SOURCE: Corrigan, Beatrice. “The Poetry of Leopardi in Victorian England 1837-1878.” English Miscellany 14 (1963): 171-84.

[In the following essay, Corrigan discusses Leopardi's reputation in England in the mid-nineteenth century.]

«The first time an Englishman ever mentioned the name of Leopardi in print was, we believe, in a recent novel», wrote George Henry Lewes in an anonymous contribution to Fraser's Magazine in 1848¹. «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».

Some of Leopardi's poems had indeed been translated into German as early as 1823², and he had been the subject of an article in France in 1833³. But during his lifetime an unfortunate barrier had already risen between English and Italian men of letters. No longer did English poets seek out, as Byron had done in Milan in 1816, their Italian confreres, and the English periodicals were interested in Italian politics rather than in Italian literature.

Leopardi was himself conscious of this lack of intellectual intercourse. Of the two Leopardi brothers, it was Carlo who had devoted himself to English literature, and who was urged by his uncle to win fame as a translator⁴; yet it was Giacomo who in 1826 wrote to the publisher Stella telling him about a newly founded English journal, the Panoramic Miscellany, and offering to translate some of its articles for the Ricoglitore. The Miscellany, he explains, «promette di accordare una particolare attenzione alla nostra letteratura trascurata generalmente dagli altri giornali inglesi, e si annunzia che i redattori sono, per opportune corrispondenze, in grado di ricevere sopra le nostre produzioni letterarie maggiori e più numerose informazioni che non si sogliono avere in Inghilterra»⁵. If the Ricoglitore published a selection of these articles, translated and annotated, «acquisterebbe un grado d'interesse dei maggiori possibili, ed anche una grande utilità, pei dibattimenti urbani a cui darebbe luogo tra una nazione e l'altra; pel confronto delle opinioni letterarie delle due nazioni, ec.».

However the Panoramic Miscellany survived only one year, and in any case Stella discouraged the project, which he considered too precarious because it was difficult to import foreign periodicals into the Austrian and Papal territories with any regularity⁶.

Leopardi seems to have made the acquaintance of only two English men of letters. In 1831 he sent a copy of his edition of Petrarch's Canzoniere to the distinguished Anglo-Italian scholar George Frederick Nott, whom he had probably met that year in Rome⁷. Nott praised the edition as «semplice e dotta», and added: «A mio avviso essa è la più utile, e perciò la migliore edizione, che forse finora sia mai comparsa di quell'illustre Poeta»⁸. He also suggested an interpretation of a passage that had puzzled Leopardi, who included Nott's explanation, with a grateful acknowledgement, in the 1839 reprint of his interpretazione.

The second surviving letter from Nott to Leopardi shows that they were on cordial terms, and that they met again in Florence in 1832 before the English scholar's departure from Italy⁹.

The only contemporary description of Leopardi in English occurs in the diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, distinguished like John Cam Hobhouse for his literary friendships rather than for his own achievements. He met Leopardi in Florence in 1831, and wrote under the date of June 13:

«I occasionally saw Leopardi the poet, a man of acknowledged genius and of irreproachable character. He was a man of family, and a scholar, but he had a feeble frame, was sickly, and deformed. He was also poor, so that his excellent qualities and superior talents were, to a great degree, lost to the world. He wanted a field for display—an organ to exercise»¹⁰.

More than twenty years later Robinson was reminded of his Florentine acquaintance, and was more frank about his own estimate of the poet. «Finished the last Prospective Review», he wrote on June 2, 1854, «by reading on Leopardi—a sickly poet of great reputation whose Odes I found unreadable—that is, obscure. He, Leopardi, was the friend of Poerio the Neapolitan victim. And Ranieri his friend is a name I recall and find in my journal. The praise is extravagant but more of the philosopher than poet. His person not unlike De Quincey in the impression left of it, like mother of pearl»¹¹.

