Leopardi has never been widely read in France. While Schopenhauer has
achieved a certain literary popularity, Leopardi has remained, even for
scholars, in the shade. This is due in large measure to the mediocrity
of his translators and his commentators....
Leopardi's poetry is difficult to enjoy. M. Turiello says that it is
obscure even to Italians of the present generation. It is true that
Leopardi is somewhat addicted to archaism and that, moreover, the
Italian language has since his day undergone rapid development under
the influence of French. His prose, despite its severe form, now too
concise and now a trifle oratorical, is more approachable.... But if
translation, is always a difficult task, it is particularly difficult
to translate Leopardi.
In prose as in verse he is a pessimist more by nature than as a result
of reasoning. It is his sensibility rather than his intellect that
speaks. He constructed no system; he gathers his impressions, his
observations, and attempts, not without arbitrariness, to generalize
them. His philosophy is entirely physiological: the world is bad
because his personal life is bad. He conceives the world in most
terrifying fashion, and supposes that if all men do not judge it as
he does, it is because they are mad. Optimism, in fact, is fairly
widespread. While there is life there is hope. The fable of Death
and the Wood-cutter is a fair symbol of humanity's out-look. On the
other hand it is certain that literatures and philosophies, even those
which aim to produce laughter as well as those which exalt life, are
generally pessimistic. There is a tragic background to Molière's plays
and a gloomy background to Nietzsche's aphorisms. Absolute, beatific
optimism is compatible only with a sort of animal insensibility and
stupidity: only idiots are constantly laughing and are constantly
happy to be alive. Absolute pessimism, however, can develop only in
certain depressed organisms: its extreme manifestations are plainly
pathological and connected with maladies of the brain.
Schopenhauer affirms that life is evil, yet he loves it and enjoys
it. Let fame come, and he expands with cheer. His character is by no
means gloomy. He is at the same time a philosopher and a humorous
writer. Leopardi never knew these expansions. He affects to despise
even glory, for which he nevertheless labors. But he, too, is a keen,
witty spirit, although ever bitter; and he, too, is a humorist. He
certainly takes pleasure in writing. If he does not know life's other
joys, he knows that of being able to impart a beautiful, puissant form
to a lucid thought. Nevertheless his existence, much more logical
than Schopenhauer's, is in exact accord with his philosophy. Sickly,
isolated, not understood, Leopardi lacked the strength to react; but if
he allowed himself to be swept along by his sadness, it was at least in
full knowledge of the fact. He questions his despair and enters into
discussion with it. And this questioning presented us with those fine
dialogues which, together with a few thoughts, were gathered together
under the title _Operette Morali_.
Leopardi died in 1837. His writings seem of this very day. Almost
all the questions touched upon with unparalleled sagacity in the
Dialogue Between Tristan And A Friend are such as still interest
philosophers and critics. "I understand," says Tristan, "and I embrace
the deep philosophy of the newspapers, which, by killing off all other
literature and all other studies of too serious and too little amusing
a nature, are the masters and the beacon-light of the modern age."
Already, in his day, the flatterers of the crowd were saying, like the
Socialists of today: "Individuals have disappeared in the face of the
masses." Already sober stupidity affirmed: "We live in an epoch of
transition," as if, resumes Tristan, all epochs and all centuries were
not a transition toward the future!
The theme itself of the dialogues is the idea of the wickedness of life
and the excellence of death. It recurs time and again and Leopardi
manages to avoid monotony only by the ingeniousness of his imagination,
the beauty of his style, the keenness of his wit. For example, the
magnificent passage in which, after having said that although the
world is rejuvenated every spring it is continually growing older,
he announces the supreme death of the universe: "Not a vestige will
survive of the entire world, of the vicissitudes and the infinite
calamities of all things created. An empty silence, a supreme calm will
fill the immensity of space. Thus will dissolve solve and disappear
this frightful, prodigious mystery of universal existence, before we
have been able to understand or clarify it."
Without a doubt. But in the meantime we must live, or else die. And if
we choose to live, it is reasonable to do our best to adapt ourselves
to life. Pessimism has but the slightest of philosophical value. It
is not even a philosophy; it is literature, and, too often, rhetoric.
This man is a bit ridiculous, tranquilly pursuing his existence, daily
adding a page to his litany of death's delights. In short, Leopardi,
like many another man, humble or exalted, suffers from not being happy;
his originality consists less in taking pleasure in his suffering,
which is not very rare, than in finding reasons for this pleasure and
expounding them logically and resolutely. His sincerity is absolute.
Considered in opposition to the base reveries of the promissors of
happiness, this literature is useful. But it is good that it should
be rare, for if we finally got to take pleasure in it alone, it would
prove only depressing. Life is nothing and it is everything. It is
empty and it contains all. But what does the word _life_ mean? It is an
abstraction. There are as many _lives_ as there are living individuals
in all the animal species. These lives are developed according to
curves and windings of infinite variety. It is the height of folly to
bring a single judgment to bear upon the multitude of individual lives.
Some are good, others bad, the majority colorless, according to every
possible degree. In this order of facts there is no justice, and the
reign of justice is particularly chimerical in this case, because the
joys and sorrows of a life are related far less to the events by which
it is crossed than to the physiological character of the individual.
Abstractions do us much harm by impelling us to the quest of the
absolute in all things. Joy does not exist, but there are joys: and
these joys may not be fully felt unless they are detached from
neutral or even painful conditions. The idea of continuity is almost
self-negating. Nature makes no leaps; but life makes only bounds. It
is measured by our heart-beats and these may be counted. That there
should be, amid the number of deep pulsations that scan the line of our
existence, some grievous ones, does not permit the affirmation that
life is therefore evil. Moreover, neither a continuous grief nor a
continuous joy would be perceived by consciousness.
Whether we deal with the transcendental theories of Schopenhauer or the
melancholy assertions of Leopardi, we arrive at the same conclusion.
Pessimism is not admissible, any more than is optimism. Heraclitus
and Democritus may be dismissed back to back, while fearlessly and
with a moderate but resolute hope, we try to extract from each of our
lives,--we men,--all the sap it contains, even though it be bitter.
Leopardi was not only the poet and the moralist of despair. At the age
of seventeen he had already achieved note as a scholar and a Hellenist,
with his Essay Upon Popular Errors Of The Ancients (1815). During
the two years that followed he produced several dissertations on the
Batrachomyomachia, on Horace, on Moscus, and Greek odes in the manner
of Callimachus, the perfection of which was such that it was believed
some forgotten manuscript had been brought to light. Niebuhr affirmed
in 1822 that the Notes On The Chronicle of Eusebus would have done
honor to the foremost German philologists. Leopardi had reached this
point when in a flash his personal genius was revealed to him, and
then there appeared his Poems, followed by his Moral Tracts. He died
at the age of thirty-nine (1837), leaving a series of labors of which
each separate division achieves perfection: the scholar, the poet, the
writer of prose, the translator, the man of wit are equally admirable
in Leopardi. Were it not for the lingering illness that accompanied his
deeply sensitive career, he would have been one of the most luminous
geniuses of humanity. His originality lies in his having been the most
sombre.