GEORGE HENRY LEWES (essay date 1848)
[Lewes was one of the most versatile men of letters in the Victorian era. A prominent English journalist, he was the founder, with Leigh Hunt, of the Leader, a radical political journal he edited from 1851 to 1854. He also served from 1865 to 1866 as the first editor of the Fortnightly Review, another journal he helped to establish. Critics often cite Lewes’s influence on the novelist George Eliot, to whom he was companion and mentor, as his principal contribution to English letters, but they also credit him with critical acumen in his literary commentary, most notably in his dramatic criticism. In the following excerpt from an introductory overview of Leopardi’s life and works. Lewes outlines Leopardi’s literary career, his place in the tradition of European Romanticism, and his philosophy of despair and pessimism.]
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Giacomo Leopardi is a name which makes the heart of almost every cultivated Italian beat with a certain sorrowful pity and a noble pride. To English ears it is a mere sound signifying nothing. It calls up no sweet memories of harmonious verse; it brings with it no compassion for the sufferings of a sad and struggling spirit. The first occasion an Englishman ever mentioned the name in print was, we believe, in a recent novel. Yet Germany has long known and cherished Leopardi. Even France, generally so backward in acknowledging a foreigner, has, on several occasions, paid tribute to his genius.
Leopardi’s mental history is crowded with striking contrasts We see him learned even among the erudite, and, at the same time, a great poet; at one period grubbing like an archaeologist, covered with the dust of folios; at another, borne away on the irresistible wings of upward-soaring imagination Nor is this all. The man who, with exquisite taste, appreciated the severe simplicity of the great works of Grecian art, first learned to know Greece through the tawdry rhetoric of the Fathers; and the bard who, of all others, deserves to be called the ‘poet of despair’—whose scepticism exceeds that of Manfred or even Lelia—began by planning sacred hymns of fervent piety.
Leopardi was self-taught. The limited instruction which he gained from two ecclesiastics was insignificant by the side of that which he acquired for himself. Unaided, he studied French, Spanish, English, Greek, and even Hebrew; the latter sufficiently to enter upon disputations with some learned Jews at Ancona. His studies had not, however, that desultoriness which is usually noticeable among self-taught men, but were almost exclusively philological. Thus, before he attained maturity, we find him compiling commentaries on the rhetoricians of the second century; writing his erudite little treatise on the vulgar errors of the ancients; collecting the fragments of the Fathers of the second century; translating and dissertating on the Batrachomyomachia; throwing new light upon the life of Moschus, and translating the Idylls: translating the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, and the second book of the Aeneid. A strange preparation for a poet! As examples of mere erudite industry, such exploits would have done honour to a long career; as the productions of a boy, they excite unmingled astonishment.
The love of mystification joined to a consciousness of power, which dictated the forgeries of Chatterton, Macpherson, and Allan Cunningham, seduced Leopardi into the scholar’s trick of publishing a pretended Greek hymn to Neptune. The translation was accompanied by notes, in which erudite dust was thrown in the eyes of the public, so as to deceive the most suspicious. This production is included in his works; as well as the two Odes of Anacreon, which he published at the same time, and which were said to have been found in the same place. These odes are capital imitations. The first is but another variation of the old theme. Love crowned with Roses, but it has the true Greek naïveté in it. The second. “To the Moon,” is longer, and generally preferred; but, to our taste, though a better ode, it is not so happy an imitation. He was only nineteen when he played this trick, a circumstance which must be taken in extenuation of the offence.
Although so ardent in pursuit of learning, his faculties were not wholly engrossed by it; for amidst these dry recondite studies he was groping his way in a far more arduous and important path—the study of his own being. The seeds of decay had early been sown in his constitution; and now a hump grew out on his back, adding a source of moral anguish to his physical pains. It is easy to understand the poignant humiliation which every sensitive nature must endure from such a deformity; but by one other cruel contradiction in Leopardi’s fate, this grief was heightened beyond the common lot; the energetic nature of his soul prompted him, above all things, to a life of action. To such a spirit deformity would have operated only as one stimulus the more; but accompanied as it was with acute suffering and bodily debility, it made Leopardi feel that he was powerless and despised. Nevertheless, the chained eagle is an eagle still—his thoughts are with the sun. Leopardi could say of himself, in seriousness, that Nature had made him for suffering:—
A te la speme
Nego, mi disse, anche la speme; e d’altro
Non brillin gli occhi tuoi se non di pianto:
for she had thrown him helpless upon the world; but the eagle was only chained, not subdued.
