An Italian Pessimist [pp. 296-315]

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so large. But he shut himself away from the kindly offices of
home-life in sullen isolation. While yet scarcely out of the
nursery he rebelled against the companionship of his tutor as a
condition of going about the town, regarding as unbearable espionage what was but an ordinary custom. Without any words
about it, he simply ceased to go beyond the gardens, and made
companions of lexicons and grammars, of dry folios and musty
parchments, instead of birds and flowers and sunshine. The
younger children, Carlo, Luigi, and Faolina, were patronized by
the dreamy boy, and he felt kindly towards them, as is shown
by letters addressed to them in after-years; but there is no evidence of any warmer sentiment towards them than that sort of
toleration expressively conveyed in the term family affection.
As to his mother, whatever her influence upon the rest of the
household may have been, it is certain that she filled' a very
small space in the regard of her gifted son, between whom and
herself there came to be an entire estrangement.*
The intense applicatidn to study of this enfant 6rudit, unnatural as it was, did not awaken the alarm of his parents; for it
must be remembered that in the beginning of this century physical culture and questions of hygiene were things comparatively
unknown. The child himself, by a strange contradiction, delighted in astonishing the friends who were wont to assemble at
the family-seat upon festive occasions by the display of his precocious attainments, and never refused to gratify parental vanity
in this regard. The love of applause thus early manifested became a ruling passion as the years went by, and in his after-life
the only thing like happiness he ever`knew lay in the recognition of his genius by the world. This abnormal development of
his intellectual powers did nothing towards lessening the loneliness of spirit which was his especial characteristic, and already
at ten years old the sense of desolation was so strong upon him
that, in a kind of despair such as might have overtaken some
broken-hearted, world-weary man, we find him seeking relief
from his misery in a new course of study, such as could only
be attempted by the few even among matured and practised
*Leopardi's estrangement from his mother has its parallel in the history of the late John
Stuart Mill, and contemporaneous evidence shows that such unnatural feeling was as unjustifiable
in the one case as in the other. So keen was the indignation at the time of publication of Mill's
Autobiography, in which his mother is as much ignored as though she had never existed, that it
was currently reported that his sisters were bribed, in justice to their mother's memory, to supplement their hrother's account of himself. Mill's alienation from his family was then attributed
by his friends to the sinister influence of his wife, whom he thus apotheosizes: "Her memory
is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does all
worthiness, I endeavor to regulate my life" (Autob6ography, p. 251).