However Robinson's diary was not published until 1869, and the novel to which George Henry Lewes referred in the passage which I have quoted at the beginning of this article, his own Ranthorpe, appeared in 1847. One of the themes of Ranthorpe is, appropriately enough, the formative influence of suffering on a poet, and though Leopardi is not mentioned in the text quotations from his poems and prose are used as epigraphs for four chapters¹². Yet Lewes' cautiously worded statement was misleading, for Leopardi's name had been mentioned in print in England, though not by an Englishman, as early as 1837. An article by Giuseppe Mazzini, entitled «Italian Literature since 1830», which appeared in the Westminster Review¹³ divides contemporary Italian men of letters into two camps, the followers of Manzoni and the followers of Guerrazzi. Then it continues: «Between these two opposite tendencies in the literary world, answering to two which exist in great activity in the social world, but with which we have no concern here, is placed making advances sometimes to one, sometimes to the other, a sect without a name—a certain number of individuals professing a literary eclecticism, who hesitate between imitation and innovation, between the ancient and the modern. Some, as Nicolini … clothe a classic outline with drapery of Romanticism. Others, as Leopardi of Recanati (who died at Naples on the 14th of June) endeavour to express the feelings and the thoughts of the present day in a form and style savouring of the classics. Neither the dramas of the first nor the Petrarchan songs of the second at all deserve, in our opinion, the high reputation they have acquired from the sentiments of patriotism with which they abound. The former contain pieces of exquisite poetry, and the latter breathe a spirit of profound melancholy, a characteristic of the age, but they are nevertheless the efforts of a transitory period, which the future is destined to efface».

This ungenerous consignment to oblivion of the greatest Italian poet of his age may perhaps be explained by Mazzini's own bias to political optimism, probably in particular need of encouragement during the first bitter moments of exile when the article was written. But it was one of the ironies of Leopardi's fate that the only record in England of his death should be set down in this casual tone by his own compatriot, unwilling or unable to appreciate his genius.

In any case, Mazzini's article preceded Ranthorpe by ten years, and Lewes' own article in Fraser's was inspired, as he himself says, by an article by Sainte-Beuve which had appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1844, and by the publication in 1845 and 1846 of Leopardi's prose works in four volumes.

Lewes begins his article with a biographical sketch, touching lightly on the fact that Leopardi had passed, «by what steps is now unknown, from the submission of a fervent piety to the freedom of unlimited scepticism». He classes him with the Romantic school, though he points out that there is no German influence on Leopardi's work. «The distinctive characteristic of Leopardi's poetry», he says, «is despair over the present accompanied with a mournful regret for the past».

«As the ‘poet of despair’ we know of no equal to Leopardi», he continues. «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 he 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 tastes alike taught him».

It is evident however that Lewes was not always capable of judging either Leopardi's mastery of his art or the profundity of his thought, and this is evident in his comments on one of the most perfect of Italian lyrics. «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 recognize the yearning for the Infinite Silence in his lines L'Infinito».

But though his discussion of the poems is slight, and he is, characteristically, much more interested in the philosophical prose works, Lewes did earn the distinction of being the first to translate into English one of Leopardi's poems. He chose Amore e morte (translated by Sainte-Beuve into French at the close of his own article) which was to prove a favourite with English translators. He made no attempt to follow the metric form of the original; his aim was rather a line by line translation which should be as faithful as possible, and at the same time rhythmic and poetical.

Lewes concluded his article by saying: «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 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 recognize a corner of doubt, and believe thas 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».

In 1849 Leopardi's Poesie and Viani's edition of his letters appeared, and the six volumes of his published works were the subject of a long review article by William Ewart Gladstone in the Quarterly Review for 1850¹⁴. Unlike Lewes, Gladstone indicates no covert sympathy with Leopardi's bleak philosophical speculations, but he admires him as a «powerful and lofty poet», unequalled by any Italian in his generation with the exception of Manzoni. Yet he found the abundant beauties of his poems often «scarred and blighted by emanations from the pit of his shoreless and bottomless despair», and he illustrated his essay with translations from the prose works alone.