Unfitted for a life of action, he sought activity in burrowing amidst the dust and obscurity of the past. He lived a life of Thought: and at his side sat Sorrow, as a perpetual enigma and as a constant monitress.—‘La parte più inesplicabile dell’inesplicabile mistero dell’universo.’ He suffered and asked himself if others suffered in the same way,—asked himself whether it was just that he should suffer, having done no wrong. He looked abroad in the world, and saw sadness painfully legible on its face; he looked far into the past, and still the same mournful aspect met his eye. Of his own soul he asked the explanation of this mystery, and he became a poet.
His two first canzoni were published in 1818. They are on the same theme—the degradation of Italy; and it would be idle to speak of the author’s youth, because no trace of youth or inexperience is to be found in them. At twenty, Leopardi was old,—at least, in thought and suffering. We wish we could, without too great a sacrifice of the original, translate the first of these canzoni. Often as her poets have reproached Italy— from Dante downwards, there have been no more piercing, manly, vigorous strains, than those which vibrate in the organ-peal of patriotism sent forth by Leopardi. Felicaja mourned over the fatal gift of Beauty in a passionate music which has stirred all hearts: but his sonnet is many degrees below the ode by Leopardi, the irregular but rhythmic march of which seizes hold of your soul and irresistibly hurries you along with it. Utter the name of Leopardi before any Italian, and he instantly bursts forth with,—
O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi
E le colonne e i simulacri e l’erme
Torri degli avi nostri,
Ma la gloria non vedo,
Non vedo il lauro e il ferro ond’eran carchi
I nostri padri antichi. Or fatta inerme,
Nuda la fronte e nudo il petto mostri.
Oimè quante ferite,
Che lividor, che sangue! oh qual ti veggio
Formosissima donna! Io chiedo al cielo
E al mondo: dite, dite
Chi la ridusse a tale? E questo è peggio
Che di catene ha carche ambe le braccia;
Si che sparte le chiome e senza velo
Siede in terra negletta e sconsolata,
Nascondendo la faccia
Tra le ginocchia, e piange.
The sustained yet musical vehemence of this opening is continued throughout. Leopardi does not join the cry of those who exclaim against Italy’s fatal gift of Beauty. He feels that Italy’s greatness is not the cause of her abasement; but that her sons are no longer worthy of her: their ancient courage and manliness have deserted them.
But these men, so supine in their country ’s cause, are invincible when fighting for another, and this thought wrings from the poet a cry of anguish. He then turns from the degeneracy of his age to those happy antique times when men gloried in dying for their country; this leads him to think of the Thessalian passes, where a handful of men were stronger than the might of Persia, stronger than fate itself: and then as St. Beuve says, ‘il refait hardiment le chant perdu de Simonide.’
The second canzone, that on the proposed monument to Dante, is in the same strain; or, let us rather say, it pours forth the same indignant sorrow: for, in point neither of thought nor expression, is it a reproduction of its predecessor. In its patriotic hatred towards France, the despoiler of Italy, we read the effects of that same spirit which animated a Körner and an Arndt; with this additional motive, that while the Germans only hated a cruel enemy, Leopardi hated the enemy who, having conquered his country, sent her sons to perish amidst the distant snows of Russia.
It was in 1822 that Leopardi left Recanati and first went to Rome. His reputation as a savant had preceded him, and he was employed to draw up a catalogue of the Greek MSS. in the Barberini Library. (p. 661)
While at Rome he published some of his most important philological researches; and had to endure the jealousies and tracasseries of a certain Mangi, the librarian, whom he lashed in two satirical sonnets under the name of Manzo (an ox). But to a poet the Eternal City could not be made vulgar by any petty jealousies; Rome was one continued inspiration to Leopardi. He walked amidst its ruins, and felt that even in its ruins it was sacred ground. . . . No one ever felt more thoroughly the real grandeur of Rome, and he saw, in the recent discovery of Fronto’s Letters and Cicero’s Republic, the signs of a complete resuscitation of ancient writers, which would force the moderns to catch something of their spirit. In the first Revival of Letters, how great was Italy! Shall there be a second Revival, and no response be heard? The first produced a Dante, a Petrarch, an Ariosto, a Tasso, a Columbus; the second will produce a new race, of whom Alfieri is the chief.
