"The three greatest pessimists who ever existed," said Schopenhauer
one day,--"that is to say, Leopardi, Byron and myself,--were in
Italy during the same year, 1818-1819, and did not make one another's
acquaintance!" One of these "great pessimists," Leopardi, happened
just at this time to be writing a little dialogue that might well be
reprinted at the beginning of every year. It would always seem new.
Life is bad, says Leopardi, and here is the proof: nobody has ever
found a man who would wish to live his life over again exactly as it
happened at first:--who would wish even, at the beginning of a new
year, to have it exactly the same as the year just past. What we love
in life is not life such as it is, but rather life such as it might be,
such as we desire it to be.
But since this Dialogue Between The Passer-By And The Almanac-Vendor,
if it has ever been translated, has remained buried in unreadable
volumes, here is a version of this excellent, though somewhat bitter,
page:
_The Almanac-Vendor_.--Almanacs, new almanacs! New calendars! Will you
buy some almanacs, sir?
_The Passer-by_.--Almanacs for the new year?
_Vendor_.--Yes, sir.
_Passer-by._ Do you think it will be a happy one,--this coming year?
_V._--Oh, yes, sir! Certainly!
_P._--As happy as the one just past?
_V._--Oh! Far, far more so!
_P._--As happy as the one before that?
_V._--Far, far more.
_P._--As happy as which other one, then? Wouldn't you be glad to have
the coming year the same as any one of the recent years?
_V._--No, sir. No. That would hardly please me.
_P._--How long have you been selling almanacs?
_V._--For twenty years, sir.
_P._--Which of those twenty years would you prefer the new year to
resemble?
_V._--I? I don't know.
_P._--Can't you recall some year that seemed happy to you?
_V._--Upon my word, no, sir.
_P._--Yet life is a good thing, isn't it?
_V._--Oh, yes indeed!
_P_.--You would be willing to live these twenty years all over again,
and even all the years since you were born?
_F._--I should say so, my dear sir. And would to God that were possible!
_P._--Even if this life were to be exactly the same that you lived
before,--no more no less,--with the same pleasures and the same
sorrows?
_F._--Oh, that! Indeed no!
_P._--Then what sort of life would you wish?
_F._--Just a life, that's all,--such as God would grant me, without any
other conditions.
_P._--A life left to accident, of which nothing would be known in
advance,--a life such as the coming year brings?
_F._--Exactly.
_P._--That's what I, too, would desire, if I had my life to live over
again,--what I and everybody else would wish for. But that means that
fate, up to this very day, has treated us badly. And it is rather
easy to see that the common opinion is, that in the past evil has
triumphed greatly over good, since nobody, if he had to go over the
same road again, would consent to be reborn. That life which is good
is not the life we know, but the life we do not know,--the life ahead
of us. Beginning with the new year, fate is going to deal kindly with
us,--with you and me and everybody,--and we are going to be happy.
_V._--Let us hope so.
_P._--Well, let me see your handsomest almanac.
_V._--Here you are, sir. It costs thirty cents.
_P._--Here's your money.
_V._--Thanks, sir. See you again. Almanacs! New almanacs! New calendars!
There is, perhaps, a slight error in Leopardi's reasoning. It is not
because our life has been bad that it would be a burden to begin it
all over again. Even a happy life lived twice would scarcely possess
any greater pleasures. The element of curiosity must be taken into
account. There is no human being, however resigned to the monotony of
a becalmed existence, who does not in the bottom of his heart hope for
some unforeseen event.
But is it really true that this idea is not contained in Leopardi's
dialogue? It is there, although hidden, and doubtless I have taken it
from there. Wherever it may come from, it is true, at least if it be
applied to life as a whole. For everybody cherishes the remembrance
of hours, and sometimes days, which he would gladly live over again.
It is often one of the occupations of men to seek to create in their
lives circumstances that plunge them for a moment back into the joys of
the past, even if they must pay for this momentary resurrection with
subsequent pain....
Leopardi, who was a distinguished philologist, an excellent Hellenist,
a great poet and an ingenious philosopher, endowed with eloquence,
was unable to discover happiness or even peace in the exercise of
these multiple gifts. His health was of the most wretched; his heart,
left empty, sounded in his bosom at the slightest shock; he was timid
and his nerves quivered at every jar, like those harps which were in
fashion during his youth. He was born four years before Victor Hugo
and died young, without having tasted fame, while Manzoni, who was
destined to fill an entire century, had been for a long time known
throughout Europe. Is the source of Leopardi's pessimism to be sought
among these divers causes? That is hard to believe. The invalid, far
from cursing life, is filled with hope; he is an optimist, and wishes
to get well; he knows that he will recover. He is not the person with
whom to speak of the infinite vanity of all things. It would rouse his
fury to listen to the condemnation of those boons that are momentarily
out of his reach but which he is preparing to seize and reconquer.
