Part Five: Humanism in Life and Letters

Leopardi would have looked with favor on several of the modern humanist movement’s beliefs. He would have certainly approved its adoption of a philosophy that was “free of theism and other supernatural beliefs,” and its commitment to “the dignity of each human being,” a phrase that avoids the exaltation of the masses that he always found alien to his way of thinking.[1] He would also have supported the idea “that knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis; that humans are an integral part of nature; and that humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships.”[2] But he would have rejected another modern humanist principle, that “working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.” For Leopardi, happiness was unattainable; at best, it consisted of an absence of pain, a stoical condition of indifferent calm in the face of life’s rewards and challenges. He would also have found it impossible to embrace modern humanism’s commitment to “a progressive philosophy of life,” since he rejected the very notion of human history as a “progressive” and developmental process, except in the physical sciences. Indeed, he believed that the ancients were more highly developed morally and creatively than were modern peoples. He also believed, more significantly, that all of the earliest literary documents that concern the origins of man, such as the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis, showed that the human species was damned, or damned itself, from its inception. This was a theme of Leopardi’s early canzone “Hymn to the Patriarchs, or on the Origins of the Human Race,” written in 1822. The concluding stanza of this poem, however, does not allude to the Biblical story of the fall of man but rather to a contemporary event, the decimation of the American Indians at the hands of “civilized” colonialists. The resulting plunder had marked still another chapter in the history of man’s degeneracy:

So in the boundless California forests

a blessed race is born, whose breast

is never nursed by pallid care, whose body

implacable disease does not destroy;

and with the woods for food, the hidden crags for nests,

and the irrigated valley giving water,

the day of dark death hangs over them unseen.

Oh kingdoms of wise nature, undefended

from our evil greed! Our boundless rage

storms her shores and caves and peaceful forests,

drives her assaulted natives to strange labor

and desires they never knew,

and hunts down fleeting, fragile happiness

till the sun sets.[3]

We’ve seen that Leopardi looked askance on the great overarching humanist principle of “the dignity of man,” which he found to be in blatant contradiction with the realities of human behavior, as evidenced in the passage just cited. Indeed, it was because of his own extreme sensitivity to pain and insult, and his disgust at seeing the many ways in which tyranny and war were justified in the name of Realpolitik, or even defended as inherently good and reasonable, that he recoiled from abstract idealizations of human dignity.

However, Leopardi can be connected unqualifiedly to the history of humanism in the cross-fertilization that took place between his friendships and his classical studies. This was a constant of his life from his mid teenage years, when he began his correspondence with Pietro Giordani, to the 1830s, when he befriended the Swiss classicist Luigi de Sinner. The word “humanism” is an appropriate term to suggest the way in which this merging of the personal and the scholarly took place. His assiduous labors as an editor and translator of Greek, Roman, and Italian authors, for which he received the modest emoluments typical of the humanist’s profession, are part of a tradition going back in Italy to the twelfth century. To this body of work I would add the hundreds of pages of the Zibaldone that deal with linguistics, prosody, literature, and criticism, and especially Leopardi’s “annotations” to his own ten canzoni, which I will comment on later in this chapter.

Leopardi’s translations, annotations, and explications of the Greco-Roman classics are not dry-as-dust scholarship. His critical and often personally engaged introductions to the works of Homer, Isocrates, Virgil, Cicero, Theophrastus, Moschus, Lucian, Seneca, Fronto, Anacreon, Epictetus, and still others are testimony to his belief that reading these authors constituted an essential part of any educational curriculum worthy of the name.[4] He believed this for essentially two reasons. The first was that he saw himself as a moralist who looked to the classics as an indispensable source of wisdom and insight concerning practical aspects of human behavior. He read the work of the seventeenth-century French moralists, from La Rochefoucauld to La Bruyère, but his greater passion was for the moralists of antiquity, in whom he found all sorts of relevant material for the modern age. The second reason was his conviction that classical antiquity was a time in human history that fostered a remarkable combination of spontaneity and profundity, of expressive energy and a sense of form and structure, qualities that he himself tried his utmost to incorporate into his own writing. Keenly aware of how far modernity had strayed, inevitably, from its origins in classical antiquity, he brought to bear on his work a strong affinity for Greek poetry and philosophy, which, it will be remembered, he acquired through his own independent efforts, whereas he learned Latin under the direction of his tutors.

Leopardi also made notable contributions to the study of the Italian language and Italian prosody. In addition to his annotated edition of Petrarch’s Rime,[5] he edited two anthologies of Italian prose and poetry, the Crestomazia di prosa and the Crestomazia poetica, published respectively in 1827 and 1828 by Antonio Fortunato Stella.[6] These were anthologies of passages that Leopardi thought worthy of study and emulation by aspiring writers. Like his Operette morali of 1826, they sold quite well, and brought him unexpected recognition by a larger reading public than did his poetry.

