I
In the year 1798, at Recanati, a little mountain town of Tuscany, was
born, noble and miserable, the poet Giacomo Leopardi, who began even
in childhood to suffer the malice of that strange conspiracy of ills
which consumed him. His constitution was very fragile, and it early
felt the effect of the passionate ardor with which the sickly boy
dedicated his life to literature. From the first he seems to have had
little or no direction in his own studies, and hardly any instruction.
He literally lived among his books, rarely leaving his own room except
to pass into his father's library; his research and erudition were
marvelous, and at the age of sixteen he presented his father a Latin
translation and comment on Plotinus, of which Sainte-Beuve said that
“one who had studied Plotinus his whole life could find something
useful in this work of a boy.” At that age Leopardi already knew all
Greek and Latin literature; he knew French, Spanish, and English; he
knew Hebrew, and disputed in that tongue with the rabbis of Ancona.
The poet's father was Count Monaldo Leopardi, who had written little
books of a religious and political character; the religion very
bigoted, the politics very reactionary. His library was the largest
anywhere in that region, but he seems not to have learned wisdom in
it; and, though otherwise a blameless man, he used his son, who grew
to manhood differing from him in all his opinions, with a rigor that
was scarcely less than cruel. He was bitterly opposed to what was
called progress, to religious and civil liberty; he was devoted to
what was called order, which meant merely the existing order of
things, the divinely appointed prince, the infallible priest. He had
a mediaeval taste, and he made his palace at Recanati as much like a
feudal castle as he could, with all sorts of baronial bric-à-brac. An
armed vassal at his gate was out of the question, but at the door of
his own chamber stood an effigy in rusty armor, bearing a tarnished
halberd. He abhorred the fashions of our century, and wore those of
an earlier epoch; his wife, who shared his prejudices and opinions,
fantastically appareled herself to look like the portrait of some
gentlewoman of as remote a date. Halls hung in damask, vast mirrors
in carven frames, and stately furniture of antique form attested
throughout the palace “the splendor of a race which, if its fortunes
had somewhat declined, still knew how to maintain its ancient state.”
In this home passed the youth and early manhood of a poet who no
sooner began to think for himself than he began to think things most
discordant with his father's principles and ideas. He believed in
neither the religion nor the politics of his race; he cherished with
the desire of literary achievement that vague faith in humanity, in
freedom, in the future, against which the Count Monaldo had so
sternly set his face; he chafed under the restraints of his father's
authority, and longed for some escape into the world. The Italians
sometimes write of Leopardi's unhappiness with passionate condemnation
of his father; but neither was Count Monaldo's part an enviable one,
and it was certainly not at this period that he had all the wrong in
his differences with his son. Nevertheless, it is pathetic to read how
the heartsick, frail, ambitious boy, when he found some article in a
newspaper that greatly pleased him, would write to the author and ask
his friendship. When these journalists, who were possibly not always
the wisest publicists of their time, so far responded to the young
scholar's advances as to give him their personal acquaintance as well
as their friendship, the old count received them with a courteous
tolerance, which had no kindness in it for their progressive ideas.
He lived in dread of his son's becoming involved in some of the many
plots then hatching against order and religion, and he repressed with
all his strength Leopardi's revolutionary tendencies, which must
always have been mere matters of sentiment, and not deserving of great
rigor.
He seems not so much to have loved Italy as to have hated Recanati.
It is a small village high up in the Apennines, between Loreto and
Macerata, and is chiefly accessible in ox-carts. Small towns
everywhere are dull, and perhaps are not more deadly so in Italy than
they are elsewhere, but there they have a peculiarly obscure, narrow
life indoors. Outdoors there is a little lounging about the _caffè_,
a little stir on holidays among the lower classes and the neighboring
peasants, a great deal of gossip at all times, and hardly anything
more. The local nobleman, perhaps, cultivates literature as Leopardi's
father did; there is always some abbate mousing about in the local
archives and writing pamphlets on disputed points of the local
history; and there is the parish priest, to help form the polite
society of the place. As if this social barrenness were not enough,
Recanati was physically hurtful to Leopardi: the climate was very
fickle; the harsh, damp air was cruel to his nerves. He says it seems
to him a den where no good or beautiful thing ever comes; he bewails
the common ignorance; in Recanati there is no love for letters, for
the humanizing arts; nobody frequents his father's great library,
nobody buys books, nobody reads the newspapers. Yet this forlorn and
detestable little town has one good thing. It has a preëminently good
Italian accent, better even, he thinks, than the Roman,--which would
be a greater consolation to an Italian than we can well understand.
