The deeds of the flesh hold
small place in their works, for which I willingly praise them.
small place in their works, for which I willingly praise them.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v15 - Kab to Les
But 10 sooner has one set of innovators achieved success than
another band begins to attack the victors of yesterday; and so battle
follows battle, and revolution revolution. ” Thus have appeared in
turn the classicists, the romanticists, the
naturalists, the Parnassians, the mystics, the
symbolists, the decadents, the neo-Catholics,
with the schismatics from each new cult.
In such an environment, criticism must
not only flourish but become a fine art.
From Boileau to Sainte-Beuve, from Mon-
taigne to Jules Janin, the line of literary
critics is rich in shining names. In our own
day, the objective and the subjective school
of criticism has each its able adherents
and proselytizers. Of the objective or scien-
tific method, M. Brunetière may be called
the foremost exemplar, the great Darwinian.
LEMAITRE
Of the subjective or imaginative camp, the
Renanists, M. Jules Lemaître is the authoritative interpreter, unless
the charming and subtle Anatole France may be allowed an equal
rank.
“As it seems to me," writes M. France, criticism, like philosophy, like his-
tory, is in a way a novel, for the use of cautious and earnest minds; as every
novel, rightly understood, becomes an autobiography. The good critic is he
who makes you comprehend the adventures of his own soul in the midst of
masterpieces. There can be no objective criticism, as there can be no object-
ive art. Whoever imagines that he puts into his work anything whatever
except himself is the victim of illusion. We can never get outside ourselves.
We are imprisoned for life, as it were, in our own personality. Let
us then make the best of it,— which is to admit with a good grace our lament-
able state, and to acknowledge that we are talking about ourselves whenever
## p. 8964 (#592) ###########################################
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we have not the strength of mind not to talk at all. To be entirely candid the
critic ought to say, “Gentlemen, it is my intention to speak about my attitude
towards Shakespeare, Racine, Pascal, or Goethe. They furnish me a very
good excuse. ) » To which Lemaitre himself adds: “A critic inevitably puts his
temperament and his personal conception of life into his commentaries; for it
is with his own mind that he deals with other men's minds. Criticism is in
reality a representation of the world, which is as personal, as relative, as base-
less, and therefore as interesting, as that representation in any other branch
of literature. ”
Jules Lemaître was born at Vennecy, Department of the Loire, in
1853. He was educated for the profession of teaching; graduating
with high honors from the École Normale in 1875, and filling the
chair of rhetoric at Havre for the next five years. Two years in
Algiers and a year at Besançon prepared him for a professorship
in the faculty of Grenoble. But the Muse would have her own. In
another year he resigned the safe dignity of the scholar's chair for
the uncertain shelter of the author's garret. He had already pub-
lished two volumes of poems - described by the reviewers as verses
of the rhymer rather than the poet — and a few essays and stories,
which obtained him a hearing in the Revue Bleue. In the course of
three months he contributed three critical reviews on Renan, Ohnet,
and Zola. The freshness, the insight, and the daring frankness of
these papers conquered a place for him. A year or two later he was
appointed dramatic critic to the Journal des Débats. Indefatigably
industrious, he wrote critical essays, dramatic reviews, poems, stories,
novels, and plays; and grew constantly in the favor of the public.
Six volumes of his critical essays have been collected under the title
(Les Contemporains' (Men of the Time), and two volumes of dra-
matic criticism called “Impressions de Théâtre. His method is one of
extreme directness and simplicity; he is the most vivacious of cen-
sors, and so dexterous and accomplished is his use of the elegant
tongue to which he had the good fortune to be born, that his fellow-
critics call him the virtuoso. ”
They criticize him, moreover, on the ground that he is inconclus-
ive, having no «absolute shall,” but presenting many points of view,
,
and leaving the reader to form his own conclusions, a process, as
Bagehot says, intensely painful to the multitude. He is accused of
inconsistency, of cynicism, and of indifference. To these allegations
he replies, in effect, that consistency is the vice of little minds, that
the candid observer cannot help taking a judicial interest in both
sides, and that in a world of illusions there is danger in finality.
