Giacomo, at the age of fourteen, entered into possession of his father’s library, and took his education into his own hands

‘What stuff for poetry’, indeed! It was a world on which, in later years, he looked back with infinite nostalgia—claiming that with the end of those ‘illusions’ and the advent of reason, the creative spirit began to shrivel. And even at the time, he clung to it with an unchildlike, almost desperate, tenacity. His imagination, he wrote later on, was fixed with great intensity on a very few ideas (‘unlike that of most children, which leaps from one thing to another’) and this caused him to be terrified of anything unusual that might be disturbing and to clutch at all that was customary and familiar, ‘outside of which he could not find peace’.46Never, perhaps, was there a child more precociously tormented by self-awareness. ‘He already knew almost all the good and evil in himself,’ he wrote, in some fragmentary autobiographical notes, ‘and was always going au devant of his own progress.’47 What he held in his hand was already valueless; what lay before him, might never be attained. ‘When we hoped for some good thing,’ he wrote, ‘what were our anxieties, our terrors, our tremblings… at every little obstacle!’ Even when the treat, so anxiously hoped for, was reached, it lasted so short a time, and was followed by ‘such dark and intense sorrow’ at its termination! ‘Indeed our sorrow then was inconsolable—not so much because the pleasure was over, as because it had not come up to our expectations, and in consequence we sometimes suffered from a sort of remorse, as if our lack of enjoyment had been our own fault. For experience had not yet taught us to have few hopes, and to be prepared to have those hopes destroyed…’48One day his mother came upon him ‘weeping because he was a man’, and laughed at him. (But little Pietruccio, on his knee, tried to comfort him, stroking his cheek.) How could he tell her that his grief was nothing less than an awareness of mortality? Long before he could formulate his knowledge, the boy knew that nothing is stable, nothing ours; that the whole of life is but a process of losing. ‘When I saw someone going away—even a person to whom I was quite indifferent—I would consider whether it was possible or probable that I should ever see him again. And if I decided that it was not, then I would watch and listen, following our guest with all my eyes and ears, always revolving within my mind this thought: “This is the last time, I shall never see him again!”’49 Once, when he was taken to play with some other children, and was called away before the game was over, the pain of this disappointment was so intense that, many years later, he could find no more vivid image for the insecurity of human life. ‘The life of man seemed to me to be as when, in childhood, I was taken to see friends, and began to play with the other children, seated around a table—and then my parents got up and called me, and my heart was heavy—but I had to go, leaving the game unplayed and the chairs upset and the children weeping.’50So the first ten years of Leopardi’s life went by: in dreams and fantasies, in early grief, in premature self-awareness, in repressed affection. A child observant, silent, fearful, passionate, secretive, vulnerable—playing with shadows, counting the stars.

The portrait is one that the future hardly changed. But one more door was still to be opened—into the world of books.

(...)

So Giacomo, at the age of fourteen, entered into possession of his father’s library, and took his education into his own hands. He began—this at least is agreeably childish—by compiling an ‘Index of the works produced by me, Giacomo Leopardi, from 1809 to 1812’.7 These included his first sonnet, La morte di Ettore, written at the age of eleven after reading Homer, a translation of the first two books of Horace’s Odes, a parody of the ArsPoetica, a poetic epistle (dedicated ‘To his dear Father, after two months’ study of philosophy’), and—perhaps in rivalry with his father, who also fancied himself as a dramatist—two full-blown tragedies.8 All these are still, of course, merely scholastic exercises; Giacomo was playing with words, as other boys with toy soldiers—marshalling his troops into formations, making reconnaissances into unfamiliar country, conquering new positions. But all the time he was acquiring the tools of his trade. By the time he was fourteen, he could make free use of almost every verse form; he could write odes, octets, sextets, free endecasyllables, and above all, could make a free use of the Dantesque terzina. ‘It is not yet poetry,’ comments De Robertis, ‘but it is literary art—and that is something.’9And by the time Giacomo was fifteen, the apprenticeship was already over; Giacomo had become an independent, an indefatigable scholar. ‘Segregated from the world,’ says De Sanctis, ‘his father’s library became to him a sort of Pompei, in which he shut himself up to excavate, as best he could, the past.’10It was a room neither sombre nor depressing, but in winter it was bitterly cold; and here, in every season, Giacomo spent the whole day, only interrupting his studies by an hour of talk with his brothers in the evenings, while he walked up and down in the dark, to rest his aching eyes. And when, at bedtime, he retired to his own room, we know that his studies were continued far into the night, for his brother Carlo has recorded that, if he woke up, he would see him ‘kneeling by the table to write by the last dim light of the guttering candle’.

