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Modern Italian Poets

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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 before. '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. Disarmèd 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?
Doth no one fight for thee, no one defend thee,
None of thy own? Arms, arms! For I alone
Will fight and fall for thee.
Grant me, O Heaven, my blood
Shall be as fire unto Italian hearts!
Where are thy sons? I hear the sound of arms,
Of wheels, of voices, and of drums;
In foreign fields afar
Thy children fight and fall.
Wait, Italy, wait! I see, or seem to see,
A tumult as of infantry and horse,
And smoke and dust, and the swift flash of swords
Like lightning among clouds.
Wilt thou not hope? Wilt thou not lift and turn
Thy trembling eyes upon the doubtful close?
For what, in yonder fields,
Combats Italian youth? O gods, ye gods,
For other lands Italian swords are drawn!
Oh, misery for him who dies in war,
Not for his native shores and his beloved,
His wife and children dear,
But by the foes of others
For others' cause, and cannot dying say,
"Dear land of mine,
The life thou gavest me I give thee back."

This suffers, of course, in translation, but I confess that in
the original it wears something of the same perfunctory air. His
patriotism was the fever-flame of the sick man's blood; his real
country was the land beyond the grave, and there is a far truer note
in this address to Death.

And thou, that ever from my life's beginning
I have invoked and honored, Beautiful Death! who only
Of all our earthly sorrows knowest pity:
If ever celebrated
Thou wast by me; if ever I attempted
To recompense the insult
That vulgar terror offers
Thy lofty state, delay no more, but listen
To prayers so rarely uttered:
Shut to the light forever,
Sovereign of time, these eyes of weary anguish!

I suppose that Italian criticism of the present day would not give
Leopardi nearly so high a place among the poets as his friend Ranieri
claims for him and his contemporaries accorded. He seems to have been
the poet of a national mood; he was the final expression of that long,
hopeless apathy in which Italy lay bound for thirty years after the
fall of Napoleon and his governments, and the reëstablishment of all
the little despots, native and foreign, throughout the peninsula. In
this time there was unrest enough, and revolt enough of a desultory
and unorganized sort, but every struggle, apparently every aspiration,
for a free political and religious life ended in a more solid
confirmation of the leaden misrule which weighed down the hearts of
the people. To such an apathy the pensive monotone of this sick poet's
song might well seem the only truth; and one who beheld the universe
with the invalid's loath eyes, and reasoned from his own irremediable
ills to a malign mystery presiding over all human affairs, and
ordering a sad destiny from which there could be no defense but death,
might have the authority of a prophet among those who could find no
promise of better things in their earthly lot.

Leopardi's malady was such that when he did not positively suffer
he had still the memory of pain, and he was oppressed with a dreary
ennui, from which he could not escape. Death, oblivion, annihilation,
are the thoughts upon which he broods, and which fill his verse. The
passing color of other men's minds is the prevailing cast of his, and
he, probably with far more sincerity than any other poet, nursed his
despair in such utterances as this:

TO HIMSELF.

Now thou shalt rest forever,
O weary heart! The last deceit is ended,
For I believed myself immortal. Cherished
Hopes, and beloved delusions,
And longings to be deluded,--all are perished!
Rest thee forever! Oh, greatly,
Heart, hast thou palpitated. There is nothing
Worthy to move thee more, nor is earth worthy
Thy sighs. For life is only
Bitterness and vexation; earth is only
A heap of dust. So rest thee!
Despair for the last time. To our race Fortune
Never gave any gift but death. Disdain, then,
Thyself and Nature and the Power
Occultly reigning to the common ruin:
Scorn, heart, the infinite emptiness of all things!

Nature was so cruel a stepmother to this man that he could see nothing
but harm even in her apparent beneficence, and his verse repeats again
and again his dark mistrust of the very loveliness which so keenly
delights his sense. One of his early poems, called "The Quiet after
the Storm", strikes the key in which nearly all his songs are pitched.
The observation of nature is very sweet and honest, and I cannot see
that the philosophy in its perversion of the relations of physical and
spiritual facts is less mature than that of his later work: it is a
philosophy of which the first conception cannot well differ from the
final expression.

... See yon blue sky that breaks
The clouds above the mountain in the west!
The fields disclose themselves,
And in the valley bright the river runs.
All hearts are glad; on every side
Arise the happy sounds
Of toil begun anew.
The workman, singing, to the threshold comes,
With work in hand, to judge the sky,
Still humid, and the damsel next,
On his report, comes forth to brim her pail
With the fresh-fallen rain.
The noisy fruiterers
From lane to lane resume
Their customary cry.
The sun looks out again, and smiles upon
The houses and the hills. Windows and doors
Are opened wide; and on the far-off road
You hear the tinkling bells and rattling wheels
Of travelers that set out upon their journey.