M. Lemaître scored Ohnet without mercy, as the apostle of smug
routine and things allowed”; he arraigned Zola for misconceiving
life; and he is unsparing to offenses against literature. His attacks
## p. 8965 (#593) ###########################################
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8965
are the more formidable for their very grace and lightness. Yet
he is one of the kindest of accusers, and he thus describes his own
feeling: -
«To an author who has ever given me this immense pleasure [of sincere
and able work] I am ready to pardon much. It is certainly a mark of stu-
pidity to say to a critic who seems to you unduly severe toward a writer
whom you love, (Attempt his work yourself — and see! ! But I could wish
that that critic would say it to himself! Of course I acknowledge that authors,
on their part, have too often a somewhat unintelligent contempt for critics.
I have known a novelist to maintain, with less esprit than assurance, that the
least of novelists and dramatists is greater than the first of critics and histori-
ans; and that, for example, the purveyor to the Petit Journal carries off the
prize from M. Taine, who invents no stories. This young man did not know
even that there are many kinds of invention. I bear him no ill-will on that
account. It enters into the definition of a good critic, to comprehend more
things than a young novelist, and to be more indulgent. Thus it is in a
spirit of sympathy and charity that we should approach such of our contem-
poraries as are not wholly beneath criticism. First we should analyze the
impression we receive from a book; then try to define the author, describe
his style, show what is permanent, what he seeks from preference, what the
world means to him, what are his opinions on life, what the kind and degree
of his sensibility,– in fact, how his brain is made! We should try to deter-
mine, according to the impression we receive from him, what is the impres-
sion he himself received from things. Thus we may arrive at so complete
an identification with the author that although his faults cause us pain, real
pain, we shall yet see how he allowed himself to fall into them, and how his
defects make a part of himself, so that they will appear at first inevitable,
and soon better than excusable - amusing. ”
»
ON THE INFLUENCE OF RECENT NORTHERN LITERATURE
From (Les Contemporains)
O
NCE more the Saxons and Germans, the Thracians and peo-
ples of snow-covered Thule, have conquered Gaul: an im-
portant but not a surprising event.
One of our most pardonable faults is acknowledged to be a
certain coquettish yet generous intellectual hospitality. As soon
as a Frenchman has succeeded in acquiring not alone national
and classical culture, but European culture as well, it is marvel-
ous to see how, at one stroke, he sets himself free from all liter-
ary chauvinism. At this point the most serious clasp hands, so
to speak, with the most frivolous; with the class emancipated
from prejudices in favor of clean linen, as well as with those
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(C
-
who, to use an expression henceforth symbolical, are “laundered
in London. ”
It is evident that Renan, for instance, who as a matter of fact
understood only superficially contemporary French literature, was
always dominated by German science and genius, and placed
Goethe, and even Herder, above all that is best among us.
Taine also concludes that we have nothing comparable not only
to Shakespeare, — we must grant him this, — but to contempora-
neous English poets and novelists.
While in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the South-
Spain and Italy - attracted us, for the past two centuries we
have been captivated by the literature of the North.
This attraction has had its accessions and its intervals; but
our last attack of septentriomania shows itself particularly violent
and prolonged, for it still endures. It began I think about a
,
dozen years ago, in the revolution against the so-called “natural-
ist” brutalities and pretensions, and in the taste, now perhaps
partially forgotten, for George Eliot.
At this time M. Edmond Schérer and M. Émile Montégut
vied with each other in demonstrating in profound and eloquent
essays that George Eliot far surpassed all our realistic novelists.