Already he was possessed by the conviction that his life would be short, that not one hour—no, not one minute—could be wasted, if he was to reach the fame for which he thirsted. It was upon the Classics that he fastened, and soon, not satisfied with Latin, he decided to teach himself Greek. A month later he was proficient enough to write a letter to his uncle in that language, and from that time onwards he left no shelf of the library unexplored. What the boy accomplished within the next four years it is almost impossible to believe. ‘He entered those rooms’, wrote De Sanctis, ‘a citizen of Recanati; he left them a citizen of the world.’ He had the enthusiasm, and also the leisure and insatiable curiosity, of a medieval scholar. ‘He came to know’, Giordani wrote, ‘the world of two thousand years ago, before he knew that of his own time; and what is more surprising, from this lost ancient world he learned what his own was, and how to value it.’11 He lived surrounded by lexicons and grammars—Greek, Latin, Hebrew—he commentated, annotated, dissertated, imitated. No classical scholar was too obscure, too erudite, to please him: ‘they formed’, he wrote, ‘my whole delight’. His first choice of an original subject, however, is suggestive: a History of Astronomy. It is, naturally enough, merely a compendium of other men’s erudition, turgidly and awkwardly presented; but the lines of Ovid which he chose for his frontispiece are significant:

… iuvat ire per alta

astra, iuvat terris et inerti sedes relicta

nube vehi, validique umeris insidere Atlantis.‡

Already the boy, for all his heavy cargo of learning, knew by instinct that the high heavens would be his dwelling-place.

But this was only the beginning. In the course of the next two years we meet with a prodigious, a truly terrifying output of erudite compositions, of which only a few need even be listed here. His genius for philology developed as suddenly, as astonishingly, as Pascal’s for mathematics. His first Greek work was a translation of the works of Hesychius of Milo; then followed a commentary on the writings of four Greek rhetoricians of the second century, and notes for a work on the Early Greek Fathers of the Church. How great his father’s pride was, may be inferred from the inscription on the flyleaf of the work which Giacomo gave him on his sixteenth birthday, a translation into Latin of Porphyry’s Commentary on the Life of Plotinus: ‘Today, August 31st, this work of his was given to me by my eldest son Giacomo Leopardi, who has had no master in the Greek language, and is sixteen years old, two months, and two days.’12 In his satisfaction, the Count even sent off the manuscript to the Abate Cancellieri, a well-known Roman philologist, who not only added his own praise upon the flyleaf but also referred to the work in Rome in a ‘Dissertation on men endowed with great memories’. ‘What may not be expected’, he wrote, ‘in maturity, of a young man of such astonishing ability?’ 

Monaldo’s gratification was no less great than his son’s, and great, too, was his satisfaction when a party of learned Jews came to Recanati from Ancona, and—or so the Count relates—Giacomo was able to converse fluently with them in Hebrew!13 But greatest of all was his paternal pride when Giacomo produced a series of ‘Discourses on Sacred Subjects’ and held two of them in Recanati, before the members of a religious confraternity. Little could the poor Count guess, from such beginnings, what a very different course his son’s genius soon would take!

And meanwhile, with undiminished enthusiasm, Giacomo was continuing his studies. After his first taste of praise from Rome, he was impatient to reach a larger audience. He had just finished a long Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients, when an exciting piece of news reached him: the Abate Angelo Mai, the librarian of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, had discovered a new manuscript by Fronto—an author almost wholly, and perhaps deservedly, unknown. With great difficulty he succeeded in obtaining the book, and feverishly set himself to translating it. Might not this be the first step to fame? The whole family shared in the boy’s hopes—Paolina and Carlo copying out his work, and Conte Monaldo hastening to send it off to a printer in Milan, Antonio Stella. And at the same time Giacomo himself sent to Angelo Mai his graceful dedication: ‘Others, when they dedicate, make a gift—I return to you a gift I have received.’ But the Abate’s acknowledgment, though civil, was not warm; Stella seemed disinclined to publish; and so the matter dropped.