Nothing can be more natural than that a poet and a scholar should look to literature as the regenerator of his country; and, consequently, to a second Revival of Letters as the one thing needful. So long as the love of letters survives, he says, Italy will not be dead; and, as a commentary on this text, we refer to his noble ode to Angelo Maï. The lines in it on Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso, are worthy of the names they commemorate.
The date of this canzone, as St. Beuve pertinently remarks, is the same as that of Manzoni’s Carmagnola (1820). ‘Le drapeau d’une réforme littéraire flottait enfin, toute une jeune milice s’ébranlait à l’entour;’ and this period will form one of the most instructive epochs in the history of literature, characterised as it is by the rising of five great nations against the despotism of a system, and the spontaneous recurrence of each to its early writers. The court of Louis XIV. had long domineered over the literature of Europe. Taste in the fine arts was religiously accepted from French critics, and the critics could see nothing but le grand siècle. The rude strength and healthy vigour of the early poets were universally pronounced barbarous, because they were (undeniably) against ‘good taste.’… Certain it is, that wherever you cast your eyes during the close of the seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries, the perruque of Louis XIV. is before you stiff and pompous. The trees and groves are not allowed their natural proportions, but are trimmed into rigidity. The Muses are wigged.
The reaction came. Lessing, the brilliant, restless, irregular, but intrepid captain of his age, harassed the imperial forces on all sides, routed, and finally drove them ignominiously from the field. Germany began to have a literature of her own. England returned to Shakespeare, Spenser, and her ballad literature; so great was the reaction, so strong the feeling against the French school, that even eminent poets could discuss, and without final agreement too, the astonishing question,—Was Pope a poet? Spain made an effort to throw off the yoke of France, and began to inquire about Lopes de Vega, Calderon, and the cancionero. France rose up against her own glory, and the école romantique sounded the tocsin of revolt. In Italy the standard was as openly raised. Everywhere men fought in this quarrel as if their liberties were inseparably connected with the abrogation of the unities, as if on the permission to use familiar and even trivial language in poetry was staked the whole interests of society.
The outlines of the history of this reaction have often been sketched, but one point has not, we believe, hitherto been insisted on, and it is this: not only was the reaction against le grand siècle felt throughout Europe, but in each country the tendency of the New School was the same. This identity of principle is suggestive, and nothing can be easier than the proof of its universality. A strong predilection for the early national literature—a blind reverence for the great Immortals who had early thrown around the nation the lustre of their genius—a pre-eminence given to Nature and the so-called Natural above all conditions of Art—such were the characteristics of the New School in each country.
It is to be noted that, though belonging to the new school, Leopardi has his place apart in it. While the Manzonis, Berchets, and others, were agitating theories of dramatic art, discussing the unities as a vital problem, he paid no attention whatever to the question. Moreover, while Italy, as well as England and France, was greatly influenced by Germany, there is not a trace of that influence on Leopardi. This is a point to be insisted on, because it lets us into the secret of his poetic nature. He was not ignorant of Germany; his friendship with Niebuhr, Bunsen, and Sinner, must have been the means of rendering him acquainted with its best writers: but they were evidently uncongenial to him. His clear, southern nature, could ill sympathise with the mysticism, reverie, and absence of precision and beauty which belong to the north. Even Göthe seems to have made little or no impression on him. ‘The Memoirs of Göthe,’ he says in a letter to Puccinotti, “contain much that is new and excellent: all his works, and a great proportion of the works of other Germans, do so. But they are written with such wild confusion and obscurity, and evince such bizarre, mystical, and visionary sentiments and ideas, that I cannot say they really please me much.” Thus partly, no doubt, from early culture and familiarity with the masterpieces of antiquity, but greatly also from the bias of his own mind, he received no durable impression from the literature of Germany.
The distinctive characteristic of Leopardi’s poetry is despair over the present, accompanied with a mournful regret for the past. His sympathies are with Greece and Rome; his deep compassion with Italy. His mind seems to linger with touching mournfulness over the remains of the antique world, to recall which for his beloved Italy he would have gladly laid down his life. It was an error, perhaps, but a generous and poetic error.