Since then M. de Voguë has magnificently revealed to us
Tolstoi and Dostoiewski; and compared with them, again, our poor
romancers are but dust in the balance. All the world worshiped
the Russian gospel, and set itself to “tolstoiser. ” At the same
time the « Théâtre Libre » set before us the dramas of Dostoiew.
ski. Finally Ibsen had his turn of apotheosis, and all his later
plays were translated. We have seen at the theatres, beside the
plays of these two writers, those of the Norwegian Björnson,
the German Hauptmann, the Swede Strindberg, and the Belgian
Maeterlinck. The fury and intolerance of admiration on the part
of young men and certain women for these products of the North
is hardly to be imagined. “Yes,” they say, “these polar souls
truly speak to our souls; they penetrate them deeply; they stir
them to their profoundest depths. ” And I read with melancholy
this page of M. de Voguë, in the preface of his Russian Ro-
mance': — «There has been created in our day, wider than the
preferences of coteries or national prejudice, a European spirit,-
a fund of culture, ideas, and tendencies common to all intelligent
societies. We find this spirit, the same in essence, the same in
impressionability, in London, Petersburg, Rome, and Berlin. But
»
(
## p. 8967 (#595) ###########################################
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8967
as yet it eludes us; the literature and philosophy of our rivals
make conquest of us but slowly: we are not imparting it, we are
towed along by it more or less successfully. But to follow is
not to guide; - the prevailing ideas which are transforming Eu-
rope no longer emanate from the French soul. ”
Possibly this may be because they issued from that soul fifty
years ago!
(
I must here premise that in speaking of the works of George
Eliot, George Sand, and some other authors, it is necessarily from
a somewhat remote reading of them, and from impressions imme-
diately following that reading. . I shall consider solely
on what ground these novelists stand; what are the dominating
ideas, the guiding sentiments, what the substratum of their
works.
That which strikes us in these romances [of George Eliot], all
of them being histories of conscience, is the constant moral pre-
occupation by which every page is marked, as well as the con-
stant cordial and observant sympathy with the most humble and
ordinary phases of human life. To consider, in passing, this
second characteristic only: it is indubitably to be found, with a
fullness that leaves nothing to be desired, in the works of George
Sand.
Read La Mare au Diable? [The Devil's Pool],
La Petite Fadette! [Little Fadette), François le Champi,'
you will find as much robust and charming good-nature, as sin-
cere a liking for simple life and homely details, as much delight
and skill in making us feel the essential interest and dignity of
a human soul, its environment and social condition, as in the
writings of the George beyond the Channel.
There is no more,
for that I believe to be impossible.
Let us pass on to
Ibsen.
Save in two or three instances, where he seems
to defy his own visions, and to jeer at them, the dramas of
Ibsen are crises of conscience, histories of revolt, and struggles
towards moral enfranchisement. That which he preaches or
dreams is the love of truth, the hatred of falsehood. Sometimes
it is the reaction of the pagan conception of life against the
Christian conception; of the joy of living,” as he terms it,
against religious melancholy. It is, beyond and above all else,
that which has been called individualism. It is the assertion of
the rights of the individual conscience against written laws which
do not provide for individual cases; against social conventions
## p. 8968 (#596) ###########################################
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FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
>
often hypocritical, and respecting appearances only. Often too
it is the redemption and purification of suffering. It is, in our
relations with others, the exercise of individual compassion, the
pardon of certain sins which phariseeism never pardons. It is in
marriage the perfect union of souls,— a union based only upon
the liberty and absolute sincerity of husband and wife, and the
entire understanding and appreciation each has of the other. It
is, in short, the conformity of life to the ideal — an ideal which
Ibsen rarely defines in set terms; in which is to be found some-
thing of antique naturalism, something of judicial and haughty
evangelicism, of aristocratic dilettantism, and covering all, a film
of pessimism.
I can make these definitions no more precise than Ibsen him-
self does. But it is undeniably into a general sentiment of revolt
that the elements of which his "dream” is composed resolve
themselves. He is in fact a mighty rebel, a malcontent, at odds
with his own genius. Now, in the work of these Northern men,
is there not the very substance of the early romances of George
Sand ? If I name her anew, it is because she had a marvelous
gift of receptivity, and because she reflected all the ideas and
chimeras of her time. She had already told us, long before
these others spoke, that marriage is an oppressive institution if it
be not the union of two free wills, and if woman be not treated
as a moral being. Already we had heard from her of the con-
Alict of religious and civil law with that other and greater law,
not inscribed on Tables of Stone. And already among us the
rights of the individual had been declared to be opposed to those
of society.
