A history of Italian literature

by Richard Garnett

That only one of the distinguished writers reviewed in the last chapter should have given free expression to the Italian craving for liberty and national unity, may be accounted for in the simplest possible manner. Foscolo was the only one in exile; the unexpatriated, writing under a censorship, said not what they would, but what they could. Apart, nevertheless, from this consideration, it is true that the national movement was slow in acquiring energy and consistency, inasmuch as it was not in the first instance an indigenous growth. The conception of an Italian nation under a single political head had not been too clearly formulated, even by Petrarch and Machiavelli, and since the latter’s time had been in great measure the exclusive possession of the finest minds. As an upbursting bubble may hint at what is passing in the depths of the sea, so Gernando’s scoff in the Gerusalemme Liberata at Rinaldo as a native of la serva Italia reveals the hidden workings of Tasso’s spirit, and vindicates him from the charge of ludicrously servile adulation. Nothing more ridiculous can be conceived than the poet’s notion that his patron Alphonso might well lead either the armies or the fleets of Europe in a new crusade if he was to be no more than a Duke of Ferrara; not so if the headship of a united and regenerated Italy was to fall to him.

The next generation reposed hopes premature, indeed—yet, as the far-off event was to show, not irrational—in the house of Savoy; but as time wore on and material circumstances improved, these patriotic aspirations waned, and the call for liberty which came from France in the revolutionary era had to create the sentiment to which it appealed. Any prospect of such a response seemed destroyed by the behaviour of the French propaganda itself—its infamous betrayal of the Venetian Republic, its exactions from private fortunes, pillages from public treasuries, and wholesale robbery of Italian works of art. Yet by an extraordinary turn of events the chief perpetrator of these iniquities, himself an Italian, became most undesignedly on his own part the father of Italian unity and freedom. By crowning himself King of Italy, Napoleon Bonaparte gave her a national existence. After a few years of his rule the inhabitants of the peninsula could not but perceive that the visions of their seers and the aspirations of their statesmen had in great measure come to pass.

Notwithstanding the existence of some nominally independent principalities, for the first time since Theodoric the Italians of the North at all events actually were Italians—not Lombards, or Tuscans, or Piedmontese. They were indeed ruled by a despot; but to this, with the practical instinct of their race, the Italians submitted in the prevision that Napoleon’s empire must be dissolved by his death, and the hope that the national unity would survive it and him. Such might well have been the case had his authority been peacefully transmitted to a successor; but the circumstances of his downfall inevitably brought back the Austrians and the exiled princes, to reign no longer over a contented or an indifferent people, but over one which had taken the idea of national unity to its heart. The effect on literature is illustrated by a passage in one of Byron’s letters from Italy: “They talk Dante, write Dante, and think and dream Dante to an extent that would be ridiculous but that he deserves it.” It was not so much the recognition of Dante’s literary desert which occasioned this reaction from eighteenth-century neglect, as the incarnation of the sufferings and the genius of his country in his person.

A generation thus nurtured on Dante, and on Dante studied from such a point of view, could not but grow up serious and patriotic. Nor were other literary influences wanting. The fourth canto of Childe Harold, and even more Madame de Staël’s Corinne, contrasted in the most forcible manner the past artistic and intellectual glories with the actual political degradation, and showed Italy how far she had fallen, but also how high she might hope to reascend. Such influences imbued the youthful generation with a more impassioned and enthusiastic character than its fathers. The new aspirations embodied themselves most distinctly in three men—Mazzini, type of physical resistance to oppression; Giusti, of relentless opposition in the intellectual sphere; Leopardi, of the passive protest of martyrdom. In him, as by an emblem, the beauty and the anguish of the suffering country are shown forth, and on this account no less than from the superiority of his literary genius, though no active insurgent against the established order of things, he claims the first place in his hapless but glorious generation.

The tragical yet uneventful life of GIACOMO LEOPARDI was little else than ardent cultivation of the spirit and constant struggle with the infirmities of the body. Born in 1798 at Recanati, a small dull town near Rimini, the son of a learned and high-minded, but unfortunately bigoted and retrograde Italian nobleman, of anti-national politics and antiquarian tastes, whose embarrassed circumstances and incapacity for business had induced him to assign his property to a practical but parsimonious wife, Leopardi solaced the forlornness of existence in a spiritual desert by intense study, favoured by his father’s extensive library, in which he immured himself to a degree propitious to neither bodily nor mental health. So extraordinary were his powers that at nineteen, besides many excellent bonâ fide translations, he produced imaginary versions of lost Greek authors which deceived accomplished classical scholars. But the maladies from which he was to suffer all his life had already made progress; he could follow no profession, and was entirely dependent upon well-intentioned but uncongenial parents, whose dread of the liberal and free-thinking opinions he had imbibed, chiefly from correspondence with Pietro Giordani, induced them to imprison him at home.

