Sì come dopo la procella oscura
Canticchiando gli augelli escon del loco
Dove cacciogli il vento (nembo) e la paura;
E il villanel che presso al patrio foco
Sta sospirando il sol, si riconforta (si rasserena)
Sentendo il dolce canto e il dolce gioco;
[As after the dark tempest
Birds singing leave the place
Where wind (storm) and fear drove them;
And the villager at his hearth
Yearning for the sun, is comforted (is cheered)
By the sound of sweet song and sweet merriment;]1
The great majority of useful works bring pleasure indirectly, showing how we can obtain it. Poetry brings it immediately, provides it for us.
Longinus asked (at the end of his treatise On the Sublime) why there were so few great men in his time and gave the explanation that it was partly because of the end of the republics and of liberty, and partly because of avarice, lust, and sloth.2 Now these are not the mothers but the sisters of that effect of which we speak. And they all derive from the progress of reason and civilization, and from the absence or weakening of illusions, without which there will almost never be greatness of thought, or power and force and boldness of spirit, or great actions, which are usually a kind of madness. But when everyone is thoroughly enlightened as to how glory, patriotism, liberty, etc. etc., are vain delights and goods without substance, he looks for something solid, obscene carnal pleasures, [22] etc., in other words earthly pleasures, he looks for personal benefit whether in money or otherwise, and becomes necessarily selfish, unwilling to make sacrifices for imaginary rewards, or to compromise himself for others, or to place at risk a greater asset such as life, property, etc., for a lesser one, such as praise, etc. (not to mention that civilization makes all men the same, removing and suppressing differences, and the distribution of wisdom and good qualities does not increase the mass but fragments it, so that, reduced to small portions, it produces small effects). This leads to avarice, lust, and sloth, and from them the barbarism that follows the excess of civilization. And so there is no doubt that the progress of reason and the extinction of illusions produce barbarism, and an excessively enlightened population certainly does not become highly civilized, as the philosophers of our day, Mme. de Staël, etc., imagine, but barbarous.1 We are moving fast in this direction and have almost arrived. The greatest enemy of barbarism is not reason but nature. Nature (if properly followed, however) provides us with illusions that, in their right place, make a people truly civilized, and certainly no one would describe the Romans when they fought the Carthaginians, or the Greeks at Thermopylae, as barbarians, even though, for both populations, it was a time of very powerful illusions and was hardly philosophical at all. Illusions are natural, inherent to the system of the world. When they are removed completely or almost completely, man is denatured, and every denatured people is barbarous, for things can no longer run as the system of the world requires. Reason is a light; nature seeks to be illuminated by reason, not burned. As I say happened with the Greeks and the Romans: at the time of Longinus, they were already almost barbarous, yet there had been no foreign invasion; barbarism arose from their very own land, from those most civilized lands, because civilization had become excessive. Cicero was the advocate of illusions.2 Read in particular the Philippics, but then all of his other political orations. He is always seeking to persuade the Romans to act in pursuit of their illusions, always with the example of their forebears, glory, liberty, patriotism, death rather than servitude. What a disgrace is this: Antony, a tyrant of this race, is still alive, etc. And yet, though Antony in other times would have been stabbed in the Forum or in the Curia as a most shameful tyrant, in Rome they could not succeed, even with so many armies against him, and with so much reason to hope that he would be defeated, that he would be declared an enemy of the state; they calculated, sought, etc., what in other times would have been agreed unanimously without a moment’s hesitation. Cicero argued in vain, there were no longer the illusions of earlier times, reason had come, people didn’t give a fig about patriotism glory benefit to others to posterity, etc.; they had become egoists, they weighed the benefit to themselves, worried about what might happen, forgot boldness and drive, forgot greatness of spirit, the example of their forebears was a triviality [23] in times so changed. And so they lost their freedom, they were unable to retain and defend what even Brutus had done out of a last vestige of illusion; the emperors came, lust and sloth increased, and shortly afterward, with so much more of philosophy, books, science, experience, history, they had become barbarous.
And reason, by making us naturally inclined to pursue our own advantage, and removing the illusions that bind us to one another, dissolves society absolutely and turns people to savagery.
