Giacomo Leopardi

LEOPARDI, GIACOMO, COUNT (1798-1837), Italian poet, was born at Recanati in the March of Ancona, on June 29, 1798. All the circumstances of his parentage and education con spired to foster his precocious and sensitive genius at the expense of his physical and mental health. His mother was absorbed in mending the family fortunes, having taken over the whole admin istration from her husband. His father, Count Monaldo Leopardi, secluded himself in his extensive library, to which his nervous, sickly and deformed son had free access, and which absorbed him exclusively in the absence of an intelligent sympathy from his parents, of any companionship except that of his brothers and sister, or of any recreation in the dullest of Italian towns. The lad spent his days over grammars and dictionaries, learning Latin with little assistance, and Greek and the principal modern languages with none at all.

Erudition.

Any ordinarily clever boy would have emerged from this discipline a mere pedant and bookworm. Leopardi came forth a Hellene, not merely a consummate Greek scholar, but penetrated with the classical conception of life, and a master of antique form and style. At 16 he composed a Latin treatise on the Roman rhetoricians of the second century, a commentary on Porphyry's life of Plotinus and a history of astronomy; at 17 he wrote on the popular errors of the ancients, citing more than 400 authors. A little later he imposed upon the first scholars of Italy by two odes in the manner of Anacreon. At 18 he produced the Appressamento alla Morte, a vision of the omnipotence of death, modelled upon Petrarch, but more truly inspired by Dante, and in its conception, machinery and general tone, offering a remarkable resemblance to Shelley's Triumph of Life (1822). At 19 he experienced his first serious passion for his cousin, Geltrude Cassi, already married and a mother. In 1819 came the great lyrical odes, the ode to Italy, and that on the monument to Dante erected at Florence. They are chaste in diction, close and nervous

in style, sparing in fancy and almost destitute of simile and metaphor, antique in spirit, yet pervaded by modern ideas. A third ode, on Cardinal Mai's discoveries of ancient mss., lamented the decadence of Italian literature.

Pessimism.

He found intellectual sympathy in the eminent scholar and patriot Pietro Giordani, to whom he wrote letters of bitter complaint and lamentation. His condition was rendered the more unhappy by bad eyesight which for months made even read ing impossible. At length (1822) his father allowed him to spend the winter in Rome, where, though he received literary encourage ment from C. C. J. Bunsen and Niebuhr, he found little satisfac tion. Dispirited and with exhausted means, he returned to Re canati, where he spent three miserable years, brightened only by the publication of his Versi (Bologna, 1824). The most remark able of these is perhaps the Bruto Minore, the epitome of his philosophy of despair.

In 1827 appeared the Operette Morali, written some years be fore and corfsisting principally of dialogues and his imaginary biography of Filippo Ottonieri, which brought Leopardi fame as a prose writer. Modern literature has few productions so emi nently classical in form and spirit, so symmetrical in construction and faultless in style. Lucian is evidently the model; but the wit and irony which were playthings to Lucian are terribly earnest with Leopardi. Leopardi's invention is 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. Filippo Ottonieri is a portrait of an imaginary philosopher, imitated from the 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.