Though solaced by the affection of his brother Carlo and his sister Paolina, Leopardi’s position was most uncomfortable, and the chief external events of his history for many years are his temporary escapes and his enforced returns. He sought refuge successively at Rome, Bologna, and Florence, meeting with friends everywhere, especially at Rome, where he won the esteem and excited the wonder of Niebuhr and Bunsen. His craving for deeper sympathy twice involved him in love affairs, both fruitful in humiliation and disappointment. Nothing else, indeed, could be expected for the suit of the pallid, deformed youth, whose blood barely circulated, whose indigestion almost deprived him of nourishment, whose feeble limbs bent beneath the weight of a body even so attenuated, and whose heart and lungs scarcely discharged their office. All active life seemed concentrated in his brain, which throve and energised at the expense of every other organ. He executed some work for the booksellers, especially his condensed but invaluable comment on Petrarch, and from time to time gave expression to some slowly-maturing thought, in literary form meet for immortality, but unvalued and unrecompensed by his contemporaries.

Neither Leopardi’s patriotic sentiments nor his speculative opinions could be disclosed under the pressure of Austrian and Bourbon despotism; the King of Sardinia had not yet declared himself on the side of liberty, and there was literally no spot in Italy where an Italian could write what he thought. Emigration to France or England would have been forbidden by his parents, upon whom he was entirely dependent. At length, in September 1833, he was able to establish himself at Naples, where for a time his health and spirits seemed marvellously improved; but from the summer of 1836 these retrograded, and he succumbed to a sudden aggravation of the dropsy which had long threatened him, on June 14, 1837. His unpublished philological writings were bequeathed to a Swiss friend, Professor de Sinner, who neglected his trust. The MSS., however, were bought from his heirs by the Italian Government, and have been partially published. Leopardi’s other works were faithfully edited by Antonio Ranieri, a friend whose devoted kindness to him during his life renders it utterly incomprehensible how he should have sought to blacken his memory after his death by the publication of a number of painful and humiliating circumstances, which, if they had been facts, should have been consigned to oblivion, but which Dr. Franco Ridella has shown to be mere invention.

While he still posed as Leopardi’s Pythias, Ranieri summed up his friend’s titles to renown as, “first a great philologer, next a great poet, at the last a great philosopher.” Great poet he unquestionably was; his refined classical scholarship might have earned him the distinction of a great philologer in a sense disused since comparative philology has taken rank among the exact sciences; if he was a great philosopher, so Voltaire and Lucian must be esteemed. The keen sensibility to pain which dominated his mental constitution was as little associated with any constructive faculty or capacity for systematic thought as was their hatred of pretence and perception of the ludicrous; but while their endowments were brilliantly serviceable to mankind, Leopardi’s moral pathology, if it had any potency at all, could operate only for ill. Mischievous attempts have indeed been made to accredit the pessimism of our times by exalting the cries wrung by anguish from a wretched invalid into the last and ripest fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever may be the case in Oriental countries, there has seldom been a pessimist in the West without some moral or physical malady which ought to have withheld him from assuming the part of an instructor of mankind; but Leopardi’s pessimism is not only morbid, but unmanly. The stress which he lays upon merely physical evils, such as heat and cold, hunger and thirst, would have moved the contempt of an ancient sage of any sect; and the contemporary of so many martyrs for their country admits no spring of human action but naked egotism. The grandeur and beauty of material nature, the sublime creations of man’s spirit, the teeming harvest of human virtues and affections, the tranquillising recognition of eternal order and controlling law, the marvellous course of the world’s history, when not ignored, are treated as the mere mockery and aggravation of the entirely imaginary background of blackness—a shining leprosy upon a hideous countenance. And yet the real nature of the man was quite different; his pessimism and egotism are simply the product of bodily suffering, of the wounded self-esteem and disappointed affections which followed in its train, and of the absence of any outlet for his surpassing intellectual powers.

It was a cruel injury to Italy that her greatest modern genius should have done so little for her regeneration, and that his writings, instead of inspiring a healthy public spirit, should rather tend to foster the selfish indifference and the despair of good which continue to be her principal bane. In two points of view, nevertheless, Leopardi rendered his country essential service. His sufferings, and the moral infirmities which they entailed, enabled him to represent in his own person, as no soundly-constituted man could have done, the unhappy Italy of his day. He seemed the living symbol of a country naturally favoured beyond all others, but racked and dismembered by foreign and domestic tyrants, the counterparts in the body politic of the maladies which crippled Leopardi’s energies, and distorted his views of man and nature. At the same time the transcendent excellence of his scanty literary performances raised Italian literature to a height which, Alfieri and Monti notwithstanding, it had not attained since Tasso, and in the midst of an epoch of servitude and subjugation gave Italians at least one thing of which they might justly be proud.