It seems that even the love of wonder has to be reduced to love of the extraordinary and hatred of the boredom produced by uniformity.
Seeing the moon journey with me.1
It is not fanciful but rather reasonable and true to place the heroic periods among the most ancient people. The heroism and self-sacrifice and glorious death, etc., discussed by Breme (Spettatore, p. 47)2 end with illusions, and no fool wishes these for himself in a period of reason and philosophy, like the present, one that, as such, is what I have said it is, a period totally devoid of heroism, etc.
The only lyric poet, ancient or modern, in whom you find that feeling which inspires eloquence and by dazzling less persuades and moves us more, especially where tenderness is concerned, is Petrarch, at the very least to that extent. And however superior Horace might be in his images and ideas, in such feeling and eloquence and plentifulness he cannot even approach comparison with Petrarch, whose style (here I am talking not only about the love poems but also particularly and especially about the three lyric poems: “O aspettata in ciel beata e bella,” “Spirto gentil che quelle membra reggi,” “Italia mia,” etc.)3 also has a simplicity and candor all its own, which yet is flexible and admirably fits the nobility and magnificence of the utterance (as in: “Pon mente al temerario ardir di Serse,” etc. [“Consider the rash daring of Xerxes”]), both in the whole structure, and continually, and in the various parts and in those passages where he rises to greater sublimity and nobility than usual. His style bends to his ideas (as in: “Rade volte addivien che a l’alte imprese,” etc. [“Rarely it happens that noble ventures”]), even if few of any note are to be found in these three poems. It adapts wonderfully to the images that abound in the three poems and which are grafted onto the style and are its lifeblood, etc. (such as: “Al qual come si legge, / Mario aperse sì ’l fianco,” etc. [“Whom, as we read, Marius so wounded”], “Di lor vene ove il nostro ferro mise,” etc. [“With their veins where he plunged our steel”], “Le man le avess’io avvolte entro i capegli” [“Would that I had my hands clutched in her hair”], etc.
Testi’s writing is competently poetic and elegant, not lacking in imagination, and also has some nice little images (as when he says of David: “E allor che in Oriente il dì nascea / Usciva a pascer l’agne / Su la costa del monte o lungo il rio” [“And when the day dawned in the East he went out to graze his sheep on the mountainside or along the stream”], in his poem “Nelle squallide spiagge ove Acheronte”).4 It has adequate grandeur and some elegance; the ideas, though not new, are neither ill-placed nor ill-stated; he is also fairly successful in his philosophical Canzoni in the style of Horace. He often imitates and sometimes almost translates Horace, but does not have his lively and well-honed style, or his concise nervousness and muscularity and energy and spirit, or great originality or novelty, or what you could really call sublimity in concept and invention. But all the qualities that I have described, save only grandeur and eloquence, shine above all in the Canzoni in the first part, which are mostly philosophical and Horatian, and in which the style is pure and there is no lack of elegance in manner and concepts. For in the other parts, although they are more exalted
and show more strength and eloquence and more powerful descriptions, and are, in short, more reminiscent of Pindar, it is difficult to find a canzone that is not smeared roughly and shabbily and visibly and persistently with the tar of his century, which in the first part is just visible here and there as tiny spots, and perhaps one or two canzoni are entirely unblemished by it and might appear to be from another century. His writing also [24] becomes less elegant and clean, and the words and turns of phrase, metaphors, figures of speech are often prosaic. In short, one sees too much of the feverishness and shoddiness and lack of polish of the seventeenth century.
Belonging only to Petrarch, as far as feeling is concerned, are not just abundance but also those outbursts full τοῦ πάθους [of pathos] and those affectionate images (such as: “E la povera gente sbigottita” [“And the poor terror-stricken people”],1 etc.) and all else that constitutes true, lively, and spirited eloquence. And from the heart’s influence in Petrarch’s poetry comes the softness and unctuousness almost, like that of the smoothest oil, of his Canzoni (and particularly those on Italy). The odes of others seem dry and hard and arid in comparison to his, and while he lacks none of the sublimity that others have, he also has the softness and mellowness that comes from the heart.