Three of Leopardi’s philological works, his edition of Petrarch’s Rime, his “preamble” to the Manual on Stoicism by the Greek philosopher Epictetus, and his “Annotations” to ten of his own poems, the canzoni, are typical of his practical, down-to-earth, philologically precise approach to the literary and scholarly traditions of which he felt a part.[7]

What strikes one immediately on reading Leopardi’s notes on Petrarch and Epictetus is his modest demeanor and his wish to be useful not just to the learned but to ordinary people as well. As early as 1820, he wrote to Pietro Giordani of his conviction that what was needed in Italy was “a language and a style that, being classical and ancient, seems modern and easy to understand and pleasurable both to common people and to men of letters.”[8] His main goal as a classical scholar was to contribute to the literary and philosophical education of as many people as possible. In this way his classical scholarship formed a part of what, in the title of this study, I have called his “search for a common life.”

Leopardi made extensive use of Petrarchan motifs in his own poetry. In effect, his poetic vocabulary and much of his imagery were Petrarchan, as were some of his themes. Like Petrarch, he never grew weary of using a series of common but suggestive words, such as dolce, cuore, cielo, chiaro, amore, caro, vero, gentile, and so on. The musicality and mellifluousness of Petrarch’s Italian were predominant features of Leopardi’s poetry as well. Also of great importance to Leopardi was Petrarch’s evocations of revelatory moments in the past that the poet relives nostalgically in the moment of composition.

Leopardi maintains a sober, objective tone throughout his edition of the Rime. The majority of his notes clarify the meanings of obscure words and phrases. Whenever necessary, he offers syntactic and grammatical explanations, although he did not want to be known as a grammarian. He is thorough in explaining Petrarch’s Christian symbolism, and his use of mythological tropes that the average reader could not be expected to know. Occasionally he cites the Latin or Greek original on which a particular verse is based.

In his comments on what is probably the best known of Petrarch’s odes, beginning Italia mia, ben che ’l parlar sia indarno (My Italy, although words are in vain), Leopardi had a perfect opportunity to denounce the lamentable divisiveness of his own time, yet he did not do so. He limited himself to a brief paraphrase of the verses in which Petrarch deplored the wars, enmities, and internecine rivalries that prevented Italian political leaders of the fourteenth century from closing ranks in opposition to their common enemies. Whether this was because of the way in which he conceived of his responsibilities as an editor, or because of a fear that more pointed comments about his own time would cause ever alert censors to prohibit publication of the book, is impossible to say. Perhaps he thought that readers would draw their own conclusions, without his having to tell them what to think. Whatever the case, as editor of Petrarch, Leopardi saw his primary role as being that of guide and teacher concerning the problems of Italian poetic discourse, not that of a militant patriot.

Leopardi’s notes also avoid detailed commentary on Petrarch’s obsessional subject, his feelings about his beloved Laura, first as a living person and then after her death in the plague of 1348. Surprisingly, Leopardi did not think that Petrarch was as great a poet as the Italian literary establishment claimed he was. He outlined his reasons for this opinion in a letter to Stella of September 13, 1826, a period in which he was in constant touch with his Milanese publisher. After comparing Petrarch unfavorably with Dante, and indicating his agreement with the Swiss historian Simonde de Sismondi (1773–1842), who had voiced this same opinion, he argued that “Platonism for Petrarch seems like a fable to me because in more than one place in his verses he demonstrates in an extremely obvious way that his love was like so many others, sentimental, indeed, but not without its carnal purpose.”[9] Leopardi was always skeptical about the spiritualization of love that took no account of the beloved’s carnal existence. This trait can also be seen in his “radically materialistic criticism of the Platonic conception of the beautiful.”[10]

Leopardi’s own point of view comes through more vibrantly in his preamble to Epictetus than in his edition of Petrarch. He took a different tack in interpreting the stoic philosophy of the Greek moralist, which was conventionally understood to be applicable only to the lives of “virile and exceptionally energetic people.” His point was that for most ordinary people, it was neither wise nor natural to resist the blows of fate, and to struggle heroically until death to realize one’s own purposes. On the contrary, for the great majority of normally weak human beings, such struggle was inappropriate. For most people, debilitated by constant unhappiness and by their own experience of the evils that lurk at every turn of the way of ordinary existence, the teachings of Epictetus, and of other stoic philosophers, were extremely useful. The reason, Leopardi argued, was that stoicism taught people the lesson that yielding to fortune or destiny is a far wiser path than aspiring to the kind of defiant individuality that marks the lives of exceptional human beings. For ordinary people, the best choice was one of calm resignation to whatever fate had in store, thus allowing a sense of “tranquil servitude” to free the individual of most of the pains that “customarily torment existence.” How this attitude differed from the Christian conception of humility in the face of suffering, which Leopardi opposed, at least in theory, is not easily explained.