Scarron was more sickly and more deformed than Leopardi, yet he was
none the less a gay, all too gay, fellow. As for not being understood,
or at least, not being received at one's proper value,--there is
nothing in that to make a healthy mind pessimistic. The superior man,
after all, scorns the opinion of men so long as it remains only an
opinion,--that is to say, a matter without practical consequences. And
this was Leopardi's situation, for he could have lived in independence
upon his scant, but honorable patrimony.
Pessimism is related to character, and character is an expression of
physiology. The case with writers, philosophers and poets is exactly
the same as with men of other professions. They are gay, sad, witty,
morose, avaricious, liberal, ardent, lazy, and their talent assumes the
color of their character.
If one were to make a study of literature from this point of view,--a
procedure which would not lack interest,--one would very probably
discover a great number of pessimists, or, as they were called
formerly, sad spirits. There are few men of worth who have not at
times found a bitter taste to life, even among those who, like M.
Renan, professed eternal joviality. There is no great writer without
great sensibility; he is capable of keen joys, and of excessive pain
as well. Now pain, which is depressive, leaves deeper traces in life
than joy. If intelligence does not rule, if it does not intervene to
establish a hierarchy, or an equilibrium of sensations, then the sad
ideas triumph because of their superior numbers and power. Renan's
serenity is perhaps only the apathy of indifference; Goethe's serenity
represents the victory of intellect over sensibility.
Pessimism is neither a religious sentiment nor a modern one, although
it has often assumed religious form and although the most celebrated
pessimists belong to the nineteenth century. The Greeks, who knew
everything, knew the despair of living: the pessimism of Heraclitus
had preceded the optimism of Plato. There are few pages more bitter
than those in which the naturalist Pliny summarizes the miseries of
human life. Nature casts man upon the earth; of all animals he is the
only one destined to tears; he cries from the moment of birth and
never laughs before his fortieth day. And after having enumerated all
the evils and the passions which desolate mankind, Pliny concludes by
approving the ancient Greek epigram: "It is best not to be born or to
die as soon as possible."
Leopardi has scarcely done more than paraphrase these elementary ideas,
but this he has done with abundance and ingeniousness. So funereal is
his spirit that he throws a veil of mourning over the most charming
things: "Enter a garden of plants, herbs and flowers," he says, "even
in the gentlest season of the year. You cannot turn your glance in
any direction without discovering traces of misery. All the members
of this vegetable family are more or less in a 'state of suffering.'
There a rose is wounded by the sun that has given it life; it shrivels,
blanches, and withers away. Further on, behold that lily, whose most
sensitive, most vital parts are being sucked by a bee.... This tree is
infested by a swarm of ants; others, by caterpillars, flies, snails,
mosquitoes; one is wounded in its bark, tortured by the sun, which
penetrates into the wound; the other is attacked in the trunk or in its
roots. You will not find in all this garden a single small plant whose
health is perfect.... Every garden is, in a way, nothing but a vast
hospital,--a place even more lamentable than a cemetery,--and if such
beings are endowed with sensibility, it is certain that non-existence
would to them be far preferable to existence." Leopardi here commits
the error of him who wishes to prove too much. His pessimism abdicates
reason, and the sentence about nothingness being preferable to life,
which in Pliny was beautiful and philosophic, acquires in the Italian
philosopher a somewhat ridiculous sentimentality.
Jouffroy, perhaps with this page in mind, has put tender souls on guard
against any belief in the sensibility of plants: let us leave that to
the reveries of Pythagoras,--so noble, from other standpoints,--or to
the fairy tales, whither we may go of an evening in spring to pluck the
rose that speaks. But if he had possessed a more intimate knowledge of
nature, and of the relations between insects and plants, what a picture
at once admirable and cruel would not Leopardi have been able to draw!
Those mosquitoes, upon whom he looks as allies of the caterpillars in
ravaging the leaves of some cherry-tree, are ichneumons, and it is the
caterpillars themselves that they have come to attack, piercing them
with a long, hollow borer which permits the mosquito to lay in the very
flesh of the caterpillar eggs which, when they become larvae, will gnaw
the living flesh like terrible little vultures.
If Leopardi had known this and many another thing,--if he had known
that every living creature is in turn prey and depredator, in turn
eater and eaten, he would have considered with even greater bitterness
the arrival of the new year, which hastens from the very first days
of its springtime, to impart full strength and full passion to the
instincts of life and devastation.
Leopardi despairs: he is, therefore, a weakling. His humble
almanac-vendor is made of better clay. He hopes; he wishes to live and
live happily; he possesses at least a little of that energy without
which other gifts prove only too often to be blemishes and burdens.