A second account of «Giacomo Leopardi: His Life and Writings» appeared anonymously in The Prospective Review in 1854, and was the article to which Crabb Robinson referred. It was based on the Epistolario alone, which accounts for the greater emphasis laid on Leopardi's philosophy, but it contained translations of twenty lines of All'Italia and of the major part of Il risorgimento¹⁵. Like Lewes' article in 1848, it opened with a claim to discovery. «Few of our countrymen we imagine», says the author, «have read the writings, not many even heard the name, of one of the most remarkable men of modern Italy, who passed away to his rest some fifteen years ago, after a life into whose short space was crowded an almost superhuman amount of labour, of wrecked ambition, and of physical suffering».

It is perhaps not without significance that Lewes' article appeared in the same number of Fraser's as one on «The Austrian-Italian Question». It was undoubtedly the political events of 1848 that kindled English interest in Italian poetry, and an Italian political exile was the next to play a part in introducing Leopardi to an English audience. Count Carlo Arrivabene, who had fought in Venice in 1848, came to London and in 1854 became deputy professor of Italian at University College, London, during the absence of Antonio Gallenga, who had returned to Italy as a member of the Subalpine Parliament. In 1855 Arrivabene published an anthology of Italian verse, with brief biographies of the poets included, for the benefit of students of the Italian language in England¹⁶. In it he printed the whole of All'Italia, and stanzas 2 and 3 of La ginestra—a characteristic and appropriate choice for a hero of the Risorgimento.

In 1859 an anonymous writer in the Westminster Review¹⁷ set down with unsparing candour the reason for the low esteem in which Italian letters had been held for some years. «The contempt which, rightly or wrongly, has fallen on the Italians as a people has extended itself to their literature. In England especially it is little valued; our poetic affinities incline us towards the north, towards Goethe, Schiller, and the poets of the ‘Fatherland’. Another reason for the neglect into which Italian poetry has fallen among us, is the difficulty attending its study. The Italian minstrels have adopted a language peculiar to themselves, abounding in the most daring inversions, which demand a long and careful study, and for this few of us have either time or patience. So we turn coldly away, and take for granted what detractors both abroad and at home are continually repeating, or at least have been repeating till the present moment, that Italian modern poetry is weak, affected, and inflated; even as we have been in the habit of repeating that modern Italians, the countrymen of Balbo, Gioberti, Manin, Cavour, are all either triflers or conspirators, opera-singers or revolutionists».

He calls Leopardi «the poet and the philosopher of grief», but makes no mention of his nihilism; and he describes his poetry as «marked by the rare purity, the nervous eloquence, the energetic conciseness which characterizes his style, and which renders all translations incapable of conveying a just idea of its beauty». He ventures however to translate the first three stanzas of All'Italia, and concludes his article by saying that «no work of imagination, however admirable in itself, which does not touch the chord of patriotism and national independence, can expect popular sympathy. This is a hopeful symptom; it proves that Italy has awoke from its slumbers—awoke to a new and healthy existence».

This view was shared by Louisa Anne Merivale, daughter of the distinguished Italian scholar, John Hermann Merivale. In 1863 she published in Fraser's Magazine a two-part article entitled «Italian Poetry and Patriotism»¹⁸. She is the first writer to recognize Leopardi's stature as a poet; she calls him superior to both Giusti and Manzoni, and says that he has had no equal for three hundred years. She points out his debt to Petrarch, and compares him to Foscolo in the Greek quality of his genius. She mentions, without deploring, that he was «deeply penetrated with the querulous, ironical, melancholy views of life, characteristic of modern scepticism», and explains this by the unhappy circumstances of his own life and the country into which he was born. She illustrates her comments by quoting in Italian fragments from the Monumento di Dante and from Ad Angelo Mai.

