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.