It was, however, at this time that—fortunately for literature—the young man’s mind was again taking another turn; he was returning to the fabulous world of his boyhood. Had he indeed ever wholly left it? ‘Sometimes,’ he wrote later on, ‘when I was sitting quite still and thinking of other things, I would hear some verse of the Classics, quoted accidentally by a member of my family, and I would catch my breath and find myself obliged to take heed (tener dietro) to those lines.’14 And indeed his brother has recorded that, when any member of the family wanted to draw Giacomo out of the brown study in which he often sat at meals, this was the only way to do so.15 He read Virgil, and noted the ‘marvellous childishness’ of Circe’s song; he read Ariosto—and as he was reading, some boys in the street were singing, ‘Amore, amore, amore!’16 Many years later, he could hear their voices still.

But still nothing was further from his thoughts than that he himself could become a poet; it was only through scholarship that he hoped to be famous. ‘My head was full of modern ideas, I scorned and rejected the study of our own language… I despised Homer, Dante, all the Classics… What has made me change my tune? The grace of God.’17

This change, which he himself called his ‘conversion’, and which he also compared to a gradual falling in love, took place between his seventeenth and his eighteenth year. ‘My passage’, he says, ‘from erudition to poetry, was not sudden, but gradual—that is, I began to note in the Classics something more than I had before.’ He discovered that the Iliad or an ode of Anacreon’s aroused in him ‘a crowd of phantasies, that people both my mind and my heart’; and when he read the Aeneid, and reached the second book, he found that inadvertently he was ‘reciting it aloud, and changing tone, and catching fire, and perhaps sometimes letting a tear fall’.18 Could he render such great art as this, he wondered, in his own language? ‘Constantly and arduously I tried to find a way of making mine, if it were at all possible, that divine beauty.’19 Moreover, in the boy’s enthusiasm, the writer’s deep instinct of assimilation and selection, for his own purposes, was already at work. ‘When I have read a classical author, my mind is all in a turmoil and confusion. Then I begin to translate the best passages and their beauties, perforce examined and recollected, one by one, take their place within my mind, and enrich it, and bring me peace.’20First he translated, in verse, a fragment of the Odyssey, the Idylls of Moschus, and the Battle of Frogs and Mice (of which, later on, he made a second translation), and then the second book of the Aeneid; and all were published between 1815 and 1817, in a literary review of Milan, Lo Spettatore.21 They are works still at times scholastic or imitative; the strains of Moschus reach us by way of Tasso, of Politian: ‘Sicule Muse, incominciate il pianto.’ Yet sometimes faintly, on the breeze, another note is borne. ‘Nelle mie quiete stanze.’… ‘Pure alla rana Donar le ninfe interminabil canto.’ To those whose ear is attuned the accent, already, is prophetic.

At all these translations, but especially at the Aeneid, Leopardi laboured with meticulous, anxious care. ‘Innumerable passages are corrected and altered,’ he wrote, and yet in the end he rejected the whole translation as insufficiently polished. In his hands, he said ruefully, Virgil’s brush had become a mere pen. Yet with what high hopes and fears these works were sent off—to receive, as he hoped, the verdict which would shape his whole future! ‘On my knees,’ he wrote, in a short preface to the Odyssey, ‘I implore the literary men of Italy to give me their opinion.’22 He was ‘torn between hope and fear’; he wrote to his publisher, ‘forgive this importunity from a man who has no other thoughts or pleasures in his life but these’.23The phrase about the Odyssey was then thought ridiculous, and no one took the pains to answer. But now the young man’s amazing versatility had taken another turn. Might he not follow, he thought, the example of Michelangelo, ‘who buried a Cupid he had sculpted, and when the man who had dug up the statue believed it to be antique, brought him the missing arm’?24 Giacomo’s Cupid was a Hymn to Neptune which—so he informed the readers of Lo Spettatore—had recently been discovered by a Roman scholar in ‘a torn codex, of which only a few pages remain in a small library’,25 and had been translated by himself from the original Greek; and this was followed by two Greek odes—the Odae adespotae—purporting to have been found in the same codex, and to be by Anacreon, but of course really composed by Leopardi himself, and by him, too, translated into Latin verse.26 Always Anacreon’s poems had pleased Leopardi greatly. ‘Were I to attempt to describe the indefinable effect that Anacreon’s odes have upon me, I could find no more suitable image than the passing of a summer breeze, scented and refreshing… that opens your heart to a delight that is already fled, before you have fully felt or savoured it.’27 And now it was this elusive melody that the young poet sought to capture, and his verses bring us to the threshold of the world that, afterwards, he made his own. The first poem, indeed—a madrigalesque address To Love—still has something of the workshop, but in the second, To the Moon, there is already a clearer promise.Medium per caelum tacite

Nocturna solaque iter facis.

