How shockingly wanting in knowledge as a thinker and in self-respect as a man!
Equally shocking, alas, are the intellectual contrasts in him. At one moment he astonishes us by his insight into the natural world and the laws which govern it, an insight exceedingly rare at the time at which he wrote. Long before 'the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest' had become a commonplace with all the incoherencies of popular acceptance, Tennyson had asked:
'Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life. . . .
'"So careful of the type"? But no,
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries: "A thousand types are gone,
I care for nothing, all shall go.
'"Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more."'
Leopardi never saw things more clearly. 'For nature,' says the Englishman, 'is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' Yet the next moment, like Paul, he would tell us a mystery. Once upon a time a man was raised from the dead. His name