Filicaia pursues the sublime and also manages to achieve it, but by speaking always of matters pertaining to our Religion he has taken to imitating that supreme sublimity of Scripture, and it is for this supreme sublimity that he is admired. When he does not seek it or does not achieve it, there is almost nothing out of the ordinary about his work, he is never elegant, he has none of Testi’s variety, etc. But even when he achieves that supreme sublimity of style similar to Scripture or prophecy, he is not very pleasing, because of the monotony of his Canzoni and because the impressions of that supreme sublimity are too vehement and therefore cannot last very long and fade away, and the reader becomes inured, so that, with this monotony, the sublime becomes ineffectual and his poems become tedious. The best are the ones on the siege and liberation of Vienna, and among these, in my view, the one that begins “Le corde d’oro elette.” Here and there, they bear the stains of seventeenth-century style. There is no lack of prosaic words, turns of phrase, or metaphors, such as “A tua Pietà m’appello” [“To your Mercy I appeal”] in the first Canzone, and in the second: “E al tuo soldo arrolata è la vittoria” [“And in your service is victory enrolled”].2
Chiabrera opened up a path that was new for Italians. He was the only Pindaric poet, not excluding Horace, sublime in the Greek style of Homer and Pindar, that is to say, within broad but proper limits, and not in the oriental style of Filicaia, but sublime, with a fitting Greek simplicity, through a juxtaposing τῶν λημμάτων [of ideas], as Longinus says,3 in other words, of certain parts of something that, when fully assembled, rapidly form the sublime, and, as I say, a sublime that is rapid, unaffected, and, in short, Pindaric; robust in his images, sufficiently fertile in invention and novelty, indeed easily capable, like Pindar, of becoming impassioned, excited, sublime even over insignificant things, and at once giving them an air of greatness and excellence. He was bold, passionate, fervent in dealing with his subjects, bold in his use of words (as in instellarsi [to fill with stars] inarenare [to run aground]), in his expressions, in his constructions, in taking from Greek and Latin the forms both of feeling (such as: Heroic Canzone 70: “Meco non vo’ che vaglia sì sconsigliata voce” [“I do not wish that such poor counsel be heeded”], and elsewhere: “A me non scenda in cor sì ria parola” [“May such a wicked word not enter my heart”], and note that I say the forms of feeling and not the feelings themselves) and of words, in which he was sometimes successful, such as: Heroic Canzone 23: “Qual non fe scempio sanguinoso acerbo / L’aspro cor dell’Eacide superbo?” [“What bloody bitter slaughter was not wrought by the savage heart of proud Eacide?”], Heroic Canzone 40: “Sol fe contrasto il gran sangue di Guisa” [“Only the noble blood of Guise resisted”], etc.4 He was also a good imitator of the Greeks and Pindar and Horace in economy of composition. And certainly sometimes he is very noble both in feeling and in words. But in the end very few pieces manage to please. Despite what has been said about his outward style, he almost never succeeds in that felicity of expression or that beauty of composition that one finds in the words of Horace, he is quite often obscure by reason of his constructions, his ambiguities (not deliberate, like those of the seventeenth-century poets but either not noticed or ignored), the suppression of intermediate ideas in passages (even if this is natural because [25] although the fervent poet never passes from one thought to another without some reason and circumstance that links as it were the various ideas, nevertheless, because this link is extremely subtle, he can easily skip it, or even if he doesn’t skip it, the reader is unable to see it) and even in passing, e.g., from the premises to the conclusion, etc., in short, he is often disjointed (but this can also be praise for the accuracy of his imitation, his sentiment, his inspiration, and this whole fault of obscurity he shares with Pindar), he has some blemishes of seventeenth-century style, which are rare, however, and would not matter much. He uses certain metaphors that are not at all seventeenth century, but are too bold, reminiscent of Pindar, yes, but overly bold, such as Heroic Canzone 14, where he describes the armies of Tuscany: “Elle non tra i confin del patrio lito, / Quasi belve in covili, / Ma fero udir gentili / Per le strane foreste aspro ruggito” [“They, no longer in their homeland, like beasts in their lairs, but nobly in foreign forests uttered their wild roar”], or Heroic Canzone 41, where veils are described as woven plumes1 (even if the use of the word roar could be defended with the preceding simile of the beasts, with the idea that it refers to the simile, in other words the metaphor was not simply about the armies roaring, but about them changed into beasts or compared with beasts and