Every heart is glad;
So grateful and so sweet
When is our life as now?

* * * * *

O Pleasure, child of Pain,
Vain joy which is the fruit
Of bygone suffering overshadowèd
And wrung with cruel fears
Of death, whom life abhors;
Wherein, in long suspense,
Silent and cold and pale,
Man sat, and shook and shuddered to behold
Lightnings and clouds and winds,
Furious in his offense!
Beneficent Nature, these,
These are thy bounteous gifts:
These, these are the delights
Thou offerest unto mortals! To escape
From pain is bliss to us;
Anguish thou scatterest broadcast, and our woes
Spring up spontaneous, and that little joy
Born sometimes, for a miracle and show,
Of terror is our mightiest gain. O man,
Dear to the gods, count thyself fortunate
If now and then relief
Thou hast from pain, and blest
When death shall come to heal thee of all pain!

"The bodily deformities which humiliated Leopardi, and the cruel
infirmities that agonized him his whole life long, wrought in his
heart an invincible disgust, which made him invoke death as the sole
relief. His songs, while they express discontent, the discord of the
world, the conviction of the nullity of human things, are exquisite in
style; they breathe a perpetual melancholy, which is often sublime,
and they relax and pain your soul like the music of a single chord,
while their strange sweetness wins you to them again and again." This
is the language of an Italian critic who wrote after Leopardi's death,
when already it had begun to be doubted whether he was the greatest
Italian poet since Dante. A still later critic finds Leopardi's style,
"without relief, without lyric flight, without the great art of
contrasts, without poetic leaven," hard to read. "Despoil those verses
of their masterly polish," he says, "reduce those thoughts to prose,
and you will see how little they are akin to poetry."

I have a feeling that my versions apply some such test to Leopardi's
work, and that the reader sees it in them at much of the disadvantage
which this critic desires for it. Yet, after doing my worst, I am
not wholly able to agree with him. It seems to me that there is the
indestructible charm in it which, wherever we find it, we must call
poetry. It is true that "its strange sweetness wins you again and
again," and that this "lonely pipe of death" thrills and solemnly
delights as no other stop has done. Let us hear it again, as the poet
sounds it, figuring himself a Syrian shepherd, guarding his flock by
night, and weaving his song under the Eastern moon:

O flock that liest at rest, O blessèd thou
That knowest not thy fate, however hard,
How utterly I envy thee!
Not merely that thou goest almost free
Of all this weary pain,--
That every misery and every toil
And every fear thou straightway dost forget,--
But most because thou knowest not ennui
When on the grass thou liest in the shade.
I see thee tranquil and content,
And great part of thy years
Untroubled by ennui thou passest thus.
I likewise in the shadow, on the grass.
Lie, and a dull disgust beclouds
My soul, and I am goaded with a spur,
So that, reposing, I am farthest still
From finding peace or place.
And yet I want for naught,
And have not had till now a cause for tears.
What is thy bliss, how much,
I cannot tell; but thou art fortunate.

* * * * *

Or, it may be, my thought
Errs, running thus to others' destiny;
May be, to everything,
Wherever born, in cradle or in fold,
That day is terrible when it was born.

It is the same note, the same voice; the theme does not change, but
perhaps it is deepened in this ode:

ON THE LIKENESS OP A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN CARVEN
UPON HER TOMB.

Such wast thou: now under earth
A skeleton and dust. O'er dust and bones
Immovably and vainly set, and mute,
Looking upon the flight of centuries,
Sole keeper of memory
And of regret is this fair counterfeit
Of loveliness now vanished. That sweet look,
Which made men tremble when it fell on them,
As now it falls on me; that lip, which once,
Like some full vase of sweets,
Ran over with delight; that fair neck, clasped
By longing, and that soft and amorous hand,
Which often did impart
An icy thrill unto the hand it touched;
That breast, which visibly
Blanched with its beauty him who looked on it--
All these things were, and now
Dust art thou, filth, a fell
And hideous sight hidden beneath a stone.
Thus fate hath wrought its will
Upon the semblance that to us did seem
Heaven's vividest image! Eternal mystery
Of mortal being! To-day the ineffable
Fountain of thoughts and feelings vast and high,
Beauty reigns sovereign, and seems
Like splendor thrown afar
From some immortal essence on these sands,
To give our mortal state
A sign and hope secure of destinies
Higher than human, and of fortunate realms,
And golden worlds unknown.
To-morrow, at a touch,
Loathsome to see, abominable, abject,
Becomes the thing that was
All but angelical before;
And from men's memories
All that its loveliness
Inspired forever faults and fades away.

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