Leopardi’s argument reduces itself to the belief that renouncing happiness and ceasing to run away from its opposite was the only reasonable choice to make for one’s life. Hence his advice to readers was to emulate “the indifference” taught by Epictetus, meaning that one should seek neither to be happy nor unhappy. He concluded his preamble by confessing that he himself had adopted the philosophy of Epictetus only after “much hard spiritual struggle and much anguish.” He hoped that everyone who read his translation of the Greek philosopher would derive the benefits from him that he had.

The preamble to Epictetus is an unusual document in that it seems to renounce the heroic dimension that Leopardi had seen as indispensable to his own life. But we should remember that Leopardi was never a man all of one piece, that he wavered and oscillated between opposing facets of his personality, and that what he had to say was almost always a product of particular moments and situations. His subject in the preamble was the perennially popular one of happiness, not heroism. In other words, the advice he imparted to his readers was designed to teach practical wisdom in the light of his own personal experience, not to foment an insurrectionary state of mind.

The Epictetus translation, which he completed in two weeks in January 1826, belongs to the same years when Leopardi was devoting most of his time to editing and translating. His particular passion at this time, reflecting the mood and style of his Essays and Dialogues, was for the ancient Greek and Roman moralists, among whom were Epictetus, Isocrates, Xenophon, Theophrastus, and Seneca. He had an ambitious plan to publish, with Stella, a series of translations of the Greek moralists, which came to only partial fruition, and included his translation of a fragment by Xenophon that appeared in the Nuovo Ricoglitore.

Leopardi’s “annotations” to ten of his canzoni, which were published together in a Bolognese edition of 1824, exemplifies his philological rigor, and his relish for polemics. They differ from his Petrarch and Epictetus commentaries in that they are characterized by the kind of combative tone that is typical of his satirical poems and the Operette morali. His aim in these annotations was not only to clarify the meanings of difficult or obscure passages in his poems but also, and more essentially, to break through the inhibitions imposed on Italian poets by three types of literary authority figures, whom he labeled pedants, pedagogues, and purists.

The Annotations are actually a kind of declaration of independence on behalf of the poet’s right to deviate from the rigid linguistic norms imposed on the Italian literary community by cultural institutions such as the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, whose Dictionary, or Vocabolario, set the standard of what constituted correct and incorrect usage. In the mid-1820s, the hoary “question of the language,” which since Dante’s time had been debated in learned treatises, was once again becoming a matter of intense controversy. Alessandro Manzoni was one of its protagonists. He took the position that the only way to achieve a classically pure and nationally uniform Italian suitable to the needs of modern Italian writers was to have them follow his example, which was to “rinse” out the dialectal and other impurities from their language and adopt, as a standard, the Italian spoken and used in Tuscany. Leopardi had high regard for Florence and the region of Tuscany, but he was not a purist, and argued in his annotations for a blend of “Tuscan” Italian with linguistic forms that, even if not endorsed by the Crusca, had been consolidated in practice by esteemed Italian writers through the centuries.

In one typical note, he had some fun playing with his real or potential critics in defending his use of the exclamation evviva as the most appropriate word for the exultant tone with which the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos sang the praises of Greek warriors who had died on the battlefield defending their country. After noting that viva was included in the Crusca Dictionary but not evviva, he expressed this point of view about the controversial word:

As for its suitability, there will be those who don’t praise the use of the word evviva in a lyrical poem. I don’t have the heart to enter into what concerns poetic usage or the style and feelings of these Canzoni, because poor besieged poetry seems to me to deserve, if nothing else, that it be free of picayune glosses. And therefore I’ll be quiet except to say that when one wants to express any kind of feeling at all with extreme vehemence, vulgar and current words and modes of expression, I don’t say must be used, but, when they are used judiciously, are much better than noble and sumptuous ones, and give much more force to the imitation.[11]

A closely associated argument that Leopardi made in his Annotations concerned his use, in a verse of the eighth stanza of “On the Monument to Dante Being Erected in Florence,” of the verb abbondare, in the third person singular: “Qui l’ira al cor, qui la pietade abbonda” (so rage and pity overwhelm the heart). The English verb “abound” comes close to the meaning Leopardi wanted to convey with abbonda, to mean in great quantity: Galassi’s “overwhelms” is an excellent translation of the word in this context. But Italian purist grammarians evidently frowned on such a usage, because, as Leopardi explained, “‘abbondare’ in the third person singular, in the way I use it, is judged to be against the rules. And I know this very well, that what is found blameworthy by others is found praiseworthy by Italians, indeed that ordinarily (and especially in literature) much more esteem is accorded by Italians to imitated things than to invented ones,”[12] where “invented” meant original.