thus roaring, by way of a Pindaric enallage). He does violence to the language in words (such as Greek-style compounds: ondisonante [sounding like the waves], etc., which our language dislikes), in forms that are inappropriately transported from Greek and Latin (since not always, indeed not often, is it appropriate, as I have stated several times), in turns of phrase, in constructions. And what is worse, and deadly, he is very uneven and overloaded with passages that are weak in feeling, indeed even whole Canzoni, or nearly, with a generally unhappy style, uncultivated language (“neglexit linguae cultum” [“he neglected to cultivate the language”], says Gravina in his Latin letter to Maffei, and it is true),2 so that there are very few pieces of which one can speak well without reservation, and in which, even when the images and feelings are perfect (which is not so rare), the external style does not have defects that are glaringly obvious and disgust you. For if he had been more selective (“delectum rerum et limam amisit” [“he renounced selecting and polishing”], as Gravina so rightly said, loc. cit.) and more polished (of the two, he was perhaps, and above all, incapable of the second), he would have been the greatest Pindaric lyricist of any country, ancient or modern, unequaled by Horace or anyone else, except Pindar himself. These defects in particular (of selection and polish in both things and words, since the other defects considered above are not so serious, and we know that a great poet must have great faults, so that, if there were only those, I would not hesitate to consider him a great lyric poet anyway) were such that, as a great lyric poet was born to Italy, so too was he lost to it, for one cannot say that the verses of Chiabrera are good lyric poetry, but only that he was a true lyric poet.
A subtle consideration concerning the art of writing is that sometimes the, let us say, fortuitous arrangement of words, however clear the author’s meaning [26] might be, produces a different idea in the minds of readers upon first reading. This must be avoided, especially when it is inappropriate, and especially in poetry, where the reader uses more imagination and more easily believes that he is seeing something and that the poet wants him to see something which the poet has not thought of or would not even wish to. This is an example from Chiabrera’s f
uneral Canzone 15, “In morte di Orazio Zanchini,” which begins: “Benchè di Dirce al fonte,” stanza 3, line 38 of the Canzone,1 and twelfth and penultimate of the stanza: “Ora il bel crin si frange, / E sul tuo sasso piange” [“Now her lovely hair is broken, and on your stone she cries”]. Si frange [is broken] here means struck, and the poet means struck with her hands, etc. The sense is clear, and that si frange has nothing to do with sul tuo sasso [on your stone] and could not be more clearly distinct from it. But the chance arrangement of the words is such that I wager that many who read Chiabrera’s canzone, with their minds on the description, first of all imagine Florence personified (since Chiabrera is speaking of Florence personified) who strikes her head and dashes her hair against Zanchini’s tombstone, even though, immediately afterward, the reader may have second thoughts and easily understand the intention of the poet, which is clear. Now, leaving aside whether or not the image that I cite is appropriate, it is certainly not intended by the poet, and therefore he must avoid such illusion, even if it’s only momentary (it’s enough for these words of Chiabrera to serve as an example without the image being necessarily inappropriate), except where it might please him, which could perhaps be the case. But this must not occur except where the illusory image does not detract from the true one and there is no need to think again before seeing the latter, since two images cannot be seen at the same time, but rather one after the other; and, if this occurs, the poet could also allow and even seek to obtain this illusion, providing that it doesn’t harm the remaining context, because it causes no damage, and, on the other hand, it’s good for the reader to remain between the two images. What I say about poets also applies in due proportion to other writers. Indeed, this might well be the source of great art, and of great effect, obtaining that vagueness and uncertainty, which belongs especially to poetry, and awakening images whose reason is not obvious, but almost hidden, and such that they seem accidental and not sought after by the poet in any way, but as though inspired by something invisible and incomprehensible and by that ineffable wavering of the poet who, when he is truly inspired by nature, by the countryside and whatever else, does not know exactly how to express what he feels, except in a vague and uncertain way, and it is therefore perfectly natural that the images awakened by his words appear to be accidental.2
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