Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/485

 LEOPARDI 465 the model ; but the wit and irony which were playthings to Lucian are terribly earnest with Leopardi. Leopardi s invention is fully equal to Lucian s, and his only drawback in comparison with his exemplar is that, while the latter s campaign against pretence and imposture commands hearty sympathy, Leopardi s philosophical creed is a repulsive hedonism in the disguise of austere stoicism. His Ice lander rebuking Nature for his cruelty and inhospitality, his Soul protesting against the original wrong of creation, his Familiar Spirit explaining the impossibility of making his master happy for a single instant all, in fact, of the chief interlocutors in these dialogues profess the same unmitigated pessimism, claim emancipation from every illusion that renders life tolerable to the vulgar, and assert or imply a vast moral and intellectual superiority over unenlightened mankind. When, however, we come to inquire what it is the privation of which renders them miserable, we find it is nothing but pleasurable sensation, fame, fortune, or some other external thing which a lofty code of ethics would deny to be either iudefeasibly due to man or essential to his felicity. A page of Sartor Itesartiis scatters Leopardi s sophistry to the winds, and leaves nothing of his dialogues but the consummate literary skill that would render the least fragment precious. As works of art they are a possession for ever, as contributions to moral philosophy they are worthless, and apart from their literary qualities can only escape condemnation if regarded as lyrical expressions of emotion, the wail extorted from a diseased mind by a diseased body. &quot; Filippo Otto- nisri &quot; is a portrait of an imaginary philosopher, imitated from th.3 biography of a real sage in Lucian s Demonax. Lucian has shown us the philosopher he wished to copy, Leopardi has truly depicted the philosopher he was. No thing can be more striking or more tragical than the picture of the man superior to his fellows in every quality of head and heart, and yet condemned to sterility and impotence because he has, as he imagines, gone a step too far on the road to truth, and illusions exist for him no more. The little tract is full of remarks on life and character of sur prising depth and justice, manifesting what powers of observation as well as reflexion were possessed by the sickly youth who had seen so little of the world. Want of means soon drove Leopardi back to Recanati, where, deaf, half-blind, sleepless, tortured by incessant pain, at war with himself and every one around him except his sister, he spent the two most unhappy years of his unhappy life. In May 1831 he escaped to Florence, where he formed the acquaintance of a young Swiss philologist, M. de Sinner. To him he confided his unpublished philo logical writings, with a view to their appearance in Germany. Sinner showed himself culpably remiss in the execution of his trust, and it is no adequate extenuation of his negligence that these treatises were of less value than Leopardi may have thought. Though continually reclaimed by the latter s friends after his death, they were never published by Sinner, but were purchased after his decease by the Italian Government, and, together with Leopardi s correspondence with the Swiss philologist, have been partially edited by M. Aulard. In 1831 appeared a new edition of Leopardi s poems, comprising several new pieces of the highest merit. These are in general less austerely classical than his earlier compositions, and evince a greater tendency to description, and a keener interest in the works and ways of ordinary mankind. &quot;The Resurrection,&quot; composed on occasion of his unexpected recovery, is a model of concentrated energy of diction, and &quot; The Song of the Wandering Shepherd in Asia&quot; is one of the highest nights of modern lyric poetry. The range of the author s ideas is still restricted, but his style and melody are unsur passable. Shortly after the publication of these pieces (October 1831) Leopardi was driven from Florence to Rome by an unhappy attachment, the history and object of which have remained unknown. His feelings are powerfully expressed in two poems, &quot;To Himself&quot; and &quot; Aspasia,&quot; which seem, however, to breathe wounded pride at least as much as wounded love. In 1832 Leopardi returned to Florence, and there formed acquaintance with a young Neapolitan, Antonio Ranieri, himself an author of merit, and destined to enact towards him the part performed by Severn towards Keats, an enviable title to renown if Ranieri had not in his old age tarnished it by assuming the relation of Trelawuy to the deceased Byron. Leopardi accompanied Ranieri and his sister to Naples, and under their care enjoyed four years of comparative tranquillity. He made the acquaintance of the German poet Platen, his sole modern rival in the classical perfection of form, and composed &quot;La Ginestra,&quot; the most consum mate of all his lyrical masterpieces, strongly resembling Shelley s &quot; Mont Blanc,&quot; but more perfect in expression. He also wrote at Naples &quot; The Sequel to the Battle of the Frogs and Mice,&quot; his most sustained effort, a satire in ottava rima on the abortive Neapolitan revolution of 1820, clever and humorous, but obscure from the local character of the allusions. The more painful and distasteful details of his Neapolitan residence may be found by those who care to seek for them in the deplorable publication of Ranieri s peevish old age (Sette Anni di Sodalizio). The decay of his constitution continued ; he became dropsical ; and a sudden crisis of his malady, unanticipated by himself alone, put an end to his life-long sufferings on June 15, 1837. Leopardi s solt but sufficient apology for the effeminacy of endless complaints, and an extremely low view of the conditions of human happiness, is to have been a poor invalid tortured by incessant pain, who in demanding pleasurable sensations for mankind was but craving what was indeed an absolute necessity for himself. With all his dramatic skill in dialogue, the cast of his mind was essen tially subjective ; he was wholly incapable of placing himself at any other point of view than his own. His philosophical opinions accordingly possess merely a personal interest, and are valueless except as illustrations of human nature in abnormal circumstances. The patriotic spirit of his earliest poems, the brief gleam of happi ness he enjoyed in female society at Bologna, reveal how different might have been his history and the spirit of his writings had his physical organization qualified him for either love or action. Bereft of every possibility of healthy energy, it is no wonder that he should have sunk into a despairing quietism, a solace probably to himself, and only hurtful to others if represented as a powerful in tellect s deliberate and unbiassed solution of the problem of the universe. Leopardi s perfect literary expression owes nothing to the nature of the ideas it is employed in embellishing, and is, indeed, most conspicuous when he stands upon common ground with other poets. Thus the magnificent description of the setting of the moon in &quot;II Tramonto della Luna&quot; is finer than the reflexions it ushers in, and his crowning work, &quot;La Ginestra,&quot; owes most of its impressive- ness to the assemblage of noble and picturesque objects which the poet summons as witnesses to the frailty of man. In the presence of Vesuvius and Pompeii such meditations seem natural, and, after all, the association of the destinies of mankind with the revolutions of nature produces rather a sentiment of grave and chastened exal tation than the self-abasement enforced by the poet. This natural and moral sublimity raises it above Leopardi s other lyrics, which in point of poetical feeling and literary workmanship are for the most part nearly on a par. They are truly classic not, as with Platen, by a laborious imitation of antique metres, but, as with Shelley and Landor and the English neo-classic poets, by a perfect appropriation of the classical spirit. As with the ancients, their range of senti ment is narrow but their form perfect ; there is probably no other modern writer in whom it would be so impossible to alter a line without detriment. The same perfection characterizes Leopardi s prose writings, and his letters would be hardly less admirable but for the hollow professions and inflated compliments exacted by the conventional proprieties of Italian correspondence. The insincerity of his letters to his father is especially painful ; and his professed yearning for death is strangely associated with a frantic dread ol cholera. Censure, however, is silent in the contemplation of his moral and physical sufferings; and his intimates unanimously attest the attractiveness of his personal character save for some infirmities that should never have been dragged to light. As a precocious XIV. - 59