In 1865 Miss Merivale published an anthology, I poeti moderni italiani¹⁹, modelled to some extent on Arrivabene's, and using for the biographical notes, as she herself acknowledged, much of the material which she had already published in Fraser's. Like the writer in the Westminster, she feels that the modern poetical idiom is difficult for the English reader, and her anthology, containing thirty-two poets of the past hundred years, is meant for «a class of readers, common I believe in this country, who, knowing Italian in a general way, and sufficiently able to construe it in prose or in a classical poet of the olden time, are not at home in the involutions of the modern style, and are wont to be repelled from the study of more recent authors by the labour it often requires to master their precise meaning».

She includes nine poems by Leopardi in her anthology, and in a prefatory note attempts to justify his philosophical attitude. «As Dante is the Poet of Scorn, Petrarch of Love, Ariosto of Adventure, so Leopardi is preeminently the Poet of Ennui: not of the mere self-indulgent listlessness to which the name is commonly applied but of that deep dissatisfaction with human life and its paltry results, which is in fact the noblest argument for man's immortal nature—for while the gloom of this dissatisfaction has often thrown its shadow over other aspiring and speculative minds besides his, the better balanced and the happier have been cheered by the consolation that lies beyond it. It was Leopardi's portion to feel the gloom but not the consolation. Yet his was far from the calculating misbelief of the Atheist. His heart clung to love and truth and virtue; and even the scepticism which his writings profess was, as has been said of it, a scepticism which led men to happiness».

An anonymous reviewer of Miss Merivale's anthology in the Athenaeum²⁰ praised Leopardi even more highly. «He is to be classed among the most complete and elect poets of our time; he is one of the typical writers of the nineteenth century, and, among Italians, closer than any contemporary to the compactness, eloquence grace and dignity of the great mediaevalists who remain to this day, and will to all ages remain, the constellations of the poetic horizon of Italy. As finished as Tennyson, as sensitive as Victor Hugo, as sombre as Byron, Leopardi would alone avail to render the poetry of the present age of permanent value and weight among the rich, but for a long while past decreasingly rich, literature of his noble country».

This reviewer commented on the monotony of the patriotic theme in Italian poetry, but it was true that, as it had been through the centuries, Italy's literary reputation was still closely linked to her political fortunes. Mazzini in 1837 had first introduced Leopardi to the English public, Arrivabene had first included him in an anthology published in England, and one of Mazzini's fellow-exiles, Giovanni Ruffini, was to be responsible for the first extensive translations of his poems into English.

After a few hungry years in England, and a quarrel with Mazzini, from whom he differed violently on more than literary matters, Ruffini had taken up residence in Paris in 1842. There in the winter of 1864 he met the Scottish novelist, Mrs. Margaret Oliphant, and became a regular weekly visitor to her salon. When she left Paris for Avranches in May 1865 he gave her as a parting present a copy of Leopardi's poems. In June of the same year Mrs. Oliphant wrote to Mr. Blackwood the publisher: «I send you with this a paper upon the Italian Leopardi, which I hope very much you may like. I am so destitute of anybody to speak to here, on literary subjects, that I cannot feel sure whether my author will impress you as he does me, or whether I have done him anything like justice. The paper is very long, I am afraid»²¹. Her article appeared anonymously in Blackwood's Magazine in October²². It began with a semi-apology for the obscurity of its subject, who, Mrs. Oliphant says, «has neither the breadth nor the depth of the great masters of Italian song». He may however, she suggests, provide for the English reader a stepping stone to Dante after he leaves «the little well-known round furnished by Manzoni and Silvio Pellico». The modern mind after all needs help to pass from «Manzoni's limpid narrative to the great depths of the majestic Florentine». The works of Leopardi, she continues, «are so little known in England that it is scarcely presumption to fancy that it is a new poet whom we are about to introduce to a large number of our readers; and though it would be vain to pretend that they are of an order which can be called popular, they express at least the emotions of a mind of our own century, whose thoughts run in a more modern channel than those of the greater poets of Italy, and by means of whom the reader may perhaps ascend more easily to those great and solemn heights».

