TH

LEOPARDI'S ESSAYS AND DIALOGUES.

6

HE seventeenth volume of the English and Foreign Philosophical Library' is an eminently readable book, and likely to suit the taste of the day, but whether this fact is to our credit, and whether many people can possibly be the better for reading the book, are altogether different questions. It is a bright and lively exposition of pessimism, set forth with all the inventive fancy and vivid colouring of one of Italy's really great poets. His conclusions are sufficiently dark and depressing: "The universe is an enigma, totally insoluble. The sufferings of mankind exceed all the good that men experience, estimating the latter in compensation for the former. Progress, or, as we call it, civilisation, instead of lightening man's sufferings, increases them, since it enlarges his capacity for suffering, without proportionately augmenting his means of enjoyment." Such are the results arrived at by one who distinguished himself alike as a philologist, a philosopher, and a poet. We naturally want to know something of the life of the man, to see if it will at least partially explain his beliefs, and we are grateful to Mr. Edwardes for the biographical sketch he has prefixed to the present volume, and only complain that it does not give us more detailed information.

In the character of Arthur Schopenhauer, with its impetuous impulses continually overpowering his better judgment, it was easy to find the origin of his philosophy. The temperament and the career of Byron go a great way towards explaining the one-sidedness of his views of life; and if people will ask the question, "Is life worth living?" we are inclined to think no better answer will ever be found than "It all depends upon the liver." Certainly in Leopardi's case there is no difficulty in connecting his pessimism with his character and fortune. His family was very noble and very poor; his father was a martinet of the "old school;" his mother a shrewd housekeeper; neither of them appreciated the brilliant powers of their son, who was made miserable by being forbidden to leave the obscure country town in which the family resided. He early began to study hard, setting himself when eight years of age to read in chronological order the Greek authors in his father's library. In 1815, when seventeen years of age, he wrote a long "Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients," in which he quotes more than 400 authors; he shows how the various philosophers opposed and contradicted one another, "while the truly wise laughed at them all. The people, left to themselves during this hubbub, were not idle, but laboured silently to increase the vast mound of human error." He ends this essay with the declaration that "To live in the true Church is the only way to combat superstition." But for him the true Church meant the Church of Rome, in Italy, in the early part of the present century; and we do not wonder * Essays and Dialogues of Giacomo Leopardi. Translated by Charles Edwardes. London: Trübner. 1882.

that Leopardi gave up his first intention of becoming a priest of that Church, and in so doing cut himself off, as far as we can judge, from all religious hope and trust. Living this solitary studious life in a thoroughly uncongenial atmosphere produced its natural consequence. He writes, "Added to all this is the obstinate, black, and barbarous melancholy which devours and destroys me; which is nourished by study, and yet increases when I forego study. I have in past times had much experience of that sweet sadness which generates fine sentiments, and which, better than joy, may be said to resemble the twilight; but my condition is now an eternal and horrible night. A poison saps my powers of body and mind."

A very dangerous thing, that "sweet sadness which generates fine sentiments." But his whole health was now most seriously affected by "seven years of immoderate and excessive study," and it is not too much to say that he had thrown it all away by the age of twenty, and that from then till the day of his death, in 1837, he was a permanent invalid, and seldom free from suffering. In 1819 he published two odes, one addressed to Italy, the other on a monument to Dante, which at once secured him a place among the greatest of his country's poets; but it was not till three years later that he first extorted permission to leave home. Five months spent at Rome disenchanted him of all his illusions concerning the Eternal City. He derives no pleasure from the great things he sees, because he knows they are wonderful without feeling them to be so. The great scholar is discovered to be a conceited, wearisome pedant; nothing is cared for there but archæology; living thought is nowhere beside a bit of ancient stone or copper. Some really eminent men at Rome, Niebuhr, Reinhold, Mai, highly esteemed Leopardi, and tried to procure him an official appointment; but Papal intrigue and prejudice were too much for their influence. He did some work cataloguing Greek manuscripts, and discovered a hitherto unknown fragment of Libanius, but even this little ewe lamb of credit was stolen from him, and he resolved to leave a place of which he writes:-"I visited Tasso's grave, and wept there. This is the first and only pleasure I have experienced in Rome."