Nevertheless it was not society, and it did not make his
fellow-townsmen endurable to him. He recoiled from them more and more,
and the solitude in which he lived among his books filled him with a
black melancholy, which he describes as a poison, corroding the life
of body and soul alike. To a friend who tries to reconcile him to
Recanati, he writes: “It is very well to tell me that Plutarch and
Alfieri loved Chaeronea and Asti; they loved them, but they left them;
and so shall I love my native place when I am away from it. Now I say
I hate it because I am in it. To recall the spot where one's childhood
days were passed is dear and sweet; it is a fine saying, 'Here you
were born, and here Providence wills you to stay.' All very fine! Say
to the sick man striving to be well that he is flying in the face of
Providence; tell the poor man struggling to advance himself that he is
defying heaven; bid the Turk beware of baptism, for God has made him a
Turk!” So Leopardi wrote when he was in comparative health and able to
continue his studies. But there were long periods when his ailments
denied him his sole consolation of work. Then he rose late, and walked
listlessly about without opening his lips or looking at a book the
whole day. As soon as he might, he returned to his studies; when he
must, he abandoned them again. At such a time he once wrote to a
friend who understood and loved him: “I have not energy enough to
conceive a single desire, not even for death; not because I fear
death, but because I cannot see any difference between that and my
present life. For the first time _ennui_ not merely oppresses and
wearies me, but it also agonizes and lacerates me, like a cruel pain.
I am overwhelmed with a sense of the vanity of all things and the
condition of men. My passions are dead, my very despair seems
nonentity. As to my studies, which you urge me to continue, for the
last eight months I have not known what study means; the nerves of my
eyes and of my whole head are so weakened and disordered that I cannot
read or listen to reading, nor can I fix my mind upon any subject.”
{Illustration: GIACOMO LEOPARDI}
At Recanati Leopardi suffered not merely solitude, but the contact
of people whom he despised, and whose vulgarity was all the greater
oppression when it showed itself in a sort of stupid compassionate
tenderness for him. He had already suffered one of those
disappointments which are the rule rather than the exception, and
his first love had ended as first love always does when it ends
fortunately--in disappointment. He scarcely knew the object of his
passion, a young girl of humble lot, whom he used to hear singing at
her loom in the house opposite his father's palace. Count Monaldo
promptly interfered, and not long afterward the young girl died. But
the sensitive boy, and his biographers after him, made the most of
this sorrow; and doubtless it helped to render life under his father's
roof yet heavier and harder to bear. Such as it was, it seems to have
been the only love that Leopardi ever really felt, and the young
girl's memory passed into the melancholy of his life and poetry.
But he did not summon courage to abandon Recanati before his
twenty-fourth year, and then he did not go with his father's entire
good-will. The count wished him to become a priest, but Leopardi
shrank from the idea with horror, and there remained between him and
his father not only the difference of their religious and political
opinions, but an unkindness which must be remembered against the
judgment, if not the heart, of the latter. He gave his son so meager
an allowance that it scarcely kept him above want, and obliged him to
labors and subjected him to cares which his frail health was not able
bear.
