bookworm. Leopardi came forth a Hellene, not merely a consummate
Greek scholar, but penetrated with the classical conception
of life, and a master of antique form and style. At
sixteen he composed a Latin treatise on the Roman rhetoricians
of the 2nd century, a commentary on Porphyry’s life of Plotinus
and a history of astronomy; at seventeen he wrote on the popular
errors of the ancients, citing more than four hundred authors.
A little later he imposed upon the first scholars of Italy by two
odes in the manner of Anacreon. At eighteen he produced a
poem of considerable length, the Appressamento alla Morte,
which, after being lost for many years, was discovered and
published by Zanino Volta. It is a vision of the omnipotence of
death, modelled upon Petrarch, but more truly inspired by
Dante, and in its conception, machinery and general tone offering
a remarkable resemblance to Shelley’s Triumph of Life (1822),
of which Leopardi probably never heard. This juvenile work
was succeeded (1819) by two lyrical compositions which at once
placed the author upon the height which he maintained ever
afterwards. The ode to Italy, and that on the monument to
Dante erected at Florence, gave voice to the dismay and affliction
with which Italy, aroused by the French Revolution from the
torpor of the 17th and 18th centuries, contemplated her forlorn
and degraded condition, her political impotence, her degeneracy
in arts and arms and the frivolity or stagnation of her intellectual
life. They were the outcry of a student who had found an ideal
of national existence in his books, and to whose disappointment
everything in his own circumstances lent additional poignancy.
But there is nothing unmanly or morbid in the expression of these
sentiments, and the odes are surprisingly exempt from the
failings characteristic of young poets. They are remarkably
chaste in diction, close and nervous in style, sparing in fancy and
almost destitute of simile and metaphor, antique in spirit, yet
pervaded by modern ideas, combining Landor’s dignity with a
considerable infusion of the passion of Byron. These qualities
continued to characterize Leopardi’s poetical writings throughout
his life. A third ode, on Cardinal Mai’s discoveries of ancient
MSS., lamented in the same spirit of indignant sorrow the
decadence of Italian literature. The publication of these pieces
widened the breach between Leopardi and his father, a well-meaning
but apparently dull and apathetic man, who had lived into the
19th century without imbibing any of its spirit, and who provoked
his son’s contempt by a superstition unpardonable in a scholar
of real learning. Very probably from a mistaken idea of duty to
his son, very probably, too, from his own entire dependence in
pecuniary matters upon his wife, he for a long time obstinately
refused Leopardi funds, recreation, change of scene, everything
that could have contributed to combat the growing pessimism
which eventually became nothing less than monomaniacal.
The affection of his brothers and sister afforded him some consolation,
and he found intellectual sympathy in the eminent
scholar and patriot Pietro Giordani, with whom he assiduously
corresponded at this period, partly on the ways and means of
escaping from “this hermitage, or rather seraglio, where the
delights of civil society and the advantages of solitary life are
alike wanting.” This forms the keynote of numerous letters of
complaint and lamentation, as touching but as effeminate in
their pathos as those of the banished Ovid. It must be remembered
in fairness that the weakness of Leopardi’s eyesight
frequently deprived him for months together of the resource of
study. At length (1822) his father allowed him to repair to
Rome, where, though cheered by the encouragement of C. C. J.
Bunsen and Niebuhr, he found little satisfaction in the trifling
pedantry that passed for philology and archaeology, while his
sceptical opinions prevented his taking orders, the indispensable
condition of public employment in the Papal States. Dispirited
and with exhausted means, he returned to Recanati, where he
spent three miserable years, brightened only by the production
of several lyrical masterpieces, which appeared in 1824. The
most remarkable is perhaps the Bruto Minore, the condensation
of his philosophy of despair. In 1825 he accepted an engagement
to edit Cicero and Petrarch for the publisher Stella at Milan,
and took up his residence at Bologna, where his life was for a
time made almost cheerful by the friendship of the countess
Malvezzi. In 1827 appeared the Operette Morali, consisting
principally of dialogues and his imaginary biography of Filippo
Ottonieri, which have given Leopardi a fame as a prose writer
hardly inferior to his celebrity as a poet. Modern literature has
few productions so eminently classical in form and spirit, so
symmetrical in construction and faultless in style. Lucian is
evidently the model; but the wit and irony which were playthings
to Lucian are terribly earnest with Leopardi. Leopardi’s
invention is equal to Lucian’s and his only drawback in comparison
with his exemplar is that, while the latter’s campaign
against pretence and imposture commands hearty sympathy,
Leopardi’s philosophical creed is a repulsive hedonism in the
disguise of austere stoicism. The chief interlocutors in his
dialogues all profess the same unmitigated pessimism, claim
emancipation from every illusion that renders life tolerable to
the vulgar, and assert or imply a vast moral and intellectual
superiority over unenlightened mankind. When, however, we
come to inquire what renders them miserable, we find it is nothing
but the privation of pleasurable sensation, fame, fortune or
some other external thing which a lofty code of ethics would
deny to be either indefeasibly due to man or essential to his
felicity. A page of Sartor Resartus scatters Leopardi’s sophistry
to the winds, and leaves nothing of his dialogues but the consummate
literary skill that would render the least fragment
precious. As works of art they are a possession for ever, as
contributions to moral philosophy they are worthless, and apart
from their literary qualities can only escape condemnation if
regarded as lyrical expressions of emotion, the wail extorted
from a diseased mind by a diseased body. Filippo Ottonieri is
a portrait of an imaginary philosopher, imitated from the
biography of a real sage in Lucian’s Demonax. Lucian has shown
us the philosopher he wished to copy, Leopardi has truly depicted
the philosopher he was. Nothing can be more striking or more
tragical than the picture of the man superior to his fellows in
every quality of head and heart, and yet condemned to sterility
and impotence because he has, as he imagines, gone a step too
far on the road to truth, and illusions exist for him no more.
The little tract is full of remarks on life and character of surprising
depth and justice, manifesting what powers of observation as well
as reflection were possessed by the sickly youth who had seen so
little of the world.
Want of means soon drove Leopardi back to Recanati, where, deaf, half-blind, sleepless, tortured by incessant pain, at war with himself and every one around him except his sister, he spent the two most unhappy years of his unhappy life. In May 1831 he escaped to Florence, where he formed the acquaintance of a young Swiss philologist, M. de Sinner. To him he confided his unpublished philological writings, with a view to their appearance in Germany. A selection appeared under the title Excerpta ex schedis criticis J. Leopardi (Bonn, 1834). The remaining MSS. were purchased after Sinner’s death by the Italian government, and, together with Leopardi’s correspondence with the Swiss philologist, were partially edited by Aulard. In 1831 appeared a new edition of Leopardi’s poems, comprising several new pieces of the highest merit. These are in general less austerely classical than his earlier compositions, and evince a greater tendency to description, and a keener interest in the works and ways of ordinary mankind. The Resurrection, composed on occasion of his unexpected recovery, is a model of concentrated energy of diction, and The Song of the Wandering Shepherd in Asia is one of the highest flights of modern lyric poetry. The range of the author’s ideas is still restricted, but his style and melody are unsurpassable. Shortly after the publication of these pieces (October 1831) Leopardi was driven from Florence to Rome by an unhappy attachment. His feelings are powerfully expressed in two poems, To Himself and Aspasia, which seem to breathe wounded pride at least as much as wounded love. In 1832 Leopardi returned to Florence, and there formed acquaintance with a young Neapolitan, Antonio Ranieri, himself an author of merit, and destined to enact towards him the part performed by Severn towards Keats, an enviable title to renown