We listened to these sayings as long ago as 1830, and I doubt
if even then they were entirely new.
I admit that I have not re-read the eighty volumes of George
Sand, but I know their contents, and have been long imbued
with their spirit. I open her first romance and I read the pro-
test of Indiana. Indiana is Ibsen's Nora. She flees from Colonel
Delmare in the same mood that drives Nora out of Helmer's
house. That which Nora goes to seek, Indiana meets. Indiana
espousing Ralph in the presence of Nature and of God is Nora
after her Aight finding the husband of her soul, and choosing
him in her freedom.
If Henrik Ibsen is not found complete, as to his ideas, in
George Sand, it is in the dramas of Dumas fils — preceding, let
## p. 8969 (#597) ###########################################
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8969
it be remembered, those of the Norwegian writer - that we shall
finally discover him.
The protest of the individual against law, of the moral senti-
ments of the heart against the moral code and worldly conven-
tionality,—this is the very soul of most of the dramas of M.
Dumas. Only, while the revolts of Ibsen are against law and
society in general, the insurrections of M. Dumas strike almost
always at some particular article of the civil code or of social
prejudice. And I do not see that this limitation is necessarily
an inferiority.
Let us go on to the Russian novelists, to Tolstoi and to Dos-
toiewski. M. de Voguë tells us that they are distinguished from
our realists by two traits:-
«First, the vague, undefined Russian spirit draws its life from
all philosophies and all vagaries. It pauses now in nihilism and
pessimism. A superficial reader might sometimes confound Tol-
stoi and Flaubert. But Tolstoi's nihilism is never accepted with-
out revolt; this spirit is never impenitent; we constantly listen to
its groanings and searchings, and it finally redeems and saves
itself by love, love more or less active in Tolstoi and Tourgé-
nief, in Dostoiewski refined and introspective until it becomes a
painful passion. Second, equally with sympathy the distinctive
characteristic of these realists is the comprehension of that which
lies beneath and surrounds life. In them the study of the real
is pressed more closely than ever before. They seem imprisoned
within its limits, and yet they meditate upon the invisible. Be-
yond the known, which they describe minutely, they accord a
secret study to the unknown, which they suspect.
ages of their creation are disquieted concerning the universal
mystery; and no matter how absorbed they may appear in the
drama of the moment, they lend an ear to the murmur of ab-
stract ideas — the ideas which people the profound atmosphere
where breathe the creations of Tourgénief, Tolstoi, and Dosto-
iewski. ”
“The things lying below life” of which these Russians talk
- what is meant by these ? Do they concern those obscure
and fatal powers of the flesh, those hereditary and physiological
instincts that govern us without our knowledge ? But this con-
stitutes nearly half of Balzac, and the whole of M. Zola. And
“the environment of life”? Does this mean the influences of the
domestic surroundings? Who has better known and expressed
The person-
((
## p. 8970 (#598) ###########################################
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FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
these than the author of the Comédie Humaine,' or the author
of Madame Bovary'? Or should we accord to these foreigners
alone the privilege of knowing how to render «the environment
of life”? Should we say that “while the French novelist selects,
separates a character or an act from the chaos of beings and
actions, to study the isolated subject of his choice, the Russian,
dominated by the feeling of universal interdependence, does not
sever the thousand ties which attach a man, a deed, a thought,
to the total sum of the world, and does not forget that each is
constituted by all ” ?
I recognize and I admire the abounding fullness, almost equal-
ing that of life itself, in that complex romance, “War and Peace”;
but have we not novels corresponding to the complexities of the
world, in which the interweaving of moral and material things
answers to that of reality, and which also contain in an equal
degree the all of life? I say, after due reflection, that all this
is true of Les Misérables,' and perhaps more profoundly so of
"L'Éducation Sentimentale. 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) ###########################################
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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) ###########################################
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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) ###########################################
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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. '
>
(
Aputharma Billed
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?
another band begins to attack the victors of yesterday; and so battle
follows battle, and revolution revolution. ” Thus have appeared in
turn the classicists, the romanticists, the
naturalists, the Parnassians, the mystics, the
symbolists, the decadents, the neo-Catholics,
with the schismatics from each new cult.