Leopardi displayed a remarkably broad and deep knowledge of Italian literature in these Annotations. He was able to cite scores of sources, examples, precedents, choices, nuances taken from obscure and famous Italian writers, whom he cited seemingly at random, although finding them in such quantity must have taken him weeks if not months of research. Ironically, the considerable effort he put into his textual commentary turned out to be, at least with regard to the two examples just discussed, 50% successful. He won the day with his use of abbonda but lost the argument over evviva, since in the 1831 and definitive edition the exclamation had gone back to viva.

A saying circulated during Leopardi’s lifetime that involved a comparison between him and Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), who was associated in the popular imagination with a belief in acceptance of the will of God and in the wisdom of Providence. The saying was “To church with Manzoni, to war with Leopardi!” But this is acceptable only insofar as it applies to particular moments and aspects of the two writers’ lives and literary practice. Manzoni’s “[re]conversion” in 1812 to the Catholic religion, and his renewed faith in the miracles of Christianity and in the virtue of sufferance, did not prevent him from heralding the militant nationalism of the day in his poem “March 1821,” where he spoke of the Italian people as “one in arms, language, and faith, / in memories, blood and heart.” Manzoni could rise to heights of patriotic pride, as in the last two stanzas of this poem, where he declaimed “Today, oh strong ones, / let the fury of your hidden aims flash like lightning: / win our fight for Italy! / her fate depends on your sword.”[13]

Leopardi the prophet of Italian redemption and Manzoni the poet of faith and forebearance were both capable of multiple states of mind; both contradicted themselves more than once. Their intentions and choices reflected the complexity of their roles as writers torn by conflicting emotions at different moments of their lives. Leopardi’s “To Italy,” of 1818, and Manzoni’s “March 1821,” belong to the same period, one that witnessed a rise in revolutionary militancy among Italy’s politically conscious class. This would account for the similarity in their attitudes at this juncture despite the differences in outlook and temperament between the two writers.

Almost all of Leopardi’s professional associations turned into strong personal friendships: such was the case of the Milanese publisher Antonio Stella, the Roman publisher and writer Francesco Cancellieri, the Florentine publisher Giampietro Vieusseux, and the Swiss classicist Luigi de Sinner.[14] His correspondence with each of these individuals is testimony to qualities in him that quickly converted what might ordinarily have been a strictly business connection into a deeply personal attachment.

At the age of seventeen, he was already an accomplished letter writer whose urbane style, while sometimes rather florid, nevertheless conveyed a sense of genuine respect for his interlocutors. Speaking of himself, in a letter to Francesco Cancellieri (1751–1826), who had praised his translation of Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, he already displayed the humanist scholar’s talent for the apposite classical quotation. After thanking Cancellieri for mentioning him in a work entitled Dissertazione intorno agli uomini dotati di gran memoria (Dissertation on men endowed with powerful memory), which he said would bring luster to his name as well as to that of the author, he went on to say, grandiloquently, that “We would not know Achilles, if Homer had not spoken of him; but the immortality of the poet guarantees that of the hero. In this way I see myself assured of living in posterity through your writings, just as great men live in their own.”[15]

Even when writing to his sister,[16] at the remarkably early age of fourteen, Leopardi had begun to use classical references with an ease that must have startled twelve-year-old Paolina. He began by describing a letter he had received from Paolina as “worthy in its brevity of being commended by the Lacedaemonians, and by other peoples of Greece, who, obliged to respond in a letter to a request sometimes wrote only the word ‘no.’” He then thanked his sister for making a copy of his recently completed Compendio di logica (Compendium of Logic), after which he closed his missive by insisting on the importance of accurate copying of manuscripts, which he exemplified with a story about Petrarch; not Petrarch the poet but Petrarch the humanist, the indefatigable searcher after classical manuscripts who, upon finding a work of Cicero, immediately copied it himself rather than wait for an amanuensis.

Like many of his predecessors in the Renaissance, such as the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who devoted years of labor to translating his beloved Plato, and Machiavelli, who formed a touching affection and esteem for his favorite Latin poets and historians, Leopardi had feelings of reverence for the classical writers he chose to translate. In his exchange of letters with Pietro Giordani, who was a classical scholar of high repute, Leopardi’s attitude toward the poets and essayists he was translating was almost always personal and passionate. Writing to Giordani on March 21, 1817, he told his new friend that “your letters have allowed me to pass beyond respect to real affection. I don’t know how you can admire someone’s virtue, and in a singular manner when they are great and illustrious, without developing an affection for the person. When I read Virgil, I fall in love with him.”[17]