The rest of his life is spent in wandering about in Northern Italy, earning what money he can by literature, sometimes the poetry and essays which have made his fame, sometimes much drudgery for bread. At the last he finds friends, a brother and sister, who devote themselves to taking care of him, put up with his habits of turning night into day, breakfasting at three p.m. and dining at midnight, disobeying his doctor and clinging to old clothes; they take him from place to place in search of health, and tenderly nurse him during his last illness at Naples. He never married, though, if one may trust his poetry, he loved deeply and unsuccessfully. Certainly, he had an affectionate nature, which craved for a return of affection; he writes thus from Rome to his brother Carlo, the only one of his family with whom he seems to have had much real sympathy, "Love me, for God's sake. I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life." He did crave for life, full, cager, sensational life, as

affording what he defines as the only constituents of pleasure in existence. But "his body proved little else than the sensation of suffering. All his vitality was concentrated in his mind." He suffered much from cold, but could not bear fire, and passed "the winters three parts submerged in a sack of feathers, reading and writing thus the greater part of the day."

Under conditions of life such as these the only wonder is that his philosophical essays and dialogues are written in a bright and lively style. Here his literary genius asserted itself, and compelled him to become interesting, but it is a profoundly melancholy fact that such powers were not devoted to higher purposes. One good may indeed come from the study of pessimistic writings. They show how untenable is any theory of life which makes happiness the main object of existence. We hear comparatively little of utilitarianism now; it shrivels up in the presence of pessimism. Who can work with ardour to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number if it is a fairly debatable question whether civilisation does increase the sum of human happiness? Who can be content to regard happiness as the highest good after all optimistic dreams are rudely dispelled? You are likely enough to come to the conclusion that "tis better not to be," that this is a bad world and tending to become worse, unless you have a stronger faith and a higher inspiration than utilitarianism can afford. And the cure for pessimism, where is that to be found? Surely only in the perception of a higher good than happiness, in the recognition of an aim so desirable that it may be sought through and in spite of much misery, in the consciousness that, given human free-will, much misery is a needful means to the attainment of that great end, a righteous soul that loveth righteousness. Armed with this interpretation of life, one may stand in the presence of much suffering, and experience some share of it oneself, without losing faith in the divine greatness and goodness. It is terrible to witness the sufferings caused by depression in trade, but it is still more terrible to see high wages causing increased intemperance, and, from the moral point of view, none need regret the check our national prosperity received after the days in which "we drank ourselves clear of the Alabama indemnity." The pessimist should listen to the confession often made in wretched homes, "I brought it on myself; it's my own fault; I've no one to blame but myself;" still better is it to witness the unconscious heroism by which suffering is turned into a school of fortitude, of resignation or renewed endeavour, of faith either to do or to bear. It is most noteworthy that our pessimistic philosophers should be men of little knowledge of the actual existence of their fellow-creatures, and that it is possible to turn to the recorded experience of many who have the closest acquaintance with the daily conditions of life's struggle for the great mass of humanity, to find the most hopeful views of progress, and the most thankful testimony to the way in which all things, even things evil, are made to work together for good.

H. SHAEN SOLLY.

HARTMANN'S RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY.' *

WIT

ITH the exception of Mr. Herbert Spencer, there is, perhaps, no English writer with whom Dr. von Hartmann may be compared. Indeed, these two philosophers stand alone in an intellectual range which, combined with a flexibility and complexity of grasp, can only be described as encyclopædic. Horace's advice of nonumque prematur in annum does not apply to such men, for, however quickly done, all they write is not only worth reading, but demands attention, whether friendly or otherwise.

The remarkable structure known as the Philosophy of the Unconscious may now be said to be fairly complete. Having shown us how the unconscious Absolute is manifested in the intellectual and moral worlds, v. Hartmann now proceeds to point out in what way it is made known to us in the evolution of the religious consciousness.