From Rome, where all things spoke to him of the days he regretted, he returned to the ‘abhorred and inhabitable Recanati.’ There his health becoming worse and worse, his studies were almost entirely interrupted; and in his pain and solitudes he had no resource but poetry. ‘Io cercava,’ he says, ‘come si cerca spesso colla poesia di consacrare il mio dolore.’ He poured his sorrows into song, which immortalised him and them. His was no fictitious grief: it was a malady of the body and of the mind—disease and despair. Never free from pain, he had not mental peace to soothe him. He was a stoic-sceptic. In everything he wrote, verse or prose, dedication or familiar letter, you may see the traces of a deep sense of the nothingness of life, a poignant feeling of its unhappiness, and a stoic contempt for the suffering which bowed him to the earth. Listen to this passage, taken from a calm letter to his friend Brighenti:
Aged twenty-one, having commenced while yet a child to think and to suffer, I have run the round of a long life, and am morally old and decrepit; especially now that the enthusiasm, which was the companion and aliment of my life, has passed away in a manner which alarms me. It is time to die—it is time to yield to fortune: the most horrible thing that a youth can do—youth, so full of hope as it usually is; but it is the only pleasure that remains to one who has long convinced himself he was born with the sacred and indelible malediction of Fate.
A gloom was on the world; he had neither the faith, which is a ray of light even in the darkness of death, nor that happy elasticity of mind which could say to the passing moment, ‘Stay, thou art fair,’ and with it be content. At times, indeed, as in the “Bruto Minore,” his scepticism rouses him to defiance:
O miserable life! we are but the merest trifles. Nature is not troubled at our wounds, nor do the stars darken at the sight of human agony. Dying, I appeal not to the deaf kings of Olympus or Cocytus—to the contemptible Earth—nor to Night—nor to Thee, O last ray in the darkness of Death, the belief in a Future State. Let the winds take my name and memory.
Elsewhere he asks, ‘Of what use is life? to despise it.’
Nostra vita che val? solo a spregiarla.
Do not suppose these things were said out of bravado or poetic caprice. His letters are sadder even than his poetry. ‘La calamità,’ he once wrote to a friend, ‘sono la sola che vi convenga, essendo virtuoso.’ In one of his dialogues he makes Nature, addressing a soul about to enter a human frame, say, ‘Vivi e tu sii grande e infelice;’ for he could not understand how happiness was possible, unless man was too stupid to apprehend his own fate. Suffering, deep and constant, was Leopardi’s individual lot; and the condition of his nation seemed to him little better: for it was to the many one of cowardly submission, of galling servitude to the few, who felt their chains, and knew that liberty was hopeless. The time was out of joint. Leopardi, quoting the verse of Petrarch,
Ed io son un di quei che’l pianger giova
(And I am one of those whom grief delights),
adds, ‘I cannot say this, because grief is not my inclination, but a necessity of the time, and the will of Fate.’
As the “poet of despair,” we know of no equal to Leopardi. But he is too limited ever to become popular. His own experience of life had been restrained within a small sphere by his misfortunes: it was intense but not extensive; consequently his lyre had but few strings. He had thought and suffered, but had not lived; and his poems utter his thoughts and sufferings, but give no image of the universal life. Yet he is never tiresome, though always the same. His grief is so real and so profound, that it is inexhaustible in expression; to say nothing of the beauty in which he embalms it. Something of the magic of his verse he, doubtless, owes to that language which ennobles the most trivial thoughts, and throws its musical spell over the merest nothings; but more to the exquisite choice of diction, which his poet’s instinct and his classic taste alike taught him. It is worthy of remark, that while Italian is, perhaps, of all languages the easiest for the composition of poetry, all the great Italian poets have been slow and laborious composers: they have had to combat against the fatal facility of their tongue, as the French do against the enormous difficulty of theirs. We are not, therefore, surprised at Leopardi’s account of his own slow and elaborate mode of composition, which is very similar to that recounted by Alfieri of himself: the conception of the poem was the result of a momentary inspiration or frenzy (un ispirazione o frenesia); the execution always demanded time. He was no master of the accomplishment of verse, and able to write at a given moment on a given theme; if the poetic enthusiasm seized him he could write, not otherwise. ‘Se l’ispirazione non mi nasce da se, più facilmente uscirebbe acqua da un tronco, che un solo verso dal mio cervello. Gli altri possono poetare sempre che vogliono; ma io non ho questa facoltà in niun modo.’—Opere.