But she compensates for her patronizing tone by translating the whole of A se stesso, A Silvia, Le ricordanze, and Il sabato del villaggio; almost the whole of Amore e Morte; and fragments from All'Italia, Nelle nozze della sorella Paolina, and La quiete dopo la tempesta.

During the next ten years, though James Thompson's translation of the prose works was printed in The National Reformer between 1867 and 1868²³, only one translation of a poem appeared in England²⁴. This was John Addington Symonds' version of A se stesso, published in the semi-obscurity of a school magazine, The Cliftonian, in 1870²⁵. In 1878, as I have described elsewhere²⁶, Giovanni Ruffini was responsible for the translation by Eugene Lee-Hamilton of a second group of poems, six in number. These appeared in Lee-Hamilton's Poems and Transcripts, published by Blackwood.

In the same year, 1878, another member of the Merivale family, Herman C. Merivale, the prolific Victorian dramatist, grandson of John and nephew of Louisa Merivale, translated for Blackwood's Magazine the Canto notturno under the title of Song of the Night²⁷. Like Mrs. Oliphant, he half apologized for the obscurity of his subject, quoting, without acknowledgement, his aunt's remark that Leopardi «as a constant victim to disease and suffering, was incapacitated from sustained composition on a large scale, so that his principal poems were canti and canzoni» Merivale further fore stalled criticism with the following footnote: «The translator, while anxious to introduce to the English-reading public a version of so fine a poem as the ‘Canto Notturno’, desires at the same time, happy as he is in a simpler faith, to disclaim on his own account all sympathy with the gloomy ‘nihilism’ which pervades it».

Thus during the first phase of Leopardi's fortunes in England, the thirty years from 1848 to 1878, only thirteen of his poems had been translated in full or in part: A se stesso, Amore e morte, and All'Italia three times each, the others once. Il passero solitario had never found a translator, though it was one of Ruffini's favourites and should have had a special appeal for the bird-loving English. The two great final poems, Il tramonto della luna and La ginestra, still remained unknown except in Italian to a generation of readers unprepared to accept Leopardi's resolute denial that future happiness for man might lie beyond the black abyss of death.

A philosopher, a statesman, two descendants of an Anglo-Italian scholar, three Italian patriotic exiles, a popular novelist and two poets had shared in the attempt to make Leopardi known to an English public. None of them apparently had any great success: most seem to have been unaware of their predecessors' efforts, though Herman C. Merivale does refer to Mrs. Oliphant's article, as well as quoting from his aunt's; many reiterate apologies for the poet's obscurity and pessimism, and seem doubtful of his merit. At least two regard him as a student's training ground for poetry more elevated or more elaborate.

Indeed it was not until 1887 that the first complete English translation of the poems, by Frederick Townsend, was published²⁸ though according to Ruffini Mrs. Oliphant had hoped to produce such a work in 1865. This marked the beginning of a second period for Leopardi. In 1888 Matthew Arnold accorded him the serious attention due to a major poet, comparing him with Wordsworth and Byron. From then on, he was to belie the predictions of Mazzini, Lewes and Mrs. Oliphant by proving the most popular and the most frequently translated Italian poet of the nineteenth century.

Notes

1. «Life and Works of Leopardi», Fraser's Magazine, XXXVII, ccxxvii (Dec. 1848), 659-669. I am indebted to Professor Walter Houghton of Wellesley College for this identification, which is based on The George Eliot Letters, ed. G. S. Haight, New Haven and London, 1955, p. 369.