Unlike most writers on the phænomenology of religion, v. Hartmann finds it to consist of naturalism and supra-naturalism. By the former he means a more or less complete identification of God with nature, by the latter, not what one is accustomed to understand by it, namely, an immediate and supernaturally-given revelation of God, but the qualification of Deity as "the sublime cause of nature," "the One spiritual Absolute or the One absolute Spirit." The chief stages of naturalism are, he considers, but modifications of what is known as henotheism, a phase of religion first worked out by Max Müller, and called by him kathenotheism. By thus extending the meaning of henotheism so as to include "the æsthetic refinement of Hellas," "the utilitarian secularisation of Rome," and "the tragico-ethical religious glow of our Teutonic ancestors," to say nothing of its "systematisation" in the "naturalistic monism" of Egypt and the "seminaturalism of the Parsis," our author seems to us to have defeated the very object for which the term was framed. The three phases through which supra-naturalism passes are-abstract monism, or the idealistic religion of emancipation; theism; and what v. Hartmann calls concrete monism, which, if we start from an ontological basis, amounts to little more than the religion of Humanity.

On the hypothesis of man's evolution from some lower organism, the question naturally presents itself, Is a pre-human religious consciousness possible, or, have the animals religion? And here it seems to us that our author looks at the subject too much from an anthropopathical point of view, which leads him to confound the "natural virtues" with "right reason," to overlook the fact that, owing to its lack of verbal symbols, animal consciousness must necessarily be too fleeting for the attitude of even a domestic pet towards man to be of a religious nature.

Curiously enough, Dr. v. Hartmann accepts the degeneration-theory as *Das religiöse Bewusstsein der Menschheit im Stufengang seiner Entwickelung. Von EDUARD VON HARTMANN. Berlin: C. Duncker. 1882.

regards what are known as the savage forms of religion. Ancestorworship, fetishism, and the rest, are looked upon as a decline of the naturalistic process. Accordingly it is only in historical man that the life and growth of religion can be observed. In naturalistic henotheism we may, he thinks, distinguish three principal cycles of divinity, which alternate and interact-namely, the cycle of heaven and earth, that of sun and moon, and the weather-cycle. This stage of identification of God and nature is succeeded by zoomorphisation," " in which every striking natural phænomenon is looked upon as assuming an animal shape. Upon this follows "anthropomorphisation," with its gods in human form. At this stage the separation of the god from nature is in no way definitive, but it is felt that the human is a form more adequate than the animal to express divine attributes. Ere long, however, henotheism is destined to lapse into polytheism and polydæmonism. Then comes the re-action. With the progress of human wisdom naturalism wanes, and we enter upon supra-naturalism.

The transition was effected in India, "where, on account of the peculiar tendency to speculative depth of thought, the religious consciousness of the most pious and cultured could no longer be content with the plurality of the nature-gods, but found the Divine, which had been manifest in the nature-gods only in a gross and half-hidden way, immanent in the inmost being of its own devotional fervour." In passing to the supra-naturalistic stage we find the type of abstract monism in Brahmanism or Acosmism, and in Buddhism or Absolute Illusionism, and, of the chapters on these two great forms of Asiatic faith, particularly as regards the doctrine of the Maja, it may be truly said that they are masterpieces of philosophic exegesis.

Theism is the next theme. Under this head are discussed-1. Primitive monotheism; 2. The religion of the law or the religion of heteronomy; and, 3. The realistic religion of salvation.

Nowhere is v. Hartmann more interesting than in his exposition of Judaism and Christianity, and yet it is precisely here that he is specially open to criticism. In the first place we are told that "there is not the slightest ground for the assumption that the ancestors of the Israelites in Egypt worshipped other gods than those of the Hyksos, of whom they formed part. Accordingly, the name of their chief divinity at that time must have been Seth; and, indeed, this name is met with in the genealogical table of the Elohists immediately below Adam." We are then informed that Adam himself was an older sky-god! What mythologist, philologist, or anthropologist would be prepared to admit this? On the whole, we are inclined to doubt whether our author is sufficiently acquainted with the latest Dutch researches in the field of Israelitism. But the revolution worked by the Prophets is brought out with a wonderful delicacy of literary skill.

As regards that "sweet Galilean vision" to which we would turn wit reverent eyes, v. Hartmann is much in the dark. In so far as it is a universal religion, he tells us, Christianity is the creation of St. Paul, who