The years 1825–26 he passed at Bologna, during which time he published more canzoni. Among them is one entitled “First Love,” from which, and from some of the other poems, ‘il resulterait,’ says St. Beuve, ‘que Leopardi n’a connu de ce sentiment orageux que la première et la plus pure, la plus douloureuse moitié, mais aussi la plus divine; et qu’il n’a jamais été mis à l’épreuve d’un entier bonheur.’ Alas! the poor, sickly, humpbacked poet, could expect to find no favour in a woman’s eyes, and found none; the heart to love was not cased in a form to be loved. That his devotion was ill received is unquestionable; and we have no doubt but that he translated the satire by Simonides, “On Women,” with cruel sincerity. That he was deeply hurt may be gathered from his strange outburst in one of his letters, wherein he writes, “L’ambizione, l’interesse, la perfidia, l’insensibilità delle donne che io definisco un animale senza cuore, sono cose che mi spaventano.”
As love poems, Leopardi’s have one merit above their class; we mean their truth. They are the transcripts of real emotions, and not the ingenious caprices of a man at ease playing with regrets. One example is worth citing. Poets have told us, till we are heartily tired of hearing it, that the moment they loved…
Nature wore a new and brighter aspect to their eyes,—that, in fact, they were awakened to a sense of Nature’s beauties by the keen delight within them. It never occurred to us that this rhapsody might be false, till we read in Leopardi the true feeling. Directly he loved, Nature became no longer the delight she had been. Fame was a bubble, Knowledge was idle; for one passion swallowed up all the rest.
Verses to the moon are suspicious, for, though one of the most melancholy and poetical objects in existence, she has had the discredit of so many and such wretched poems that one begins to doubt her power of inspiring; yet who that ever looked on her sad face can help being charmed with the delicate pathos of these lines?
“Alla Luna”
O graziosa luna, io mi rammento
Che, or volge l’anno, sovra questo colle
Io venia pien d’angoscia a rimirarti:
E tu pendevi allor su quella selva
Siccome or fai, che tutta la rischiari.
Ma nebuloso e tremulo dal pianto
Che mi sorgea sul ciglio, alle mie luci
Il tuo volto apparia, che travagliosa
Era mia vita: ed è, nè cangia stile,
O mia diletta luna. E pur mi giova
La ricordanza, e il noverar l’etate
Del mio dolore.
This reads like a chapter of the heart’s memoirs, and not like a ‘copy of verses’ to the moon. The same may be said of the charming poem which precedes it “La Sera del dì di Festa,” … and of several other pieces in the volume; and this quality, far beyond the mere art of verse, will render them durable. Only that which is vital and issues out of life can hope to live; and Leopardi will not pass away from the fashion of a day, because his poems are the expressions of real emotions.
Among the works written [during his residence in Florence from 1826 to 1831] we must not pass over without mention his Dialogues, the style of which a great judge, Manzoni, declared had never been surpassed; and a collection of detached thoughts, not at all in the Rochefoucauld strain. We must confess, however, that, to us, his prose derives much of its interest from his poetry; it is not satisfactory in doctrine, nor happy in tone. The learned essays on philological subjects are more to our taste,—that is, when we are in a philological mood; but as that mysterious entity, the ‘general reader,’ can hardly be expected to be often in such a mood, we spare him some tiresome pages on the matter.
The erudite essays, which the pious love of Leopardi’s friends has collected together in one curious volume, may be commended to the attention of scholars; the public will not heed them, or heeding, will think of them, with a certain interest, only as the productions of one born with a spirit for great achievements, to whom all achievements were denied. It was not an age for action, and the most energetic of his countrymen were powerless. To the absence of a fitting theatre whereon to play an heroic part, there was added the want of a physical organisation capable of supporting even the humblest part; and the soul of the poor, emaciated hunchback, felt itself doubly imprisoned,—first, in a prostrate, nerveless country; secondly, in a feeble, helpless body. What, then, remained for him? Incapacitated for action, unable to incarnate his thoughts in deeds, he incarnated them in poems and essays. And if in this lower sphere of human activity, as he regarded it, he sometimes frittered away his time in the scholar’s fascinating researches, no one who knows the temptation will blame him. Philology, to most a dry and fruitless study, was with him an early passion; and in the sadder earnestness of manhood it was indulged, because it kept him in closer familiarity with that Past which was the Golden Age of his credulous imagination, when, as he was wont emphatically to say, men lived and acted.