2. Franz Spunda, G. Leopardi, Gedichte, Leipzig.

3. G. Charlier, «Le premier article français sur Leopardi», Revue des Études Italiennes, Jan-Mar. 1938, 13-20.

4. Epistolario di Giacomo Leopardi, ed. Francesco Moroncini, Firenze, Le Monnier, 1934-41, I, 200, 204.

5. Ibid., IV, 177-178.

6. Ibid., IV, 179-180.

7. In 1808 Nott had published in London Petrarch Translated: in a Selection of his Sonnets and Odes Accompanied with Notes and the Original Italian.

8. Epistolario, VI, 129.

9. Ibid., VI, 191.

10. Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, Boston, 1871, II, 154.

11. Published by permission of the Trustees of the Dr. Williams's Library from the Henry Crabb Robinson Collection. A portion of this entry in the Journal had been previously published in Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith Morley, London, Dent, 1938, II, 740.

12. Book III, chap. xi («Despair»), lines 27-36 of the Ultimo canto di Saffo. Book IV, ch. viii («The Miseries of Genius»), quotation from the Operette morali. Book IV, ch. vii («The Dream»), lines 4-8 of Il sogno, and 25-31 of Il primo amore. Book IV, ch. viii («Waking Dreams and Waking Sadness»), lines 19-23 of the Ultimo canto.

13. Westminster Review, XXVIII (1837-38), 132-168. The article is signed A. U., probably as a compliment to Mazzini's companion in exile, Angelo Usiglio. It was the first article published by Mazzini in English. He was paid £ 36 for it, but had to give half this sum to the translator.

14. LXXXVI, clxxii (March, 1850), 295-336. Cf D. E. Rhodes, «Mr Gladstone's Essay on Leopardi», Italian Studies, VIII (1953), 59-70. Also Professor J. H. Whitfield's introduction to his translation of I Canti, Naples, Scalabrini, 1962.

15. X, xxxviii (1854), 157-194.

16. I Poeti Italiani. Selections from the Italian Poets, London, 1855.

17. «Modern Poets and Poetry of Italy», Westminster Review, LXXII, cxlii (Oct. 1859, American ed.), 237-253. This is a review of three works: Foscolo's Opere (Florence, 1857); Rime scelte di vari poeti moderni (Paris, 1857); Poeti italiani (Lugano, 1859).

18. LX (Jan.-June, 1863), 383-395; LXVIII (July-Dec., 1863), 603-618. Leopardi is discussed in the second part, which covers the period from Alfieri to Guerrazzi.

19. London, Williams and Norgate. The poems included are: All'Italia, Ad Angelo Mai, Canto notturno, La sera del dì di festa, Frammento («Spento il diurno raggio»), Consalvo, Le ricordanze, Alla luna, A Silvia, Il sogno.

20. May 20, 1865, pp. 681-2.

21. The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs M. O. W. Oliphant. 3rd ed., Edinburgh, Blackwood, 1899, p. 71.

22. XCVIII, 459-480.

23. Though he translated none of Leopardi's poems, his own poetry shows the influence of the Italian poet. For Thompson's interest in Leopardi, see Imogene B. Waller's James Thompson (B. V.), Cornell University Press, 1950, pp. 86-88.

24. I am dealing here only with translations published in England. But mention should be made of William Dean Howell's article, «Modern Italian Poets», North American Review, CIII, 213 (Oct. 1868), 313-345. In a perceptive discussion of Leopardi, he translates A se stesso, A Silvia, Imitazione, Sopra un bassorilievo antico sepolcrale, and lines 96-107 of Amore e morte.

25. II, i (July 1870), 11.

26. English Miscellany, 13 (1962).

27. CXXIV, dcclv (Sept. 1878), 336-339.

28. The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi, translated by Frederick Townsend: New York and London, G. P. Putnam's Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1887. Townsend, an American born in New York, spent the last ten years of his life in Italy. His translation was published posthumously with an introduction by Octavius Brook Frothingham. It begins, inevitably: «Giacomo Leopardi is a great name in Italy among philosophers' and poets, but is quite unknown in this country». The translation is complete except for the Coro dei morti, I nuovi credenti, and three Frammenti.