Leopardi’s correspondence with Giordani during the early years of their friendship is saturated with this kind of enthusiasm. He spoke of Homer, Virgil, and Dante as if they were close friends, not imposing figures belonging to a distant past. He was so deeply immersed in Greek studies that on several occasions, as he revealed to Giordani in a letter of May 30, 1817,[18] he took pleasure in passing off poems he had written in Greek as authentic originals by an unknown author that he had had the good fortune to discover in an unspecified library. One of these, which he entitled “Hymn to Neptune,” and to which he appended detailed scholarly notes, was published in Lo Spettatore on May 1, 1817. He explained his reason for this learned prank to Giordani by confessing that “enamored of Greek poetry, I wanted to imitate Michelangelo, who buried his Cupid and, to the person who dug it up and believed it to be an ancient work, he brought the missing arm.” He seems to have been convinced that his subterfuge would soon be found out, but in the meantime he asked Giordani not to tell anyone about it. Four months later, in an exclamation typical of their correspondence, Giordani was so amazed by the younger man’s literary gifts that he exclaimed in Latin Inveni hominem (I have found the man), referring to the passages in the Book of Daniel where King Nebuchadnezar rewards Daniel for having interpreted a dream that none of his own advisers had understood. Giordani was convinced that his young friend was destined to achieve the renown that he, Leopardi, had craved since he was first introduced to the classically based studia humanitatis, the humane studies, embracing poetry, history, and moral philosophy, for which he felt such a strong affinity.

During his five-month stay in Rome from November 1822 to April 1823 Leopardi continued to mix his classical scholarship with personal friendships that expanded his horizons beyond the Italian landscape. Three such friends were his first cousin Giuseppe Melchiorri, a paleontologist who was among Leopardi’s most devoted friends; a young Belgian writer named André Jacopssen, with whom he conversed and corresponded in French; and the Prussian historian and diplomat Christian Karl von Bunsen, who did his utmost to secure gainful employment for Leopardi through his extensive contacts in Rome with diplomats, church officials, scholars and publishers. During Leopardi’s stay in Rome, Bunsen was secretary to the Prussian ambassador to the Holy See, Barthold Niebuhr. Unfortunately, none of his efforts on Leopardi’s behalf were successful.

In a letter [19] from Bruges written in early June 1823 to Leopardi, a few months after the latter’s return to Recanati, the young Belgian, after an account of his romantic adventures, made it clear that the two friends had talked at length about how to acquire the ability to deal with “the inevitable unhappiness and disappointments of life.” This was one of Leopardi’s favorite subjects, and Jacopssen was grateful for the benefits he had derived from their conversations. Like Leopardi, who had steered him in this direction, he revealed that he had profited immensely from reading the classics. “You need all of antiquity to find models as perfect as Socrates and Boethius. Yet who doesn’t know the precepts for happiness of Seneca? Who has depicted better the sweetness of a peaceful life than a Jean-Jacques?” Jacopssen also agreed with Leopardi concerning the human quality best able to help people cope with life, which was la sensibilité.

In his response to this letter, Leopardi adopted an intimate and almost confessional tone, telling Jacopssen how touched he was by his confidence in him, and by his candor in revealing “the state of his soul . . . [because] it is so sweet to see the secrets of a heart such as yours.” He wrote at length about his frustration at not being able to “apply” the gift of “sensibility” in practical ways.

Among the things that Leopardi had discussed with Jacopssen was the nature of virtue and of “illusions” as real forces in the lives of many people. Both he and Jacopssen had read the Greek and Roman moralists for enlightenment on these subjects. Their teachings informed the following paragraph of Leopardi’s letter, which could easily have been mistaken for the work of one of his favorite classical authors: Cicero, for example, who in his essay “Laelius: On Friendship” said that “the feeling [of friendship] shines brightest when it is shared by persons of the same age.”[20] Leopardi said this to his friend:

In truth, my dear friend, the world does not know its true interests. I would agree, if you wish, that virtue, like everything that is beautiful and great, is but an illusion. But if this illusion were common, if all men believed and wanted to be virtuous, if they were compassionate, beneficent, generous, magnanimous, full of enthusiasm; in a word, if everyone were sensitive (because I make no distinction between sensitivity and what is called virtue), wouldn’t we be happier? Wouldn’t each individual find a thousand resources in society? Shouldn’t one apply oneself to fulfilling illusions as much as possible, since the happiness of man cannot consist in what is real?[21]

I don’t know whether Leopardi was able to maintain contact with Jacopssen in future years; but even if their relationship lasted only a short time, it must have gratified him to have found a person of his own age with whom to express deeply personal ideas and feelings that were rooted in a classical culture common to both.

Leopardi’s friendship with his cousin Giuseppe Melchiorri lasted until the poet’s death in 1837, which caused Melchiorri almost as much grief as it did Antonio Ranieri. Leopardi had known Melchiorri since childhood, but they became fast friends only later, in Rome, when they relied on each other in both personal and professional matters. Melchiorri was the son of Leopardi’s aunt Ferdinanda, Monaldo’s younger sister. The Melchiorris were a family of believers; several of their offspring were dignitaries in the Church. But this does not seem to have provoked any tension between Leopardi and his cousin. The reason lay in their conception of friendship, which came up in several of their letters. When either one of the two began to fear that the other had lost interest in him, he made it known immediately, and so avoided the unacknowledged misunderstandings and resentments that have spoiled many a friendship.