In such an environment, criticism must
not only flourish but become a fine art.
From Boileau to Sainte-Beuve, from Mon-
taigne to Jules Janin, the line of literary
critics is rich in shining names. In our own
day, the objective and the subjective school
of criticism has each its able adherents
and proselytizers. Of the objective or scien-
tific method, M. Brunetière may be called
the foremost exemplar, the great Darwinian.
LEMAITRE
Of the subjective or imaginative camp, the
Renanists, M. Jules Lemaître is the authoritative interpreter, unless
the charming and subtle Anatole France may be allowed an equal
rank.
“As it seems to me," writes M. France, criticism, like philosophy, like his-
tory, is in a way a novel, for the use of cautious and earnest minds; as every
novel, rightly understood, becomes an autobiography. The good critic is he
who makes you comprehend the adventures of his own soul in the midst of
masterpieces. There can be no objective criticism, as there can be no object-
ive art. Whoever imagines that he puts into his work anything whatever
except himself is the victim of illusion. We can never get outside ourselves.
We are imprisoned for life, as it were, in our own personality. Let
us then make the best of it,— which is to admit with a good grace our lament-
able state, and to acknowledge that we are talking about ourselves whenever
## p. 8964 (#592) ###########################################
8964
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
we have not the strength of mind not to talk at all. To be entirely candid the
critic ought to say, “Gentlemen, it is my intention to speak about my attitude
towards Shakespeare, Racine, Pascal, or Goethe. They furnish me a very
good excuse. ) » To which Lemaitre himself adds: “A critic inevitably puts his
temperament and his personal conception of life into his commentaries; for it
is with his own mind that he deals with other men's minds. Criticism is in
reality a representation of the world, which is as personal, as relative, as base-
less, and therefore as interesting, as that representation in any other branch
of literature. ”
Jules Lemaître was born at Vennecy, Department of the Loire, in
1853. He was educated for the profession of teaching; graduating
with high honors from the École Normale in 1875, and filling the
chair of rhetoric at Havre for the next five years. Two years in
Algiers and a year at Besançon prepared him for a professorship
in the faculty of Grenoble. But the Muse would have her own. In
another year he resigned the safe dignity of the scholar's chair for
the uncertain shelter of the author's garret. He had already pub-
lished two volumes of poems - described by the reviewers as verses
of the rhymer rather than the poet — and a few essays and stories,
which obtained him a hearing in the Revue Bleue. In the course of
three months he contributed three critical reviews on Renan, Ohnet,
and Zola. The freshness, the insight, and the daring frankness of
these papers conquered a place for him. A year or two later he was
appointed dramatic critic to the Journal des Débats. Indefatigably
industrious, he wrote critical essays, dramatic reviews, poems, stories,
novels, and plays; and grew constantly in the favor of the public.
Six volumes of his critical essays have been collected under the title
(Les Contemporains' (Men of the Time), and two volumes of dra-
matic criticism called “Impressions de Théâtre. His method is one of
extreme directness and simplicity; he is the most vivacious of cen-
sors, and so dexterous and accomplished is his use of the elegant
tongue to which he had the good fortune to be born, that his fellow-
critics call him the virtuoso. ”
They criticize him, moreover, on the ground that he is inconclus-
ive, having no «absolute shall,” but presenting many points of view,
,
and leaving the reader to form his own conclusions, a process, as
Bagehot says, intensely painful to the multitude. He is accused of
inconsistency, of cynicism, and of indifference. To these allegations
he replies, in effect, that consistency is the vice of little minds, that
the candid observer cannot help taking a judicial interest in both
sides, and that in a world of illusions there is danger in finality.
