These pieces fairly indicate the range of Leopardi, and I confess that
they and the rest that I have read leave me somewhat puzzled in the
presence of his reputation. This, to be sure, is largely based upon
his prose writings--his dialogues, full of irony and sarcasm--and his
unquestionable scholarship. But the poetry is the heart of his fame,
and is it enough to justify it? I suppose that such poetry owes very
much of its peculiar influence to that awful love we all have
of hovering about the idea of death--of playing with the great
catastrophe of our several tragedies and farces, and of marveling what
it can be. There are moods which the languid despair of Leopardi's
poetry can always evoke, and in which it seems that the most life can
do is to leave us, and let us lie down and cease. But I fancy we all
agree that these are not very wise or healthful moods, and that their
indulgence does not fit us particularly well for the duties of life,
though I never heard that they interfered with its pleasures; on the
contrary, they add a sort of zest to enjoyment. Of course the whole
transaction is illogical, but if a poet will end every pensive strain
with an appeal or apostrophe to death--not the real death, that comes
with a sharp, quick agony, or “after long lying in bed”, after many
days or many years of squalid misery and slowly dying hopes and
medicines that cease even to relieve at last; not this death, that
comes in all the horror of undertaking, but a picturesque and
impressive abstraction, whose business it is to relieve us in the most
effective way of all our troubles, and at the same time to avenge
us somehow upon the indefinitely ungrateful and unworthy world we
abandon--if a poet will do this, we are very apt to like him. There is
little doubt that Leopardi was sincere, and there is little reason why
he should not have been so, for life could give him nothing but pain.
De Sanctis, whom I have quoted already, and who speaks, I believe,
with rather more authority than any other modern Italian critic, and
certainly with great clearness and acuteness, does not commit himself
to specific praise of Leopardi's work. But he seems to regard him as
an important expression, if not force or influence, and he has some
words about him, at the close of his “History of Italian Literature”,
which have interested me, not only for the estimate of Leopardi which
they embody, but for the singularly distinct statement which they make
of the modern literary attitude. I should not, myself, have felt that
Leopardi represented this, but I am willing that the reader should
feel it, if he can. De Sanctis has been speaking of the Romantic
period in Italy, when he says:
“Giacomo Leopardi marks the close of this period. Metaphysics at
war with theology had ended in this attempt at reconciliation. The
multiplicity of systems had discredited science itself. Metaphysics
was regarded as a revival of theology. The Idea seemed a substitute
for providence. Those philosophies of history, of religion, of
humanity, had the air of poetical inventions.... That reconciliation
between the old and new, tolerated as a temporary political necessity,
seemed at bottom a profanation of science, a moral weakness.... Faith
in revelation had been wanting; faith in philosophy itself was now
wanting. Mystery re-appeared. The philosopher knew as much as the
peasant. Of this mystery, Giacomo Leopardi was the echo in the
solitude of his thought and his pain. His skepticism announced the
dissolution of this theologico-metaphysical world, and inaugurated the
reign of the arid True, of the Real. His songs are the most profound
and occult voices of that laborious transition called the nineteenth
century. That which has importance is not the brilliant exterior of
that century of progress, and it is not without irony that he speaks
of the progressive destinies of mankind. That which has importance is
the exploration of one's own breast, the inner world, virtue, liberty,
love, all the ideals of religion, of science, and of poetry--shadows
and illusions in the presence of reason, yet which warm the heart, and
will not die. Mystery destroys the intellectual world; it leaves the
moral world intact. This tenacious life of the inner world, despite
the fall of all theological and metaphysical worlds, is the
originality of Leopardi, and gives his skepticism a religious stamp.
... Every one feels in it a new creation. The instrument of this
renovation is criticism.... The sense of the real continues to develop
itself; the positive sciences come to the top, and cast out all the
ideal and systematic constructions. New dogmas lose credit. Criticism
remains intact. The patient labor of analysis begins again....
Socialism re-appears in the political order, positivism in the
intellectual order. The word is no longer liberty, but justice.
... Literature also undergoes transformation. It rejects classes,
distinctions, privileges. The ugly stands beside the beautiful; or
rather, there is no longer ugly or beautiful, neither ideal nor real,
neither infinite nor finite.... There is but one thing only, the
Living.”