A Manual of Italian Literature

by Francis Henry Cliffe

[CHAPTER XIX.]

LEOPARDI.

It is not often that a writer towers so immeasurably above his contemporaries, that we can point him out, without fear of contradiction, as the greatest of his century. We can, however, unhesitatingly do so in the case of Leopardi. The works to which he owes his immortality are, indeed, few in number and short in extent, but their perfection gives them a dignity which more voluminous productions might emulate in vain.

Giacomo Leopardi was born at Recanati, a town of the March of Ancona, on the 29th of June, 1798, the eldest son of Count Monaldo Leopardi and Adelaide, his wife, daughter of the Marquis Antici. He had three brothers, Carlo, Luigi, and Pierfrancesco, and one sister, Paolina. His father was a man of literary tastes and had a magnificent library, in which the future poet quenched his thirst for knowledge with as much ardour as did Magliabecchi, in a former age, in the library of Cardinal Medici. He soon outstripped in learning the priests who were entrusted with his education. His eager and independent mind spurned direction and disdained moderation. He acquired many languages, and he soon endeavoured to put on paper the result of his studies. Some of his injudicious admirers tried to make an infant prodigy of him, and the stimulus of vanity was added to his passion for knowledge. He toiled day after day in his intellectual quarry, with no relaxation except the absolute necessities of food and sleep. The result may be imagined. His sight failed him from the merciless strain put upon it by reading till late hours of night, often by a flickering candle burnt down to its socket. His spine became curved from constantly bending over the huge folios that formed the staple of his reading. His lungs craved in vain for dilation in his cramped chest and for the freshness of the open air. His nerves gave way, his food failed to nourish him, and his strength at last collapsed so completely that he could neither read nor write, nor even think or speak. From the age of sixteen to twenty-one the mischief was done. The duty of his parents was plain. They should from the beginning have sternly forbidden the overwork, and have compelled him to take requisite exercise and rational amusement. Unhappily, they seem rather to have encouraged the overwork, and actually to have discountenanced all amusement and all intercourse with the outer world. They cannot be acquitted of grave errors of judgment, but it would be harsh to charge them with cruelty. Monaldo was devotedly attached to his children, but it would have been better if he had sent them to school and college, where they would have knocked about with companions of their own age, instead of being left to solitary brooding with their minds preying upon themselves. They would then have returned home, fresh and buoyant, and happy to be again with their parents.

Monaldo had been extravagant in his youth, his estates were considerably encumbered; motives of economy probably made him rejoice that his children were actually learning more at home than could be expected from pupils of the most famous seminaries. In later life, whilst willing and happy to keep them in a handsome style in his ancestral home at Recanati, he found it impossible to supply them with sufficient funds to live in Rome or Florence or Naples in the style to which they had always been accustomed. Therefore, he strongly opposed their desire to see the world. He was perfectly contented with his own surroundings, and he neither understood nor sympathised with Giacomo's longing to widen his sphere of experience.

Painful misunderstandings were the result. Giacomo, owing to the utter prostration into which he had fallen, was obliged to remain a whole year without reading or writing, and he was thrown back upon his melancholy thoughts. He had already received sufficient praise to fire his youthful ambition and he chafed at the bondage in which he was kept. Pietro Giordani was the first literary man of eminence whose acquaintance he made, and long letters passed between the friends, letters full of admiration on the part of Giordani, full of impatience and despair on the part of Leopardi. That he exaggerated the horrors of his condition cannot for a moment be doubted. Many youths would have been thankful to take his place in a handsome and dignified home; but then few youths could possibly have been tormented by such bitter melancholy and such overweening ambition.

At last a desperate resolve occurred to him. Permission to leave home was denied him; he would act on his own responsibility and take refuge in flight. He made preparations for secret departure, and wrote a long letter to his father explaining the motives of his desperate measure. Happily, the insane project was abandoned, but the letter was preserved by his brother Carlo, and it is deeply to be regretted that it was published some years ago. Far better would it have been to draw a veil across the eccentricities of a great mind and the misunderstandings between natures noble and upright, but painfully divergent in thought and action. However, the letter exists and must be dealt with. There is nothing discreditable in it either to the poet or to his father, but much that is inexpressibly painful.

The letter was written in the month of July, 1819. He begins by saying with perfect sincerity that he always loved his father, that he always would love him, and that he deeply grieved at being the cause of giving him pain. "You know me," he continues, "and you know what my conduct has been up to now. You will see that in all Italy, and I may say in all Europe, no other person of my rank and even younger than I am, and perhaps with intellectual gifts inferior to mine, could be found who would show one-half of the circumspection, abstinence from all the pleasures of youth, obedience and submission to his parents that I have shown. However poor your opinion may be of the few talents that Heaven has bestowed upon me, you cannot altogether refuse to credit the many estimable and famous men who have passed the judgement upon me which you know and which it is not for me to repeat. It was the marvel of everybody who knew me that I should still be buried in this town, and that you alone should be of an opposite opinion, and should inflexibly persist therein. It is certainly not unknown to you, that there is not a youth of barely seventeen years of age who is not taken in hand by his parents to be placed in a position for his future advantage. I say nothing about the liberty accorded to all young people of that age in our position in life—liberty of which not one-third was accorded to me at the age of twenty-one. It was only recently that I began to ask you to provide for my future in the manner indicated by the opinion of all who knew me. I noticed several families of this town, probably less well off than we are, making heavy sacrifices in order to start their sons in life, however faint the indications of promising talent might be.

"Many people were of opinion that my intellect showed much more than a faint indication; but you were of opinion that I was quite unworthy of a father's solicitude or of any sacrifice on his part, nor did you think that my present or future welfare was of sufficient importance for you to make any alteration in your domestic arrangements.

"I saw my parents make light of the posts which they obtained for others from the Sovereign Pontiff, and hoping that they would take the same trouble for me, I asked that at least some means of living might be obtained that would enable me to live in a manner suitable to my position without being a drag upon my family. I was answered with derision, and you did not think that your influence should be used to obtain a decent competence for your son. I was well aware of the projects you were forming for us, and how, to secure the prosperity of what you call our 'house' and 'family,' you exacted from Carlo and from me the sacrifice of our inclinations, of our youth, and of our whole life. Being quite certain that neither Carlo nor I would ever humour you in that, I could not possibly entertain the idea of those projects. You know only too well the most wretched life I have led through the effects of my horrible melancholy, and the torments I have endured from my strange imagination. You cannot have been blind to the fact that there was no other remedy for my suffering health since I fell into this wretched debility, but powerful distractions, and, in short, everything that could not be had in Recanati.