M. Lemaître scored Ohnet without mercy, as the apostle of smug
routine and things allowed”; he arraigned Zola for misconceiving
life; and he is unsparing to offenses against literature. His attacks
## p. 8965 (#593) ###########################################
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
8965
are the more formidable for their very grace and lightness. Yet
he is one of the kindest of accusers, and he thus describes his own
feeling: -
«To an author who has ever given me this immense pleasure [of sincere
and able work] I am ready to pardon much. It is certainly a mark of stu-
pidity to say to a critic who seems to you unduly severe toward a writer
whom you love, (Attempt his work yourself — and see! ! But I could wish
that that critic would say it to himself! Of course I acknowledge that authors,
on their part, have too often a somewhat unintelligent contempt for critics.
I have known a novelist to maintain, with less esprit than assurance, that the
least of novelists and dramatists is greater than the first of critics and histori-
ans; and that, for example, the purveyor to the Petit Journal carries off the
prize from M. Taine, who invents no stories. This young man did not know
even that there are many kinds of invention. I bear him no ill-will on that
account. It enters into the definition of a good critic, to comprehend more
things than a young novelist, and to be more indulgent. Thus it is in a
spirit of sympathy and charity that we should approach such of our contem-
poraries as are not wholly beneath criticism. First we should analyze the
impression we receive from a book; then try to define the author, describe
his style, show what is permanent, what he seeks from preference, what the
world means to him, what are his opinions on life, what the kind and degree
of his sensibility,– in fact, how his brain is made! We should try to deter-
mine, according to the impression we receive from him, what is the impres-
sion he himself received from things. Thus we may arrive at so complete
an identification with the author that although his faults cause us pain, real
pain, we shall yet see how he allowed himself to fall into them, and how his
defects make a part of himself, so that they will appear at first inevitable,
and soon better than excusable - amusing. ”
»
ON THE INFLUENCE OF RECENT NORTHERN LITERATURE
From (Les Contemporains)
O
NCE more the Saxons and Germans, the Thracians and peo-
ples of snow-covered Thule, have conquered Gaul: an im-
portant but not a surprising event.
One of our most pardonable faults is acknowledged to be a
certain coquettish yet generous intellectual hospitality. As soon
as a Frenchman has succeeded in acquiring not alone national
and classical culture, but European culture as well, it is marvel-
ous to see how, at one stroke, he sets himself free from all liter-
ary chauvinism. At this point the most serious clasp hands, so
to speak, with the most frivolous; with the class emancipated
from prejudices in favor of clean linen, as well as with those
## p. 8966 (#594) ###########################################
8966
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
(C
-
who, to use an expression henceforth symbolical, are “laundered
in London. ”
It is evident that Renan, for instance, who as a matter of fact
understood only superficially contemporary French literature, was
always dominated by German science and genius, and placed
Goethe, and even Herder, above all that is best among us.
Taine also concludes that we have nothing comparable not only
to Shakespeare, — we must grant him this, — but to contempora-
neous English poets and novelists.
While in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the South-
Spain and Italy - attracted us, for the past two centuries we
have been captivated by the literature of the North.
This attraction has had its accessions and its intervals; but
our last attack of septentriomania shows itself particularly violent
and prolonged, for it still endures. It began I think about a
,
dozen years ago, in the revolution against the so-called “natural-
ist” brutalities and pretensions, and in the taste, now perhaps
partially forgotten, for George Eliot.
At this time M. Edmond Schérer and M. Émile Montégut
vied with each other in demonstrating in profound and eloquent
essays that George Eliot far surpassed all our realistic novelists.