There is a tendency among modern writers to overvalue Thought and to undervalue Action. This is partly, no doubt, as a set-off against the coarse depreciation by the mass of men of those conquests that are merely intellectual; but partly, also, in consequence of authors living more secluded lives than when Aeschylus stormed upon the dark-haired Persian at Marathon, or Cervantes lost his arm at Lepanto. In Germany, we see this error pushed to an extreme; and the vices of her literature arise mainly from this, that literature is cultivated for its own sake, as a means, not as an end. What a contrast is presented by these German writers, shut up in their studies, breathing an atmosphere thick with tobacco smoke and the dust of ponderous volumes, and squandering their lives in sterile speculations, or in laborious researches into matters of no human importance, to the free and active lives of the Greek and Roman writers, or even those of our Chaucers, Spensers, Shakespeares, Miltons, Clarendons, Burkes, &c.,—writers who were men, not thinking machines! And it is interesting to read the excuses Cicero frequently puts forward for his pursuit of literary fame, as in no way interfering with his active duties, but simply as dignifying his leisure. Leopardi thought with Cicero. If human life, he says, be the principal subject of literature, and if the regulation of our actions be the first intention of philosophy, there can be no doubt that to do is more dignified than to meditate or to write; inasmuch as the end is more noble than the means,—and things and actions than words and syllogisms.
… [No] mind is by nature created for studies; no man is born to write, but to act. Therefore do we see that the greatest writers and the most illustrious poets of our own times, such as Vittorio Alfieri, were, from the first, intensely inclined to do great things; but Time and Fate forbidding this, they wrote great things. Only those capable of executing great things are capable of writing them.
[“Il Parini, ovvero della gloria”]
So little was Leopardi of a mere bookworm! Forced to find in study a refuge against sorrow and ennui, he never exaggerated the part which study should occupy in man’s life. Literature in his eyes was but a pis aller for action,—the mimicry of a life that could not be really lived. His great hope in literature was, that by means of it men would be stimulated to action. It angered him to see his countrymen reducing it to an amusement. ‘It can have but one solid principle,’ he said, ‘and that is the regeneration of our country.’
Leopardi’s sense of helplessness was very keen; that he was useless in the world, where so much sorrow attended him,—that he only expected peace on quitting it, is evident in all his poems. The beauties of nature seem but to deepen his sadness; his very style is painful. When not roused to indignation, his Muse has but one low plaint—a yearning for release from life. In one of his smaller pieces this is delicately touched; every reader who has known the luxury of reverie when contemplating a setting sun will recognise the yearning for the Infinite Silence in his lines, “L’Infinito.”
But it is in the poem on “Love and Death” that he most undisguisedly expresses that desire for release which the brilliant Frenchwoman uttered when she said, “I sometimes feel the want to die, as the wakeful feel the want to sleep.”
Leopardi did not long survive this appeal to Death. He lingered out his few remaining years at Naples, secluded from the world, secluded even from study, but somewhat consoled by the sympathy of his friend, Antonio Ranieri, and by that of Count Platen, a kindred spirit, who, in a rapid decline, had come from his cold Germany to linger out a few months longer at Naples. In the brief intervals of his respite from pain, Leopardi amused himself with composing a satyrico-political continuation to the Batrachomiomachia (Paralipomeni della Batrach), in eight cantos, which may, probably, be amusing to Italians, but has little attraction for foreigners. On the 14th of June, 1837, in his thirty-ninth year, just as Ranieri was about to remove him to Portici, the cholera having burst out at Naples, his sufferings ceased. A few hours before his death, says St Beuve, he wrote some verses in the style of Simonides or Mimnermus, “et dont voici le sens: Mais la vie mortelle, depuis que la belle jeunesse a disparu, ne se colore plus jamais d’une autre lumière ni d’une autre aurore; elle est veuve jusqu’à la fin, et à cette nuit qui obscurcit tous les autres âges, les dieux n’ont mis pour terme que le tombeau.” To the very last, the same despair!
Our task is done. We have introduced the name of a great writer and most unhappy man, and, in a general way, indicated the nature of his genius and the cast of his thoughts. It remains for those who can appreciate and enjoy the one, without being ungenerous towards the other,—who can admire the writer while condemning his opinions, and who, in the calm serenity of their own minds, can still recognise a corner of doubt, and believe that, so long as doubt and sorrow shall be the lot of mankind, the poet whose lyre vibrates powerfully with their accents will deserve a place amongst the musical teachers,—it remains for them to seek in Leopardi’s works a clearer, fuller knowledge, of the man.
[George Henry Lewes], “Life and Works of Leopardi,” in Fraser’s Magazine for Town & Country, Vol. XXXVIII, No. CCXXVIII, December, 1848, pp. 659–69.