and who think a great
deal about good things to eat and drink. So he scrambles with the
others. In the four volumes of Gil Blas's adventures, with the long
digressions about his acquaintances, there is no more plot than in a
man's life. There is no preaching. Yet the effect is of unity, and
the tale as moral as experience itself. ”
The distinctive quality of Le Sage is unprejudiced exposition.
“My purpose was to represent human life historically as it exists,"
he says in the preface to Gil Blas. «God forbid I should hold myself
out as a portrait-painter. Nevertheless he is a portrait-painter, seiz-
”
ing the outward visible fact with little psychological effort. His is
the hearty spontaneity of the simple story-teller.
In spite of his love of Spanish models, Le Sage breaks away from
the popular picaresque literature,- sensational tales recording the suc-
cess of low-born, witty rogues. He represents plenty of knavery; but
after all, Gil Blas finds honesty the best policy.
The work of Le Sage marks the transition from the spirit of the
seventeenth to that of the eighteenth century. In his large and gen-
eral view of life, of society en masse, and in his taste for foreign lit-
erature, he belongs to the seventeenth century. But his realism is
more modern; and in his lack of conscious moral motive, and in his
fatalistic acceptance of the conditions of human life, a grain of Vol-
tairean unbelief is already germinating:
Curiously enough, Le Sage exercised more influence abroad than
at home. Before his fellow-countrymen had learned to appreciate
him, Smollett had translated Gil Blas into English; and it had become
the model after which Fielding and his contemporaries sought to
shape the English novel.
The great charm of Le Sage lies in the strong and rapid style of
his witty narration. Occasionally he shows an appreciation of nature,
but his interest in life is almost wholly social. Whatever he has to
say is expressed with characteristic grace and strength. The words
are so ready and so apt, the phrase so just yet easy, the whole effect
so animated, that in his instinctive pleasure the reader hardly realizes
the great literary skill which created this masterpiece of precise and
vigorous French.