Since then M. de Voguë has magnificently revealed to us
Tolstoi and Dostoiewski; and compared with them, again, our poor
romancers are but dust in the balance. All the world worshiped
the Russian gospel, and set itself to “tolstoiser. ” At the same
time the « Théâtre Libre » set before us the dramas of Dostoiew.
ski. Finally Ibsen had his turn of apotheosis, and all his later
plays were translated. We have seen at the theatres, beside the
plays of these two writers, those of the Norwegian Björnson,
the German Hauptmann, the Swede Strindberg, and the Belgian
Maeterlinck. The fury and intolerance of admiration on the part
of young men and certain women for these products of the North
is hardly to be imagined. “Yes,” they say, “these polar souls
truly speak to our souls; they penetrate them deeply; they stir
them to their profoundest depths. ” And I read with melancholy
this page of M. de Voguë, in the preface of his Russian Ro-
mance': — «There has been created in our day, wider than the
preferences of coteries or national prejudice, a European spirit,-
a fund of culture, ideas, and tendencies common to all intelligent
societies. We find this spirit, the same in essence, the same in
impressionability, in London, Petersburg, Rome, and Berlin. But
»
(
## p. 8967 (#595) ###########################################
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
8967
as yet it eludes us; the literature and philosophy of our rivals
make conquest of us but slowly: we are not imparting it, we are
towed along by it more or less successfully. But to follow is
not to guide; - the prevailing ideas which are transforming Eu-
rope no longer emanate from the French soul. ”
Possibly this may be because they issued from that soul fifty
years ago!
(
I must here premise that in speaking of the works of George
Eliot, George Sand, and some other authors, it is necessarily from
a somewhat remote reading of them, and from impressions imme-
diately following that reading. . I shall consider solely
on what ground these novelists stand; what are the dominating
ideas, the guiding sentiments, what the substratum of their
works.
That which strikes us in these romances [of George Eliot], all
of them being histories of conscience, is the constant moral pre-
occupation by which every page is marked, as well as the con-
stant cordial and observant sympathy with the most humble and
ordinary phases of human life. To consider, in passing, this
second characteristic only: it is indubitably to be found, with a
fullness that leaves nothing to be desired, in the works of George
Sand.
Read La Mare au Diable? [The Devil's Pool],
La Petite Fadette! [Little Fadette), François le Champi,'
you will find as much robust and charming good-nature, as sin-
cere a liking for simple life and homely details, as much delight
and skill in making us feel the essential interest and dignity of
a human soul, its environment and social condition, as in the
writings of the George beyond the Channel.
There is no more,
for that I believe to be impossible.
Let us pass on to
Ibsen.
Save in two or three instances, where he seems
to defy his own visions, and to jeer at them, the dramas of
Ibsen are crises of conscience, histories of revolt, and struggles
towards moral enfranchisement. That which he preaches or
dreams is the love of truth, the hatred of falsehood. Sometimes
it is the reaction of the pagan conception of life against the
Christian conception; of the joy of living,” as he terms it,
against religious melancholy. It is, beyond and above all else,
that which has been called individualism. It is the assertion of
the rights of the individual conscience against written laws which
do not provide for individual cases; against social conventions
## p. 8968 (#596) ###########################################
8968
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
>
often hypocritical, and respecting appearances only. Often too
it is the redemption and purification of suffering. It is, in our
relations with others, the exercise of individual compassion, the
pardon of certain sins which phariseeism never pardons. It is in
marriage the perfect union of souls,— a union based only upon
the liberty and absolute sincerity of husband and wife, and the
entire understanding and appreciation each has of the other. It
is, in short, the conformity of life to the ideal — an ideal which
Ibsen rarely defines in set terms; in which is to be found some-
thing of antique naturalism, something of judicial and haughty
evangelicism, of aristocratic dilettantism, and covering all, a film
of pessimism.
I can make these definitions no more precise than Ibsen him-
self does. But it is undeniably into a general sentiment of revolt
that the elements of which his "dream” is composed resolve
themselves. He is in fact a mighty rebel, a malcontent, at odds
with his own genius. Now, in the work of these Northern men,
is there not the very substance of the early romances of George
Sand ? If I name her anew, it is because she had a marvelous
gift of receptivity, and because she reflected all the ideas and
chimeras of her time. She had already told us, long before
these others spoke, that marriage is an oppressive institution if it
be not the union of two free wills, and if woman be not treated
as a moral being. Already we had heard from her of the con-
Alict of religious and civil law with that other and greater law,
not inscribed on Tables of Stone. And already among us the
rights of the individual had been declared to be opposed to those
of society.
