Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  {Illustration: GIACOMO LEOPARDI}

  At Recanati Leopardi suffered not merely solitude, but the contact of people whom he despised, and whose vulgarity was all the greater oppression when it showed itself in a sort of stupid compassionate tenderness for him. He had already suffered one of those disappointments which are the rule rather than the exception, and his first love had ended as first love always does when it ends fortunately — in disappointment. He scarcely knew the object of his passion, a young girl of humble lot, whom he used to hear singing at her loom in the house opposite his father’s palace. Count Monaldo promptly interfered, and not long afterward the young girl died. But the sensitive boy, and his biographers after him, made the most of this sorrow; and doubtless it helped to render life under his father’s roof yet heavier and harder to bear. Such as it was, it seems to have been the only love that Leopardi ever really felt, and the young girl’s memory passed into the melancholy of his life and poetry.

  But he did not summon courage to abandon Recanati before his twenty-fourth year, and then he did not go with his father’s entire good-will. The count wished him to become a priest, but Leopardi shrank from the idea with horror, and there remained between him and his father not only the difference of their religious and political opinions, but an unkindness which must be remembered against the judgment, if not the heart, of the latter. He gave his son so meager an allowance that it scarcely kept him above want, and obliged him to labors and subjected him to cares which his frail health was not able bear.

  From Recanati Leopardi first went to Rome; but he carried Recanati everywhere with him, and he was as solitary and as wretched in the capital of the world as in the little village of the Apennines. He despised the Romans, as they deserved, upon very short acquaintance, and he declared that his dullest fellow-villager had a greater share of good sense than the best of them. Their frivolity was incredible; the men moved him to rage and pity; the women, high and low, to loathing. In one of his letters to his brother Carlo, he says of Rome, as he found it: “I have spoken to you only about the women, because I am at a loss what to say to you about literature. Horrors upon horrors! The most sacred names profaned, the most absurd follies praised to the skies, the greatest spirits of the century trampled under foot as inferior to the smallest literary man in Rome. Philosophy despised; genius, imagination, feeling, names — I do not say things, but even names — unknown and alien to these professional poets and poetesses! Antiquarianism placed at the summit of human learning, and considered invariably and universally as the only true study of man!” This was Rome in 1822. “I do not exaggerate,” he writes, “because it is impossible, and I do not even say enough.” One of the things that moved him to the greatest disgust in the childish and insipid society of a city where he had fondly hoped to find a response to his high thoughts was the sensation caused throughout Rome by the dress and theatrical effectiveness with which a certain prelate said mass. All Rome talked of it, cardinals and noble ladies complimented the performer as if he were a ballet-dancer, and the flattered prelate used to rehearse his part, and expatiate upon his methods of study for it, to private audiences of admirers. In fact, society had then touched almost the lowest depth of degradation where society had always been corrupt and dissolute, and the reader of Massimo d’Azeglio’s memoirs may learn particulars (given with shame and regret, indeed, and yet with perfect Italian frankness) which it is not necessary to repeat here.

  There were, however, many foreigners living at Rome in whose company Leopardi took great pleasure. They were chiefly Germans, and first among them was Niebuhr, who says of his first meeting with the poet: “Conceive of my astonishment when I saw standing before me in the poor little chamber a mere youth, pale and shy, frail in person, and obviously in ill health, who was by far the first, in fact the only, Greek philologist in Italy, the author of critical comments and observations which would have won honor for the first philologist in Germany, and yet only twenty-two years old! He had become thus profoundly learned without school, without instructor, without help, without encouragement, in his father’s house. I understand, too, that he is one of the first of the rising poets of Italy. What a nobly gifted people!”

  Niebuhr offered to procure him a professorship of Greek philosophy in Berlin, but Leopardi would not consent to leave his own country; and then Niebuhr unsuccessfully used his influence to get him some employment from the papal government, — compliments and good wishes it gave him, but no employment and no pay.