Super montes, arborumque

Cacumina, et domorum culmina.§

Have not these lines—to the reader of the Canto notturno and La sera del dì di festa—a strangely familiar ring? And in the same year the young writer composed another poem, Le rimembranze, which began:

Era in mezzo del ciel la curva luna.¶

Thus, in the first faint foreshadowing of a theme by a single flute, we may hear already the violins and trumpets, the oboes and the drums, of a great orchestra.

So Giacomo spent his youth, and it was the only period of his life of which, later on, he could say that he was happy. ‘The days passed without my knowing it, and all their hours seemed short; and I myself at the time often marvelled at the happiness I felt… And this state’, he added, ‘I shall never find again.’28 No, it would not return. For at some moment between his seventeenth and his eighteenth year—how or why, we do not know—a sudden anguish seized him. He realized what, in these mole-like years, he had done to himself. For seven years he had lived only in his books; he had allowed himself no time for recreation, for exercise, for intercourse with friends of his own age; he had grudged even the short time snatched for his meals. ‘What a life,’ cried the ladies of Recanati, ‘what a way to spend one’s youth!’29 Perhaps one morning his eyes ached so much that he was forced to stop reading, and looked in a mirror; perhaps he tried, as in the old days, to run a race with his brother, and discovered how quickly he became exhausted, how his head hammered and his pulses beat; perhaps his eyes fell upon some ridiculous, but none the less painful, verses, addressed to him by a young lady of his acquaintance: 

Non ti crucciare, almo giovinetto,

Se il dorso ’ai curvo, se ansimante il seno.||

Suddenly his eyes were opened, and what he saw aroused in him not only despair, but rage. The seven happy years at his books he now called ‘seven years of mad and desperate study’; and his father’s indulgence, ‘criminal blindness’; while to his mother he attributed a still more sinister motive. ‘She considered beauty a true misfortune, and seeing her children ugly or deformed, gave thanks to God.’ Such thoughts are not healthy food for a boy of eighteen; their bitterness warped and haunted him for the rest of his life. ‘I have miserably and irremediably ruined myself’, he wrote, ‘by rendering odious and contemptible my outer appearance… the only part of a man which most people take into account. And not only the common herd, but also all those who desire that virtue should have some physical adornment, when they find me utterly wanting in this respect, will hardly dare to love me—will hardly dare to love a man, in whom nothing but his soul has beauty.’30

What was the appearance of the young man who wrote these despairing words? It was not, surely, as unpleasing as he thought it. He was slight and pale, and not very tall, but his face still had the ‘serious and wistful’ look which had charmed the ladies of Recanati when he was a child; and his blue eyes held not only intelligence, but tenderness. But the rather large head was sunk deeply between his shoulders, and a very slight double hump had just begun to be perceptible. To himself—for self-deception was never Leopardi’s weakness—he was quite plain about it. He was not like other young men: in a society where to be different was to be an outcast, he was a gobbo. Medical opinion seems to agree that what he suffered from was scoliosis—a curvature of the spinal column which generally takes place in adolescence, and which throws the frame of the thorax out of place in such a way as to produce a slight double hump, on the back and chest, and eventually—as in Leopardi’s case—may affect the functions of both the lungs and the heart. But how soon this deformity began, we do not know. All we know is that in childhood Giacomo was as strong and straight as Carlo himself, and that when, in 1816, his publisher Stella saw him for the first time, the deformity was already noticeable. The silk cape of his ecclesiastical cloak, ‘which is lifted up by the slightest breeze’, concealed it a little, and this, in Carlo’s opinion, was one of the chief reasons why his family wished him to become a priest.31For Conte Monaldo was not indifferent to his son’s welfare, nor was he wholly blind; he merely walked in blinkers. Undoubtedly the long years that the boy spent, while he was growing, bent over his books, may have aggravated the condition of his spine, as well as straining his eyesight. But none of this would Conte Monaldo admit. Yet he was, in other ways, a careful father. We have seen how he watched over the children’s health when they were small, and in a long letter to Ranieri after Giacomo’s death he said with pride that, although the boy had had ‘a dangerous inflammatory illness of the chest’ (pneumonia?) at the age of six, he had had no other severe illness, ‘and, although never very robust, never spent a day in bed’. He related, however, a number of nervous symptoms of his adolescence, and observed with some complacency that, however foolish his son’s caprices might be, ‘with me he was always docile, and yielded to my arguments and my prayers’.32 On one point only was he silent: he never referred, even by implication, to his son’s deformity.

