A Manual of Italian Literature

by Francis Henry Cliffe

"In spite of all this, you suffered a man of my character, either to consume the remnant of his strength in suicidal studies, or to bury himself in the most terrible ennui with its attendant melancholy. These evils were aggravated by the surrounding solitude, and by the empty and unoccupied tenour of my life, especially in the last months.

"It did not take me long to find that no arguments could move you, and that the extraordinary firmness of your character, disguised under a mild exterior, was such that I could not entertain even a shadow of hope. All these circumstances and my reflections on human nature persuaded me that I should rely upon nobody but myself, although I was destitute of everything. And now that by law I am my own master, I will no longer delay to take upon myself the load of my destiny. I know that human felicity consists in contentment, and that I could more easily be happy begging for bread like a mendicant, than surrounded in this abode by all the material luxuries it may present. I hate that vile prudence that freezes and binds us and makes us incapable of every great action, reducing us to the level of the animals who apply themselves placidly to the preservation of this unhappy life without any other thought. I know that I shall be held to be insane, as all great men have been held before me. And even as the career of almost every great genius has begun with despair, I am not dismayed at mine beginning so too. I would rather be unhappy than obscure; I would rather suffer than languish in miserable ennui which to me is the fruitful mother of deadly melancholy and black thoughts of wretchedness, more agonising than all discomforts of the body. Parents, as a rule, judge their children more favourably than others, but you, on the contrary, judge your children more harshly, and therefore you never would believe that we were born for anything great; perhaps no greatness appeals to you that cannot be measured with geometrical precision.

"Having, to the best of my ability, given you my reasons for the step I am about to take, it only remains for me to ask your pardon for the distress it may cause you. If my health were less uncertain, I would rather beg from house to house that touch a pin that belonged to you. But feeble as I am, and hopeless of getting anything from you, I have been obliged, in order not to die on the road, to take what is absolutely necessary for my existence. I am deeply grieved, and it almost makes me waver in my resolution when I think of the sorrow I shall cause you, knowing your kindness of heart and all your endeavours to make us contented with our lot. For those endeavours I am grateful from the bottom of my heart, and it is agony to me to think that I shall appear infected with the vice of ingratitude which I abhor more than anything else. Only the difference in our principles which was in no way to be overcome, and which would necessarily end either in my dying here of desperation, or in my taking to flight as I am doing, has been the cause of all my unhappiness. It has pleased Heaven for our punishment that the only young men in this town who had thoughts above the ordinary level of Recanati, should be born to you to try your patience and that the only father who looked upon such sons as a misfortune, should be allotted to us. That which consoles me is the thought that this is the last annoyance I give you, and that it will free you from my unwelcome presence. My dear father, if you will allow me to call you by that name, I kneel down before you, and pray you to pardon one so unhappy by nature and by circumstances. I would that my unhappiness were my exclusive property and that nobody might share it with me, and so I trust it will be in the future. If fortune ever makes me the possessor of anything my first thought shall be to replace what I have now taken from you. The last favour that I ask of you is that if ever you recall to your memory your wretched son who has always venerated and loved you, you will not curse him; and that if you cannot praise him, you will, at least, bestow upon him that compassion which is granted even to malefactors."

Such, abridged in a few passages, is the memorable letter which reveals the troubles of Leopardi's mind. It is a curious medley of wounded vanity, of imaginary wrongs and of genuine grievances. It is passing strange that Leopardi should have been so anxious about his future. He was his father's eldest son, and as such, heir to ample, if somewhat encumbered, estates. I think he mistook his own feelings, and what he thought solicitude for his livelihood, was in reality the agony of unsatisfied ambition. The fatal mistake that his father made was to coop up so ardent and aspiring a young man in the restricted routine of a somewhat cloistral home. Monaldo and Adelaide had a genuine fear of their children becoming contaminated by undesirable associates; and to avert this evil, neither the poet nor his brothers were allowed to go out unaccompanied. The young prisoners naturally resented this surveillance, especially Leopardi who, at a time when his literary renown was spreading all over Italy, was still under the restrictions of the nursery. "Everybody treats me as a child," he writes, "except my parents who treat me as a baby." No wonder that flight had its romance and its attractions; but where would he have gone to if he had run away? Doubtless, the utter inability to answer this question made him abandon the idea. Carlo and Paolina noticed something peculiar in his demeanour; they watched him, and we may safely assume that their affection extorted from him his secret, that he showed them the letter intended for his father and that they persuaded him to abandon the wild and desperate scheme. It would have been well if the letter had been burnt, and the whole unhappy episode consigned to oblivion. It makes the poet appear wild and visionary and the father a more obdurate tyrant than he really was. He utterly failed to enter into the ideas of his illustrious son, and posterity has censured him with a harshness he was far from deserving.

Leopardi abandoned the idea of flight and resigned himself as best he could to the melancholy life he was compelled to lead. His home was dull, but it was not, it could not have been, the Hell upon earth that Montefredini, one of his biographers, would have us believe. There was no domestic discord; not a trace of strife is discernible. The style of living in Monaldo's house was handsome and even luxurious, but neither his father nor his mother seem to have encouraged visitors or to have entertained as might be expected from their rank. Of Leopardi's acquaintance with Pietro Giordani they were undoubtedly apprehensive. Giordani, although a Priest, had the reputation of being a freethinker at heart, and they trembled lest he should infect the poet with his opinions. It is even suspected that many letters between the friends were intercepted. But others not only reached their destination, but have been preserved and published, and they now form a noble memorial of confidence and friendship. Leopardi was able at intervals to devote himself to his favourite pursuit of literature and he published some of his earlier poems; but their patriotic character frightened the apprehensive Monaldo. He was afraid his son would be regarded as a sympathiser with the Carbonari, and Leopardi had to distribute the copies surreptitiously and to speak of them as little as possible.

He was abandoning his labours in the field of Classical Antiquity and turning his attention to original and stirring themes, full of life and actuality. But, unhappily, the more his intellect expanded, the more his health deteriorated. The blackest melancholy never left him, and it became daily intensified by his persistent habits of introspection. He complains in a letter to Giordani of utter weakness of his whole body and especially of the nerves. We hear nothing of doctors being called in to arrest the evil, nor does the patient himself seem to have asked for them. Things were allowed to drift until it was too late. "I am lying," he says in one of his letters to Giordani, "under a mountain of sorrows, and not a ray of hope can be seen." "I speak from my heart and I do not pretend," he exclaims. The great poet is already a great pessimist.

In 1821 the tone of his letters became a trifle more cheerful and he was interested in the engagement of his sister Paolina, and he wrote a poem on her marriage. But the negotiations were broken off and the wedding never took place.

Conscious of the immense reputation he already possessed of vast erudition, his parents formed the hope that he would embrace the ecclesiastical career and rise to high dignities in the Roman Curia. When at last their consent was obtained for his departure from home in the hope that change would benefit his shattered nerves, it was to Rome that he was sent, doubtless with the desire that he should make acquaintances useful to him in the future. He resided with his maternal uncle, the Marquis Carlo Antici. But no sooner had he arrived in Rome than he regretted Recanati, and it became apparent that wherever he went, one of his most striking oddities was an intense horror of his place of residence, an utter loathing which he neither moderated nor concealed. If he called Recanati a dungeon, he called Rome a gigantic sepulchre. His shattered nerves could ill bear the concourse of people around him, and he saw in society, not its vivacity and animation, but its frivolity and emptiness. For the literary men of Rome he entertained immeasurable contempt. He despised them for their devotion to Antiquarian minutiæ. But this reproach came with ill-grace from Leopardi, who had himself devoted years of laborious study, who had even squandered the precious possession of health in laborious elucidation of grammatical and philological problems, hardly more important than the coins and inscriptions of Roman Antiquarians.

He made, however, some agreeable acquaintances, pre-eminent among whom was the historian Niebuhr, at that time Prussian Ambassador to the Vatican. Niebuhr conceived the most intense admiration for his genius and spoke of him in the highest terms to Cardinal Consalvi, Secretary of State to Pius VII. The Cardinal offered him the prospect of valuable preferment, but only on condition that he should embrace the ecclesiastical career. To this, however, Leopardi offered invincible repugnance. Neither his own interests nor the persuasion of friends could induce him to yield. Pius VII died in 1823, and Consalvi retired from the direction of public affairs. So favourable an opportunity never returned. Niebuhr offered Leopardi an appointment in Prussia, but he refused, dreading the long journey and the severe climate of Berlin. Great as his reputation was, no other opening offered itself. It is curious to reflect on the vicissitudes of literary fame. Leopardi is now valued for his lyric poems and for his dialogues and thoughts in prose; but his laborious studies in philology, studies to which he sacrificed health and happiness, are rapidly sinking into oblivion. When he first went to Rome, he had hardly written a line of that which has conferred immortality upon him. All the esteem he enjoyed was lavished upon him for the fruits of his juvenile industry. The grammarian who could solve the most difficult passages in the ancient writers of Greece and Rome, who was as well versed in the Talmud as in the Bible, who knew the obscurest Italian writers of the Fourteenth Century as intimately as his contempories knew Petrarch, was valued and extolled; the melodious poet and the profound philosopher was not ignored or despised, because he was not even suspected to exist.

In 1823, after five months sojourn in Rome, he returned to Recanati. He had seen the world he so longed to explore, and disenchantment was the result. His health was not improved, on the contrary, it was rather injured, by the inevitable exertions of travel, sight-seeing and society. He remained at Recanati for two years, and during part of this period he was occupied in publishing a volume of poems. They were well received, but they were published secretly, without the knowledge of his parents. The passion for overwork did not desert him even after the warning already given to him by his shattered health. "I work day and night as much as my strength will allow. When I break down, I walk up and down my room daily for months." He would have done better to walk up and down in the open air.