  From Rome Leopardi went to Milan, where he earned something — very little — as editor of a comment upon Petrarch. A little later he went to Bologna, where a generous and sympathetic nobleman made him tutor in his family; but Leopardi returned not long after to Recanati, where he probably found no greater content than he left there. Presently we find him at Pisa, and then at Florence, eking out the allowance from his father by such literary work as he could find to do. In the latter place it is somewhat dimly established that he again fell in love, though he despised the Florentine women almost as much as the Romans, for their extreme ignorance, folly, and pride. This love also was unhappy. There is no reason to believe that Leopardi, who inspired tender and ardent friendships in men, ever moved any woman to love. The Florentine ladies are darkly accused by one of his biographers of having laughed at the poor young pessimist, and it is very possible; but that need not make us think the worse of him, or of them either, for that matter. He is supposed to have figured the lady of his latest love under the name of Aspasia, in one of his poems, as he did his first love under that of Sylvia, in the poem so called. Doubtless the experience further embittered a life already sufficiently miserable. He left Florence, but after a brief sojourn at Rome he returned thither, where his friend Antonio Ranieri watched with a heavy heart the gradual decay of his forces, and persuaded him finally to seek the milder air of Naples. Ranieri’s father was, like Leopardi’s, of reactionary opinions, and the Neapolitan, dreading the effect of their discord, did not take his friend to his own house, but hired a villa at Capodimonte, where he lived four years in fraternal intimacy with Leopardi, and where the poet died in 1837.

  Ranieri has in some sort made himself the champion of Leopardi’s fame. He has edited his poems, and has written a touching and beautiful sketch of his life. Their friendship, which was of the greatest tenderness, began when Leopardi sorely needed it; and Ranieri devoted himself to the hapless poet like a lover, as if to console him for the many years in which he had known neither reverence nor love. He indulged all the eccentricities of his guest, who for a sick man had certain strange habits, often not rising till evening, dining at midnight, and going to bed at dawn. Ranieri’s sister Paolina kept house for the friends, and shared all her brother’s compassion for Leopardi, whose family appears to have willingly left him to the care of these friends. How far the old unkindness between him and his father continued, it is hard to say. His last letter was written to his mother in May, 1837, some two weeks before his death; he thanks her for a present of ten dollars, — one may imagine from the gift and the gratitude that he was still held in a strict and parsimonious tutelage, — and begs her prayers and his father’s, for after he has seen them again, he shall not have long to live.

  He did not see them again, but he continued to smile at the anxieties of his friends, who had too great reason to think that the end was much nearer than Leopardi himself supposed. On the night of the 14th of June, while they were waiting for the carriage which was to take them into the country, where they intended to pass the time together and sup at daybreak, Leopardi felt so great a difficulty of breathing — he called it asthma, but it was dropsy of the heart — that he begged them to send for a doctor. The doctor on seeing the sick man took Ranieri apart, and bade him fetch a priest without delay, and while they waited the coming of the friar, Leopardi spoke now and then with them, but sank rapidly. Finally, says Ranieri, “Leopardi opened his eyes, now larger even than their wont, and looked at me more fixedly than befor
e. ‘I can’t see you,’ he said, with a kind of sigh. And he ceased to breathe, and his pulse and heart beat no more; and at the same moment the Friar Felice of the barefoot order of St. Augustine entered the chamber, while I, quite beside myself, called with a loud voice on him who had been my friend, my brother, my father, and who answered me nothing, and yet seemed to gaze upon me.... His death was inconceivable to me; the others were dismayed and mute; there arose between the good friar and myself the most cruel and painful dispute, ... I madly contending that my friend was still alive, and beseeching him with tears to accompany with the offices of religion the passing of that great soul. But he, touching again and again the pulse and the heart, continually answered that the spirit had taken flight. At last, a spontaneous and solemn silence fell upon all in the room; the friar knelt beside the dead, and we all followed his example. Then after long and profound meditation he prayed, and we prayed with him.”

  In another place Ranieri says: “The malady of Leopardi was indefinable, for having its spring in the most secret sources of life, it was like life itself, inexplicable. The bones softened and dissolved away, refusing their frail support to the flesh that covered them. The flesh itself grew thinner and more lifeless every day, for the organs of nutrition denied their office of assimilation. The lungs, cramped into a space too narrow, and not sound themselves, expanded with difficulty. With difficulty the heart freed itself from the lymph with which a slow absorption burdened it. The blood, which ill renewed itself in the hard and painful respiration, returned cold, pale, and sluggish to the enfeebled veins. And in fine, the whole mysterious circle of life, moving with such great effort, seemed from moment to moment about to pause forever. Perhaps the great cerebral sponge, beginning and end of that mysterious circle, had prepotently sucked up all the vital forces, and itself consumed in a brief time all that was meant to suffice the whole system for a long period. However it may be, the life of Leopardi was not a course, as in most men, but truly a precipitation toward death.”

  Some years before he died, Leopardi had a presentiment of his death, and his end was perhaps hastened by the nervous shock of the terror produced by the cholera, which was then raging in Naples. At that time the body of a Neapolitan minister of state who had died of cholera was cast into the common burial-pit at Naples — such was the fear of contagion, and so rapidly were the dead hurried to the grave. A heavy bribe secured the remains of Leopardi from this fate, and his dust now reposes in a little church on the road to Pozzuoli.