From Recanati Leopardi first went to Rome; but he carried Recanati
everywhere with him, and he was as solitary and as wretched in the
capital of the world as in the little village of the Apennines. He
despised the Romans, as they deserved, upon very short acquaintance,
and he declared that his dullest fellow-villager had a greater share
of good sense than the best of them. Their frivolity was incredible;
the men moved him to rage and pity; the women, high and low, to
loathing. In one of his letters to his brother Carlo, he says of Rome,
as he found it: “I have spoken to you only about the women, because
I am at a loss what to say to you about literature. Horrors upon
horrors! The most sacred names profaned, the most absurd follies
praised to the skies, the greatest spirits of the century trampled
under foot as inferior to the smallest literary man in Rome.
Philosophy despised; genius, imagination, feeling, names--I do not say
things, but even names--unknown and alien to these professional poets
and poetesses! Antiquarianism placed at the summit of human learning,
and considered invariably and universally as the only true study
of man!” This was Rome in 1822. “I do not exaggerate,” he writes,
“because it is impossible, and I do not even say enough.” One of the
things that moved him to the greatest disgust in the childish and
insipid society of a city where he had fondly hoped to find a response
to his high thoughts was the sensation caused throughout Rome by the
dress and theatrical effectiveness with which a certain prelate said
mass. All Rome talked of it, cardinals and noble ladies complimented
the performer as if he were a ballet-dancer, and the flattered prelate
used to rehearse his part, and expatiate upon his methods of study
for it, to private audiences of admirers. In fact, society had then
touched almost the lowest depth of degradation where society had
always been corrupt and dissolute, and the reader of Massimo
d'Azeglio's memoirs may learn particulars (given with shame and
regret, indeed, and yet with perfect Italian frankness) which it is
not necessary to repeat here.
There were, however, many foreigners living at Rome in whose company
Leopardi took great pleasure. They were chiefly Germans, and first
among them was Niebuhr, who says of his first meeting with the poet:
“Conceive of my astonishment when I saw standing before me in the
poor little chamber a mere youth, pale and shy, frail in person, and
obviously in ill health, who was by far the first, in fact the only,
Greek philologist in Italy, the author of critical comments and
observations which would have won honor for the first philologist
in Germany, and yet only twenty-two years old! He had become thus
profoundly learned without school, without instructor, without help,
without encouragement, in his father's house. I understand, too, that
he is one of the first of the rising poets of Italy. What a nobly
gifted people!”
Niebuhr offered to procure him a professorship of Greek philosophy in
Berlin, but Leopardi would not consent to leave his own country;
and then Niebuhr unsuccessfully used his influence to get him some
employment from the papal government,--compliments and good wishes it
gave him, but no employment and no pay.
From Rome Leopardi went to Milan, where he earned something--very
little--as editor of a comment upon Petrarch. A little later he went
to Bologna, where a generous and sympathetic nobleman made him tutor
in his family; but Leopardi returned not long after to Recanati, where
he probably found no greater content than he left there. Presently we
find him at Pisa, and then at Florence, eking out the allowance from
his father by such literary work as he could find to do. In the latter
place it is somewhat dimly established that he again fell in love,
though he despised the Florentine women almost as much as the Romans,
for their extreme ignorance, folly, and pride. This love also was
unhappy. There is no reason to believe that Leopardi, who inspired
tender and ardent friendships in men, ever moved any woman to love.
The Florentine ladies are darkly accused by one of his biographers of
having laughed at the poor young pessimist, and it is very possible;
but that need not make us think the worse of him, or of them either,
for that matter. He is supposed to have figured the lady of his latest
love under the name of Aspasia, in one of his poems, as he did his
first love under that of Sylvia, in the poem so called. Doubtless the
experience further embittered a life already sufficiently miserable.
He left Florence, but after a brief sojourn at Rome he returned
thither, where his friend Antonio Ranieri watched with a heavy heart
the gradual decay of his forces, and persuaded him finally to seek
the milder air of Naples. Ranieri's father was, like Leopardi's, of
reactionary opinions, and the Neapolitan, dreading the effect of their
discord, did not take his friend to his own house, but hired a villa
at Capodimonte, where he lived four years in fraternal intimacy with
Leopardi, and where the poet died in 1837.
Ranieri has in some sort made himself the champion of Leopardi's fame.
He has edited his poems, and has written a touching and beautiful
sketch of his life. Their friendship, which was of the greatest
tenderness, began when Leopardi sorely needed it; and Ranieri devoted
himself to the hapless poet like a lover, as if to console him for
the many years in which he had known neither reverence nor love. He
indulged all the eccentricities of his guest, who for a sick man had
certain strange habits, often not rising till evening, dining at
midnight, and going to bed at dawn. Ranieri's sister Paolina kept
house for the friends, and shared all her brother's compassion for
Leopardi, whose family appears to have willingly left him to the care
of these friends. How far the old unkindness between him and his
father continued, it is hard to say. His last letter was written to
his mother in May, 1837, some two weeks before his death; he thanks
her for a present of ten dollars,--one may imagine from the gift and
the gratitude that he was still held in a strict and parsimonious
tutelage,--and begs her prayers and his father's, for after he has
seen them again, he shall not have long to live.
He did not see them again, but he continued to smile at the anxieties
of his friends, who had too great reason to think that the end was
much nearer than Leopardi himself supposed. On the night of the 14th
of June, while they were waiting for the carriage which was to take
them into the country, where they intended to pass the time together
and sup at daybreak, Leopardi felt so great a difficulty of
breathing--he called it asthma, but it was dropsy of the heart--that
he begged them to send for a doctor. The doctor on seeing the sick man
took Ranieri apart, and bade him fetch a priest without delay, and
while they waited the coming of the friar, Leopardi spoke now and then
with them, but sank rapidly. Finally, says Ranieri, “Leopardi opened
his eyes, now larger even than their wont, and looked at me more
fixedly than before. 'I can't see you,' he said, with a kind of sigh.
And he ceased to breathe, and his pulse and heart beat no more; and
at the same moment the Friar Felice of the barefoot order of St.
Augustine entered the chamber, while I, quite beside myself, called
with a loud voice on him who had been my friend, my brother, my
father, and who answered me nothing, and yet seemed to gaze upon
me.... His death was inconceivable to me; the others were dismayed and
mute; there arose between the good friar and myself the most cruel and
painful dispute, ... I madly contending that my friend was still
alive, and beseeching him with tears to accompany with the offices of
religion the passing of that great soul. But he, touching again and
again the pulse and the heart, continually answered that the spirit
had taken flight. At last, a spontaneous and solemn silence fell upon
all in the room; the friar knelt beside the dead, and we all followed
his example. Then after long and profound meditation he prayed, and we
prayed with him.”
In another place Ranieri says: “The malady of Leopardi was indefinable,
for having its spring in the most secret sources of life, it was like
life itself, inexplicable. The bones softened and dissolved away,
refusing their frail support to the flesh that covered them. The flesh
itself grew thinner and more lifeless every day, for the organs of
nutrition denied their office of assimilation. The lungs, cramped into
a space too narrow, and not sound themselves, expanded with difficulty.
With difficulty the heart freed itself from the lymph with which a slow
absorption burdened it. The blood, which ill renewed itself in the hard
and painful respiration, returned cold, pale, and sluggish to the
enfeebled veins. And in fine, the whole mysterious circle of life,
moving with such great effort, seemed from moment to moment about to
pause forever. Perhaps the great cerebral sponge, beginning and end of
that mysterious circle, had prepotently sucked up all the vital forces,
and itself consumed in a brief time all that was meant to suffice the
whole system for a long period. However it may be, the life of Leopardi
was not a course, as in most men, but truly a precipitation toward death.”
Some years before he died, Leopardi had a presentiment of his death,
and his end was perhaps hastened by the nervous shock of the terror
produced by the cholera, which was then raging in Naples. At that time
the body of a Neapolitan minister of state who had died of cholera
was cast into the common burial-pit at Naples--such was the fear of
contagion, and so rapidly were the dead hurried to the grave. A heavy
bribe secured the remains of Leopardi from this fate, and his dust now
reposes in a little church on the road to Pozzuoli.