In vain did the other members of the family try to arouse his alarm. In 1813, when Giacomo was fifteen, his uncle, Marchese Carlo Antici, sent his father a long letter of warning. ‘You tell me that your unequalled Giacomo is learning Greek without a teacher, and hopes to master it in the course of one year, and afterwards to teach himself Hebrew. I congratulate you, him, and the priesthood, to which he already seems dedicated—but allow me to express my apprehensions for his health. Were Giacomo to mitigate his exhausting concentration by some exercise in horsemanship, my fears would be greatly diminished; but knowing that his long hours of study are broken only by the discharge of ecclesiastical duties, I cannot escape the distressing thought that his body is likely to become as frail as his intellect is strong.’33 And Marchese Antici begged his brother-in-law to send Giacomo to stay with him in Rome, where the boy, while still pursuing his studies with eminent scholars, could lead a more active life.

But Conte Monaldo—was it only owing to his satisfaction in his son’s brilliance, or from a deeper, less acknowledgeable pride of race?—would not heed. He denied that Giacomo’s health was being undermined, and though he agreed that a visit to Rome might benefit his studies, he firmly refused to let him go. ‘For the present my preference is, that he should be less learned, but belong to his father, and live peacefully and cheerfully in the town in which Providence has placed him… Depriving myself of him, I should lose the only friend I have, or hope to have, in Recanati, and I do not feel disposed to such a sacrifice.’34 This at least is frank, and there is something pathetic in Monaldo’s belief that his son was also his friend. Little did he foresee that Giacomo was soon to revolt against all the principles he had been at pains to instil; little did he realize that his rule already seemed a tyranny.

The months dragged on, and the years, and the boy was still in Recanati—and subject to long attacks of black, capricious melancholy. Sometimes it drove him to a more violent frenzy of study than ever before; sometimes, instead, it manifested itself in a total apathy, in which, far from studying, he could not even read. Periods of intense emotionalism alternated with others of complete aridity; sudden bursts of gaiety, with attacks of anguish. At one time he would take interminable daily walks across the hills in total silence, even if his father or brother were with him; at another, he shut himself up for weeks, with no exercise at all. Sometimes he played with the thought of suicide. Leaning over the rim of the deep round well in the garden, he longed to sink down, down into its brown depths, never to return:Pensoso di cessar dentro quell’acque

La speme e il dolor mio.**

But an hour later he would admit to himself—and note, with characteristic self-appraisal, in his diary—the inconstancy of even that desire. ‘If I were to throw myself in, I would climb up on to the rim again, as soon as I reached the surface… and feel some moments of pleasure at having saved myself, and of affection for this life, which I now so deeply despise.’35For several months he was convinced that he had, at most, only a year or two more to live, and it was then that, in eleven days, he wrote a long visionary poem entitled The Approach of Death. ‘Composition of Cantica’, he noted in his diary, ‘at night, in the midst of grief.’36

Dunque morir bisogna, e ancor non vidi

Venti volte gravar neve il mio tetto,

Venti rifar le rondinelle i nidi.††

Then this apprehension, too, receded. He would live, he believed, but ‘clinging on to life by my teeth and doing only the half of what other men can do’,37 and ‘torn always and without relief between acute pain and lack of all pleasures, between chronic tedium and burning shame at [my] physical deformities’.38 What could life hold for such a man? ‘I have not yet seen the world,’ he wrote, ‘but when I shall see it and have some experience of other men, I shall certainly have to retreat within myself… What I fear are the things that will wound my heart.’39

It was with a mind set in this key that he stumbled into his first romance.

A STUDY in SOLITUDE

The Life of Leopardi – Poet, Romantic and Radical

Iris Origo