  II

  “In the years of boyhood,” says the Neapolitan critic, Francesco de Sanctis, “Leopardi saw his youth vanish forever; he lived obscure, and achieved posthumous envy and renown; he was rich and noble, and he suffered from want and despite; no woman’s love ever smiled upon him, the solitary lover of his own mind, to which he gave the names of Sylvia, Aspasia, and Nerina. Therefore, with a precocious and bitter penetration, he held what we call happiness for illusions and deceits of fancy; the objects of our desire he called idols, our labors idleness, and everything vanity. Thus he saw nothing here below equal to his own intellect, or that was worthy the throb of his heart; and inertia, rust, as it were, even more than pain consumed his life, alone in what he called this formidable desert of the world. In such solitude life becomes a dialogue of man with his own soul, and the internal colloquies render more bitter and intense the affections which have returned to the heart for want of nourishment in the world. Mournful colloquies and yet pleasing, where man is the suicidal vulture perpetually preying upon himself, and caressing the wound that drags him to the grave.... The first cause of his sorrow is Recanati: the intellect, capable of the universe, feels itself oppressed in an obscure village, cruel to the body and deadly to the spirit.... He leaves Recanati; he arrives in Rome; we believe him content at last, and he too believes it. Brief illusion! Rome, Bologna, Milan, Florence, Naples, are all different places, where he forever meets the same man, himself. Read the first letter that he writes from Rome: ‘In the great things I see I do not feel the least pleasure, for I know that they are marvelous, but I do not feel it, and I assure you that their multitude and grandeur wearied me after the first day.’... To Leopardi it is rarely given to interest himself in any spectacle of nature, and he never does it without a sudden and agonized return to himself.... Malign and heartless men have pretended that Leopardi was a misanthrope, a fierce hater and enemy of the human race!... Love, inexhaustible and almost ideal, was the supreme craving of that angelic heart, and never left it during life. ‘Love me, for God’s sake,’ he beseeches his brother Carlo; ‘I have need of love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life.’ And in truth it may be said that pain and love form the twofold poetry of his life.”

  Leopardi lived in Italy during the long contest between the Classic and Romantic schools, and it may be said that in him many of the leading ideas of both parties were reconciled. His literary form was as severe and sculpturesque as that of Alfieri himself, whilst the most subjective and introspective of the Romantic poets did not so much color the world with his own mental and spiritual hue as Leopardi. It is not plain whether he ever declared himself for one theory or the other. He was a contributor to the literary journal which the partisans of the Romantic School founded at Florence; but he was a man so weighed upon by his own sense of the futility and vanity of all things that he could have had little spirit for mere literary contentions. His admirers try hard to make out that he was positively and actively patriotic; and it is certain that in his earlier youth he disagreed with his father’s conservative opinions, and despised the existing state of things; but later in life he satirized the aspirations and purposes of progress, though without sympathizing with those of reaction.

  The poem which his chief claim to classification with the poets militant of his time rests upon is that addressed “To Italy”. Those who have read even only a little of Leopardi have read it; and I must ask their patience with a version which drops the irregular rhyme of the piece for the sake of keeping its peculiar rhythm and measure.

  My native land, I see the walls and arches,

  The columns and the statues, and the lonely

  Towers of our ancestors,

  But not their glory, not

  The laurel and the steel that of old time

  Our great forefathers bore. Disarm�d now,

  Naked thou showest thy forehead and thy breast!

  O me, how many wounds,

  What bruises and what blood! How do I see thee,

  Thou loveliest Lady! Unto Heaven I cry,

  And to the world: “Say, say,

  Who brought her unto this?” To this and worse,

  For both her arms are loaded down with chains,

  So that, unveiled and with disheveled hair,

  She crouches all forgotten and forlorn,

  Hiding her beautiful face

  Between her knees, and weeps.

  Weep, weep, for well thou may’st, my Italy!

  Born, as thou wert, to conquest,

  Alike in evil and in prosperous sort!

  If thy sweet eyes were each a living stream,

  Thou could’st not weep enough

  For all thy sorrow and for all thy shame.

  For thou wast queen, and now thou art a slave.

  Who speaks of thee or writes,

  That thinking on thy glory in the past

  But says, “She was great once, but is no more.”

  Wherefore, oh, wherefore? Where is the ancient strength,

  The valor and the arms, and constancy?

  Who rent the sword from thee?

  Who hath betrayed thee? What art, or what toil,

  Or what o’erwhelming force,

  Hath stripped thy robe and golden wreath from thee?

  How did’st thou fall, and when,

  From such a height unto a depth so low?