“In the years of boyhood,” says the Neapolitan critic, Francesco de
Sanctis, “Leopardi saw his youth vanish forever; he lived obscure, and
achieved posthumous envy and renown; he was rich and noble, and he
suffered from want and despite; no woman's love ever smiled upon him,
the solitary lover of his own mind, to which he gave the names of
Sylvia, Aspasia, and Nerina. Therefore, with a precocious and bitter
penetration, he held what we call happiness for illusions and deceits
of fancy; the objects of our desire he called idols, our labors
idleness, and everything vanity. Thus he saw nothing here below equal
to his own intellect, or that was worthy the throb of his heart; and
inertia, rust, as it were, even more than pain consumed his life,
alone in what he called this formidable desert of the world. In such
solitude life becomes a dialogue of man with his own soul, and the
internal colloquies render more bitter and intense the affections
which have returned to the heart for want of nourishment in the world.
Mournful colloquies and yet pleasing, where man is the suicidal
vulture perpetually preying upon himself, and caressing the wound that
drags him to the grave.... The first cause of his sorrow is Recanati:
the intellect, capable of the universe, feels itself oppressed in an
obscure village, cruel to the body and deadly to the spirit.... He
leaves Recanati; he arrives in Rome; we believe him content at
last, and he too believes it. Brief illusion! Rome, Bologna, Milan,
Florence, Naples, are all different places, where he forever meets the
same man, himself. Read the first letter that he writes from Rome: 'In
the great things I see I do not feel the least pleasure, for I know
that they are marvelous, but I do not feel it, and I assure you that
their multitude and grandeur wearied me after the first day.'... To
Leopardi it is rarely given to interest himself in any spectacle of
nature, and he never does it without a sudden and agonized return to
himself.... Malign and heartless men have pretended that Leopardi was
a misanthrope, a fierce hater and enemy of the human race!... Love,
inexhaustible and almost ideal, was the supreme craving of that
angelic heart, and never left it during life. 'Love me, for God's
sake,' he beseeches his brother Carlo; 'I have need of love, love,
love, fire, enthusiasm, life.' And in truth it may be said that pain
and love form the twofold poetry of his life.”
Leopardi lived in Italy during the long contest between the Classic
and Romantic schools, and it may be said that in him many of the
leading ideas of both parties were reconciled. His literary form was
as severe and sculpturesque as that of Alfieri himself, whilst the
most subjective and introspective of the Romantic poets did not
so much color the world with his own mental and spiritual hue as
Leopardi. It is not plain whether he ever declared himself for one
theory or the other. He was a contributor to the literary journal
which the partisans of the Romantic School founded at Florence; but he
was a man so weighed upon by his own sense of the futility and vanity
of all things that he could have had little spirit for mere literary
contentions. His admirers try hard to make out that he was positively
and actively patriotic; and it is certain that in his earlier youth he
disagreed with his father's conservative opinions, and despised
the existing state of things; but later in life he satirized the
aspirations and purposes of progress, though without sympathizing with
those of reaction.
The poem which his chief claim to classification with the poets
militant of his time rests upon is that addressed “To Italy”. Those
who have read even only a little of Leopardi have read it; and I must
ask their patience with a version which drops the irregular rhyme of
the piece for the sake of keeping its peculiar rhythm and measure.
My native land, I see the walls and arches,
The columns and the statues, and the lonely
Towers of our ancestors,
But not their glory, not
The laurel and the steel that of old time
Our great forefathers bore. Disarmèd now,
Naked thou showest thy forehead and thy breast!
O me, how many wounds,
What bruises and what blood! How do I see thee,
Thou loveliest Lady! Unto Heaven I cry,
And to the world: “Say, say,
Who brought her unto this?” To this and worse,
For both her arms are loaded down with chains,
So that, unveiled and with disheveled hair,
She crouches all forgotten and forlorn,
Hiding her beautiful face
Between her knees, and weeps.
Weep, weep, for well thou may'st, my Italy!
Born, as thou wert, to conquest,
Alike in evil and in prosperous sort!
If thy sweet eyes were each a living stream,
Thou could'st not weep enough
For all thy sorrow and for all thy shame.
For thou wast queen, and now thou art a slave.
Who speaks of thee or writes,
That thinking on thy glory in the past
But says, “She was great once, but is no more.”
Wherefore, oh, wherefore? Where is the ancient strength,
The valor and the arms, and constancy?
Who rent the sword from thee?
Who hath betrayed thee? What art, or what toil,
Or what o'erwhelming force,
Hath stripped thy robe and golden wreath from thee?
How did'st thou fall, and when,
From such a height unto a depth so low?
Doth no one fight for thee, no one defend thee,
None of thy own? Arms, arms! For I alone
Will fight and fall for thee.
Grant me, O Heaven, my blood
Shall be as fire unto Italian hearts!
Where are thy sons? I hear the sound of arms,
Of wheels, of voices, and of drums;
In foreign fields afar
Thy children fight and fall.
Wait, Italy, wait! I see, or seem to see,
A tumult as of infantry and horse,
And smoke and dust, and the swift flash of swords
Like lightning among clouds.
Wilt thou not hope? Wilt thou not lift and turn
Thy trembling eyes upon the doubtful close?
For what, in yonder fields,
Combats Italian youth? O gods, ye gods,
For other lands Italian swords are drawn!
Oh, misery for him who dies in war,
Not for his native shores and his beloved,
His wife and children dear,
But by the foes of others
For others' cause, and cannot dying say,
“Dear land of mine,
The life thou gavest me I give thee back.”
This suffers, of course, in translation, but I confess that in
the original it wears something of the same perfunctory air. His
patriotism was the fever-flame of the sick man's blood; his real
country was the land beyond the grave, and there is a far truer note
in this address to Death.
And thou, that ever from my life's beginning
I have invoked and honored, Beautiful Death! who only
Of all our earthly sorrows knowest pity:
If ever celebrated
Thou wast by me; if ever I attempted
To recompense the insult
That vulgar terror offers
Thy lofty state, delay no more, but listen
To prayers so rarely uttered:
Shut to the light forever,
Sovereign of time, these eyes of weary anguish!
I suppose that Italian criticism of the present day would not give
Leopardi nearly so high a place among the poets as his friend Ranieri
claims for him and his contemporaries accorded. He seems to have been
the poet of a national mood; he was the final expression of that long,
hopeless apathy in which Italy lay bound for thirty years after the
fall of Napoleon and his governments, and the reëstablishment of all
the little despots, native and foreign, throughout the peninsula. In
this time there was unrest enough, and revolt enough of a desultory
and unorganized sort, but every struggle, apparently every aspiration,
for a free political and religious life ended in a more solid
confirmation of the leaden misrule which weighed down the hearts of
the people. To such an apathy the pensive monotone of this sick poet's
song might well seem the only truth; and one who beheld the universe
with the invalid's loath eyes, and reasoned from his own irremediable
ills to a malign mystery presiding over all human affairs, and
ordering a sad destiny from which there could be no defense but death,
might have the authority of a prophet among those who could find no
promise of better things in their earthly lot.
Leopardi's malady was such that when he did not positively suffer
he had still the memory of pain, and he was oppressed with a dreary
ennui, from which he could not escape. Death, oblivion, annihilation,
are the thoughts upon which he broods, and which fill his verse. The
passing color of other men's minds is the prevailing cast of his, and
he, probably with far more sincerity than any other poet, nursed his
despair in such utterances as this: