Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/376

358 harvest of human virtues and affections, the tranquillising recognition of eternal order and controlling law, the marvellous course of the world's history, when not ignored, are treated as the mere mockery and aggravation of the entirely imaginary background of blackness—a shining leprosy upon a hideous countenance. And yet the real nature of the man was quite different; his pessimism and egotism are simply the product of bodily suffering, of the wounded self-esteem and disappointed affections which followed in Its train, and of the absence of any outlet for his surpassing intellectual powers. It was a cruel injury to Italy that her greatest modern genius should have done so little for her regeneration, and that his writings, instead of inspiring a healthy public spirit, should rather tend to foster the selfish indifference and the despair of good which continue to be her principal bane. In two points of view, nevertheless, Leopardi rendered his country essential service. His sufferings, and the moral infirmities which they entailed, enabled him to represent in his own person, as no soundly-constituted man could have done, the unhappy Italy of his day. He seemed the living symbol of a country naturally favoured beyond all others, but racked and dismembered by foreign and domestic tyrants, the counterparts in the body politic of the maladies which crippled Leopardi's energies, and distorted his views of man and nature. At the same tilne the transcendent excellence of his scanty literary performances raised Italian literature to a height which, Alfieri and Monti notwithstanding, it had not attained since Tasso, and in the midst of an epoch of servitude and subjugation gave Italians at least one thing of which they might justly be proud.