In one letter of October 1824, Leopardi, not having received a prompt reply to his letter, was frank enough to hope that Melchiorri “had not renounced the close and sincere friendship that we have formed.”[22] In March of the following year, he returned to this subject, telling Melchiorri that he, Melchiorri, had certainly not deceived himself in “believing me to be your true and immutable friend, and you should also be persuaded that friendship with men of your character commits those who have possessed it once to then zealously conserve it always.”[23]

It’s symptomatic of the classical education that both men had received that in the letter just cited, the phrase Leopardi used to convey the idea of “zeal” was con ogni studio, where studio is a translation of the Latin studium, which in ancient times was usually used to mean zeal or eagerness rather than “study” as it does in modern Italian and English. Once again, it is evident that Leopardi’s manner of expressing himself in his letters to highly educated friends was determined in good part by his long immersion in the Greco-Roman canon. Taking friendship as seriously as they did was itself an outgrowth of their mutual bond as heirs to the thought of Greek and Roman moralists. Melchiorri was the first to articulate this theme when, in May of 1823, not long after Leopardi left Rome, he let it be known how much he missed his friend’s company. One gets the feeling that friendship compensated both men for the deprivations they experienced in other aspects of their lives. This would explain why Melchiorri went to such pains to tell Leopardi that “the expressions of your heart, born of your sincerity and true friendship, will always be most welcome, and since we have no other pleasure, let’s not deprive ourselves of repeating to each other our reciprocal feelings of benevolence and friendship.”[24]

If Leopardi was seeking a publisher for one of his pet translations, it was likely to be Melchiorri that he turned to for help, knowing that his cousin was both a dependable friend and a knowledgeable classicist who would appreciate the value of his project. Melchiorri was his middleman in establishing relations with a Roman publisher, Mariano De Romanis, with whom Leopardi had exchanged letters as early as 1816. Leopardi knew that Melchiorri would understand the importance of a book proposal he wanted to make to De Romanis in December 1824, which was to produce “an elegant little edition of Theophrastus’s Characters in pure and good Italian.” To this he added that “no such work exists, translated directly from the Greek.”[25] In order to begin work, he needed Melchiorri to send him “a Greek or Greco-Latin copy of the latest edition of Characters, which can be found in Rome.” Leopardi counted on Melchiorri’s being familiar with all of the booksellers in Rome who dealt in classical literature, since Melchiorri was himself involved intellectually and professionally in the buying and selling of such texts, to individuals and to libraries. Among other responsibilities he was secretary of the Archaeology Society in Rome.

Melchiorri was instrumental in seeing to it that Leopardi’s Annotazioni all’Eusebio was published, along with his translations of several books of Xenophon’s Anabasis,[26] an account of the Spartan march across mountain fastnesses to the Black Sea in 401 B.C., after their defeat at the hands of the Persian army. The importance of the work by Eusebius (A.D. 265–340) was that it was the basis of much that is known about Greek and Roman history to A.D. 325.[27] Not only did Melchiorri represent Leopardi in his dealings with publishers, but he also corrected the proofs of the Eusebius translation.[28]

In May 1832, when Leopardi was thought by many to be the author of his father Monaldo’s reactionary Dialoghetti, an immensely popular book that went through three editions in less than a month,[29] it was Melchiorri who managed to insert the poet’s disavowal of his presumed authorship in an issue of the Rome newspaper Il Diario di Roma. But it was in June 1837, soon after Leopardi’s death, that Melchiorri’s sensitivity and understanding of what made Leopardi the person he was became fully evident. In his letter of condolence to Ranieri on June 22, 1837,[30] Melchiorri spoke from the heart when he said to Ranieri that “the sorrow caused by Leopardi’s death will be eternal, just as his memory will be eternal to me.”

Leopardi’s life and death were never far from Melchiorri’s mind, as we can see in a letter to Ranieri of November 9, 1839. He was among those who appreciated the “spiritual affinity” between the two friends;[31] he saw beyond conventional attitudes, which were sometimes thinly veiled insults, when he wrote that “your letters which more than anything else compensate me a little for the very bitter loss of my dear Giacomo” were what had made him aware that “so great in both of you was the uniformity of thought and feeling, so great was the bond between your hearts, that it seems to me that I have not lost everything if I still possess your sincere friendship.”[32]

Another of Leopardi’s important friendships in Rome was with the Protestant theologian and diplomat Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen. Although born to a farmer’s family in the German principality of Waldeck, he eventually acquired the title of “Baron” and had a successful career in the Prussian foreign service. He was a close friend and colleague of the Danish-German historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, when both worked in the Prussian embassy in Rome, he as secretary and Niebuhr as ambassador to the Vatican. Bunsen eventually replaced Niebuhr as ambassador to the Holy See and served in this post from 1832 to 1839. He was a man of liberal political sympathies who helped to obtain fair treatment in Germany for that country’s Catholic minority.

