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.