We listened to these sayings as long ago as 1830, and I doubt
if even then they were entirely new.
I admit that I have not re-read the eighty volumes of George
Sand, but I know their contents, and have been long imbued
with their spirit. I open her first romance and I read the pro-
test of Indiana. Indiana is Ibsen's Nora. She flees from Colonel
Delmare in the same mood that drives Nora out of Helmer's
house. That which Nora goes to seek, Indiana meets. Indiana
espousing Ralph in the presence of Nature and of God is Nora
after her Aight finding the husband of her soul, and choosing
him in her freedom.
If Henrik Ibsen is not found complete, as to his ideas, in
George Sand, it is in the dramas of Dumas fils — preceding, let
## p. 8969 (#597) ###########################################
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
8969
it be remembered, those of the Norwegian writer - that we shall
finally discover him.
The protest of the individual against law, of the moral senti-
ments of the heart against the moral code and worldly conven-
tionality,—this is the very soul of most of the dramas of M.
Dumas. Only, while the revolts of Ibsen are against law and
society in general, the insurrections of M. Dumas strike almost
always at some particular article of the civil code or of social
prejudice. And I do not see that this limitation is necessarily
an inferiority.
Let us go on to the Russian novelists, to Tolstoi and to Dos-
toiewski. M. de Voguë tells us that they are distinguished from
our realists by two traits:-
«First, the vague, undefined Russian spirit draws its life from
all philosophies and all vagaries. It pauses now in nihilism and
pessimism. A superficial reader might sometimes confound Tol-
stoi and Flaubert. But Tolstoi's nihilism is never accepted with-
out revolt; this spirit is never impenitent; we constantly listen to
its groanings and searchings, and it finally redeems and saves
itself by love, love more or less active in Tolstoi and Tourgé-
nief, in Dostoiewski refined and introspective until it becomes a
painful passion. Second, equally with sympathy the distinctive
characteristic of these realists is the comprehension of that which
lies beneath and surrounds life. In them the study of the real
is pressed more closely than ever before. They seem imprisoned
within its limits, and yet they meditate upon the invisible. Be-
yond the known, which they describe minutely, they accord a
secret study to the unknown, which they suspect.
ages of their creation are disquieted concerning the universal
mystery; and no matter how absorbed they may appear in the
drama of the moment, they lend an ear to the murmur of ab-
stract ideas — the ideas which people the profound atmosphere
where breathe the creations of Tourgénief, Tolstoi, and Dosto-
iewski. ”
“The things lying below life” of which these Russians talk
- what is meant by these ? Do they concern those obscure
and fatal powers of the flesh, those hereditary and physiological
instincts that govern us without our knowledge ? But this con-
stitutes nearly half of Balzac, and the whole of M. Zola. And
“the environment of life”? Does this mean the influences of the
domestic surroundings? Who has better known and expressed
The person-
((
## p. 8970 (#598) ###########################################
8970
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
these than the author of the Comédie Humaine,' or the author
of Madame Bovary'? Or should we accord to these foreigners
alone the privilege of knowing how to render «the environment
of life”? Should we say that “while the French novelist selects,
separates a character or an act from the chaos of beings and
actions, to study the isolated subject of his choice, the Russian,
dominated by the feeling of universal interdependence, does not
sever the thousand ties which attach a man, a deed, a thought,
to the total sum of the world, and does not forget that each is
constituted by all ” ?
I recognize and I admire the abounding fullness, almost equal-
ing that of life itself, in that complex romance, “War and Peace”;
but have we not novels corresponding to the complexities of the
world, in which the interweaving of moral and material things
answers to that of reality, and which also contain in an equal
degree the all of life? I say, after due reflection, that all this
is true of Les Misérables,' and perhaps more profoundly so of
"L'Éducation Sentimentale. 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
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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. '
>
(
Aputharma Billed
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
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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?