Bunsen had scholarly interests, and for this reason was immediately drawn to Leopardi when the two men met at a social gathering in Rome in the latter part of 1822. Three years later, in August 1825, when Leopardi was in Milan working for Stella on a bilingual Latin-Italian edition of Cicero’s writings, his uncle Carlo persuaded him to write a letter to Bunsen in which he was to make a clear statement of his principles expressed in such a way as to gain a favorable response from the papal secretary of state, and through him from the Pope himself, Leo XII. The idea was for Bunsen to use the letter to promote Leopardi’s candidacy for any one of several academic and administrative posts that were soon to become available in Rome. The approach failed. But several things about this letter deserve to be mentioned.

The letter [33] is one of the few incidents in Leopardi’s life when he seems to have let his personal needs and ambitions take precedence over his principles. This, at least, is the impression it makes on the reader today. He began by emphasizing his devotion to classical studies and to “the true and healthy philosophy,” which he did not specify, hoping, apparently, that the Papal secretary would interpret his words as an implicit assertion of conservative values. But he followed up these words with a more ethically questionable generalization by saying how much he deplored “the horrible uncertainty into which so many fine modern intellects have been thrown by a poorly understood freedom of thought, and above all by the unhappy state of public morals in our time, and that ruin and destruction by which society is currently threatened because of the diffusion of principles that are incompatible with the social life of mankind.” Moving on then to one of his favorite themes, while citing the French philosopher Pierre Bayle as support for his views, he spoke of his conviction that “pure human reason . . . is an instrument of destruction, not edification.” This could be taken either as a repudiation of reason disjoined from faith, or as a rejection of reason tout court. His actual thought on reason is far more nuanced than such a statement would imply.

At this point in the letter, Leopardi, not content to arouse the papal secretary’s sympathy by implication, returned to his chosen role of classical scholar in order to link his humanistic studies with a certain interpretation of Plato that saw the Greek philosopher as what Leopardi called “the greatest exponent of the foundations of religious morality that antiquity produced, I mean the divine Plato, prince of philosophic eloquence and so highly praised and loved by early Christians, but now not known in Italy except simply by name and reputation.” His praise of “the divine Plato” as a precursor of Christianity gave him a way of telling his correspondent that he, Leopardi, was determined to translate those of Plato’s writings that were not stuffed with “thorny dialectics” but rather that offered a supreme example of Greek philosophical eloquence. He let it be known that he was the man ready to do a translation of Plato into “a pure Italian.” The remainder of the letter was a request that he be given the chance to return to “the capital of the Catholic world” by serving “in whatever capacity His Holiness might wish to impose on him.” I’ll return shortly to this letter; but first a few observations on Leopardi’s views on Plato are in order here.

Leopardi’s comments on Plato in his letter to Bunsen are an indication of the extent to which he looked to the Greek philosopher as a source of insight into the relationship between reason and imagination. He rejected Plato’s conception of ideas as preexisting their real worldly incarnations, and was skeptical about other aspects of Platonic idealism. But he was mindful of what poets such as himself owed to Plato as embodying in his very style a synthesis of poetry and philosophy. An entry in the Zibaldone of August 22, 1823, is a telling statement of Leopardi’s indebtedness to Plato:

It should be observed that the most profound philosophers, the most penetrating seekers of truth, and those capable of the widest field of vision, were expressly noteworthy and singular also for their faculties of imagination and heart, they distinguished themselves for a decidedly poetic vein and genius, they gave illustrious examples of it in their writings and their actions, or in the sufferings of life that derive from the imagination and sensibilities, or in all of these things together. Among the ancients Plato, the profoundest, the most vast, the most sublime philosopher of all the ancients who dared to conceive a system that embraced all of existence, and took into account all of nature, was in his style and in his inventions etc. as great a poet as everyone recognizes.[34]

Returning to the letter to Bunsen, it isn’t known what impression if any it made, assuming that Bunsen succeeded in getting the letter into the Pope’s hands; the fact that nothing came of it suggests that Leopardi’s reputation as a critic of the Church and of priestly abuses, and his repeated rejections of attempts by his father and uncles to persuade him to become a priest himself, made him an unlikely candidate for the kind of position he was seeking.

It’s always possible, of course, that Leopardi believed much of what he said or implied in this letter, especially with regard to misguided “modern intellects” who did not understand what “freedom of thought” really meant. This remark may have reflected a sincere wish on Leopardi’s part to justify his own brand of liberalism, which by the mid-1820s was not friendly to revolutionary action of the kind that had already failed in Italy on various occasions over the preceding decades. He mistrusted all political theories based on mass action. The general tenor of his thoughts on the French revolution in the Zibaldone, which are dated May 1821, consistently place that event in a philosophical rather than a concretely political context, by connecting it to the triumph of reason, which he looked upon with profound mistrust. Yes, he thought, the revolution did accomplish a “rebirth” in Europe, a risorgimento of sorts, but it had done so by avoiding the life-destroying consequences of “pure reason” and “by having brought men back into touch with nature.”[35] In other words, the revolution had left sufficient space for the flow of spontaneous creative energy. But this does not qualify as real enthusiasm.

There is nothing in Leopardi’s writings after the mid-1820s that would justify considering him a militant revolutionary. Nor did he have any particular interest in the fortunes of the European working-class movements, one of whose stellar moments was the role it played in the French revolution of July 1830. He was more of a liberal democrat, to use a contemporary label. Indeed, some years later, in a letter of June 26, 1832 to his sister Paolina, he spoke of the French Revolution of July 25, 1830 as an event that had “ruined Europe and with it literature for a good century.”[36] So it seems reasonable to wonder to what extent the language he used in his letter to Bunsen for the Vatican secretary, although deliberately ambiguous, was in some respects a true gauge of his outlook at the time. This is another reminder that we will be well served if we keep in mind Leopardi’s state of mind at the time he expressed this or that opinion, the nature of his motives, and the person or group to whom he was addressing what he had to say.

Bunsen, although only seven years older than Leopardi, seems to have been something of a father figure to him in that he became the person to whom the poet turned most often for financial assistance, personal recommendations, and exchanges about their common intellectual interests. He often relayed messages and books given to Leopardi by his superior at the Prussian embassy, Barthold Niebuhr, whose History of Rome was a work that Leopardi read in November 1828, with considerable interest. Niebuhr’s reaction to the Revolution of July 1830 was so similar to Leopardi’s that one wonders whether the two men had some contact with each other at the time, either in person or in correspondence. Leopardi’s feeling that it had “ruined Europe and with it literature for a good century” was shared in equal measure by Niebuhr, to whom the Revolution was a terrible blow, and filled him with the most dismal anticipations of the future of Europe.

None of Bunsen’s efforts on Leopardi’s behalf bore fruit. In October 1825, he supported Leopardi’s candidacy for an appointment to a chair in Greek and Latin eloquence at Rome’s La Sapienza University. But he finally discouraged Leopardi from seeking this chair because he did not think that the salary for such a position was sufficient to allow Leopardi to live decently in Rome.[37] He also urged Leopardi to test his mettle at one of several German universities where he, Bunsen, had contacts and influence. But this démarche too came to nothing.

Leopardi corresponded with Bunsen in the mid-1830s, when he, Leopardi, was living in Naples with Ranieri. Bunsen had facilitated Leopardi’s friendships with a small group of German intellectuals in Naples that included the poet August von Platen (1790–1835), with whom Ranieri also struck up a close friendship. They owed their contact with Platen to a German archaeologist and art historian, Heinrich G. Schulz. Platen visited Leopardi and Ranieri often; he demonstrated his knowledge of Italian in a cleverly rhymed three-line poem that went “A. P[laten]. saluta Giacomo Leopardi / che s’alza tanto tardi, / e Antonio Sempre-fuori / dottissimi signori.”[38] He was struck by the almost “repugnant” impression that Leopardi’s physical appearance made on him at their first meeting, but he noted that this was quickly dissipated by “the refinement of his classical culture and by the grace of his being, which win you over.”[39] The one letter we have from Schulz was addressed to Ranieri on April 17, 1835, whom he asked to enlist Leopardi’s help for a scholar who was doing research for a biography of Raphael. He spoke of Leopardi as “the poet of Italy, gentleman and Count Leopardi, whose profound Canti currently stimulate a lively interest among foreign scholars . . .”[40]

In July 1835, Bunsen sent Leopardi an amusing letter that probably expressed the feelings of many readers of Leopardi’s Essays and Dialogues. He spoke of the Essays as “philosophical” rather than as prose-poetic writings, following a tendency of German critics to see in Leopardi more of a thinker than a poet. A week or so after honoring Leopardi’s request for a loan, as he had done a number of times in the past, he ventured a little critique of Leopardi’s point of view in the following manner:

My reading of your philosophical works had suggested some ideas to me which I wanted to communicate. To confess to you frankly, in many parts I don’t find my old Platonist, but instead the acute and hypochondriacal observer of the hypocrisy of men, of the cowardice of familiar character types, of the abuse that is made of the eternally sacred names of virtue, of love of country, of religion. I would like you to bestow on your country a philosophical work that did not reflect so clearly your melancholy at having to live in such times.[41]

Leopardi responded to this letter with some comments about himself that we rarely find so explicitly stated in his correspondence. His unusual self-appraisal reflects, I think, the mixture of frankness and objectivity that he associated with a classical humanist’s proper decorum. His aim was to clarify an aspect of his life experience as it had affected his writing: