Sypnosis of Leonis

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 4, Chapter 1, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

n the same year Ruskin published a tale, "Leoni," the structure of which resembles Marcolini. The bandit Leoni, who robs from the rich and gives to the poor, is the outlaw self of one Francesco, who for years has wooed Giulietta; in order to win Giulietta, however, "Francesco" must reveal his identity as Leoni, take her away from her aged father, and bring upon himself the wrath of her wicked brother, Garcio. To her father Giulietta is all that is left of life -- an angel, a light, a sun; and she is life to Leoni as well: "For withered as the autumn leaf, and vain as the ocean spray, and desolating and feared as the influence of the fires of the night, shall I be, Giulietta, when parted from thee" (I, 296n) -- rather like the wicked brother, who is all darkness, storm, and pestilence and indeed like the entire landscape after her death. Thus either Leoni or the old father must die for love of Giuletta. (By the end of the tale everyone is dead except Leoni, who becomes a raving maniac.) Narrative collapses into landscape, or rather into a pair of antithetical landscapes of which the bright one is pervaded by the spirit of Giulietta, just as in Marcolini narrative collapses, so to speak, into cityscape.

Last modified December 2000