44. Again, the mice, having lost their monarch, proceed to elect a constitutional sovereign, and declare him not King of Mouse-land, but only King of the Mice. "Ma il novello signor, giurato ch' ebbe E 'l manto si vestì di pel di gatto, Dato alla plebe fu cacio con polta, Re de' Topi costui con nuovo nome, 45. It is well worth while to notice, in the case of so powerful a poet, his ordinary mode of composition, which he has described with reference to his Odes. He says that, in designing and shaping his compositions, he always followed on the instant a sudden suggestion of the mind; that it was then his practice to wait for another access of fervour, commonly a month or more afterwards: he would H then set himself to compose, but so slowly, that he commonly occupied two or three weeks in finishing even the shortest piece.* 46. Even at a very early period, he seems to have had a spontaneous or ready-made philosophy for every subject. For example, in a letter to Giordani of May 1817, he controverts a doctrine of the latter with respect to art. Giordani had admonished young painters never, without an overruling necessity, to represent what was ugly, and then only with tact and reserve: inasmuch as the proper business of art was with beautiful and winning, not with distasteful objects. No, says Leopardi, their office is to imitate nature nel verisimile. And he argues thus. The same general maxims, he conceives, that govern poetry, must also hold good for painting. But in poetry, if Giordani were right, it must follow that Homer and Virgil had erred times without number; Dante above all, who had so often represented il brutto. Storms, deaths, other calamities are distasteful; but the poets are full of them. Again, tragedy must be radically, and of its own nature, bad. But in the tears, agitation, shuddering, caused by the perusal of poetry, there is real and keen delight, which springs from the vivid imitation and representation of nature, as it brings before us, and fills with life, what is distant, or dead, or purely imaginary. Hence, while the beautiful in actual nature only gives a limited satisfaction, that of art, having a power not bounded by fact and experience, gives an unlimited delight, and even what is ugly acquires the power to please, provided it be represented according to the verisimile or probable in art; for if there should happen to live a man * Epistolario, I. 316. of deformity beyond belief, he would not be a fit subject for painting. 47. There can be little doubt that Leopardi misled himself in this case by his analogy drawn from poetry to painting. He was here unconsciously upon the ground trodden so carefully, and, we presume, trodden once for all, by Lessing in his Laocoon. That great and poetical critic shows us how and why the master who produced the unrivalled group, and the poet Virgil, are alike right, though the former has given to the principal figure a mouth not crying aloud-as Winckelmann has said, er hebt kein schreckliches Geschrei-while in Virgil (Æn. ii. 222), "Clamores simul horrendos ad sidera tollit ;" And the reason is, that each follows with equal sagacity the law of the beautiful in his own art, which admits in poetry, for the mind, many things that it excludes from painting, for the eye. So that their material difference is the proof of their formal agreement. But although Leopardi fell here into error, it was a very common and natural error. There have been, until very lately, even if there are not now, eminent artists who would have supported him. At the very worst, his being on the losing side in such case can scarcely cause any deduction from our admiration of the passage we have rudely summed up, in which he shows he had a clear, consistent, and philosophical view of art, while he was yet a boy; at a time, too, when he had never wandered from the little town of Recanati, and probably had never seen a picture which could do anything but misinform and mislead him. But, indeed, he showed at this early period, in all the subjects which he handled, his inborn capacity for philosophy; and it is no exaggeration to say that even his extended learning is not more remarkable than his general acuteness, depth, and continuity of thought. 48. It may seem strange that, if this description be true, his most strictly philosophical writings should present, in the results at which he arrives, so deplorable a picture. The principal of these are his Operette Morali, a series of dialogues, first published as a whole at Milan in 1827, though a portion of them had been previously printed; and his Pensieri Morali, not published till after his death. Of the former he gives us plainly to understand that they were his favourite work; and in publishing the latter (in 1845) his friend Ranieri has only fulfilled the scheme they jointly arranged towards the end of his life. But the opinions, which he here brings out in stricter form, are but too traceable in some of his poetry, and make up the burden of no small number of his letters, especially, we must add, of those in which he writes with entire sincerity and freedom. It is plain that prudential motives often restrained him; as when he writes to Madame Tommassini with reference to one of his published papers, that he looks upon the Greeks as brothers, that he has said as much for them as he could, and quite enough, he thinks, considering that he was unable to give a free utterance to his opinions.* The censorship, however, if it had power to annoy him, did not avail for any other purpose; and we think all those, who peruse his Operette, will join with us in putting the question, if the publication of works such as these is to be permitted, for what imaginable end is such a tribunal to be maintained? 49. To speak plainly, then, of his abstract philosophy of life and action, paganism is Gospel light, and the Great *Epistolario, II. p. 10. Desert a pays riant, in comparison with it. The falseness, misery, and hopelessness of life are the burden of his strain in the familiar letters of his early youth under his father's roof, as often as they become subjective. And as soon as the year 1819 he wrote to Giordani that he had not spirit remaining to conceive a wish, not even for death he had indeed no fear of it in any respect, but it seemed so little different from life, from life in which now not even pain came to sustain him, but an intense weariness both exhausted him and tormented him as if it had been the extreme of pain, and drove him beside himself in his incapacity to feel that his despair itself was a reality. In the happiest of his moods, he had just strength enough to weep over the miseries of man, and the nullity of all things. This looks like mere rhapsody, and in ordinary cases one would say, it is a love-sick or brain-sick boy, and the very violence of the fit is the best assurance that it cannot last. But with him it was a settled and habitual tone of thought; and only on rare occasions, throughout the whole course of his letters or his works, will the reader find even a transient expression that is not in unison with it. In common life, we are sometimes astonished and appalled at the power of the human frame to endure protracted nervous agony; and the records of this extraordinary man constantly suggest a similar feeling with respect to the capacity of the mind both to suffer, and to heighten and inflame the causes of its own torture. 50. Doubtless, as regarded his practical life, there are deductions to be made from the extreme breadth of these statements. Even while he told Giordani that he could not conceive a wish, nay that he had ceased to understand the meaning of friendship and of affection, he also begged for letters, and said he would always love him. But what |