Melancholic and sentimental poetry is a breath of the soul.1 The oppression of the heart, whether it comes from passion of some kind, or from disenchantment with life and a deep sense of the nothingness of things, which closes off the heart completely, leaves no space for this breath. Other types of poetry are much less compatible with this condition. And I believe that Tasso’s continual misfortunes are the reason that, as far as originality and invention are concerned, he is inferior to the three other great Italian poets, even while his soul, in its emotions, affections, greatness, and tenderness, etc., is certainly equal if not superior to theirs, as is apparent from his letters and other writings in prose. But while it is true that those who have not suffered understand nothing,2 it is certain that the melancholic imagination and sensibility, too, are powerless without some breath of well-being, and without a mental vigor that cannot exist if there is not a half light, a ray, a glimmer of gladness.3 (24 June 1820.)
Today, superior minds have a capacity for finding it very easy to conceive great illusions and for losing them just as quickly and easily (I’m also talking about our petty, everyday [137] illusions). They conceive them because of the great power of imagination, and lose them because of the great power of reason.
Once, while I was utterly sick of life, completely without hope, and so longing for death that I was desperate I could not die, I received a letter from that friend who had always encouraged me to hope and begged me to go on living, assuring me that, as a man of outstanding intellect and growing fame, I was destined for greatness and the glory of Italy. In this letter he said that he understood all too well my unhappiness (Piacenza 18 June)1 and that if God chose to let me die I should accept death as a good and that, because of his great love for me, he hoped for his own sake and mine that it would be soon. Can you believe that this letter, instead of making me despair even more of life, made me appreciate anew what I had already abandoned? And that, thinking of my former hopes and the reassurance and encouragement once given by my friend, who now seemed unconcerned to see them realized and indifferent to the glory he had once promised me, and thinking randomly about my writing and my studies, remembering my childhood and all my thoughts and desires, and all the wonderful work and plans that filled my adolescence, my heart froze in a way that made me unable any longer to give up hope, and death terrified me? It was not the idea in itself but death as the annulment of all my former great expectations. Yet this letter had not said anything that I had not [138] been saying to myself almost daily, and it conformed more or less exactly with my own opinion. I find the following reasons for this effect. (1) That things that seem tolerable at a distance look very different when close. That letter and those sentiments made me feel almost superstitious, as if the screws were tightening and death really were close by, and what seen from afar had seemed very easy to bear, indeed the only thing I wished for, when close seemed terrifying and extremely painful.
(2) I used to think of this longing for death as heroic. I knew quite well that there was nothing else left for me, but still I took pleasure in imagining my own death. I certainly believed that, though my friends were few, those few and particularly that one friend would wish me to stay alive and would not accept my disappearance, and, if I died, would be surprised and upset, and would say, “So it’s all over? Oh my God, such hopes, such a great soul, such genius, all come to nothing. No glory, no pleasure, all over as if it had never been.” But the thought that they should say, “Praise be to God, his suffering is over, I am glad for him, because there was nothing left for him, may he rest in peace”; the tomb almost spontaneously closing over me, this immediate and heartfelt relief at my death on the part of my dear ones, however reasonable, overwhelmed me with a sense of my total extinction. The anticipation of your death by your friends and their being consoled by it in advance is the most frightening thing you can imagine.
[139] (3) The state not of my reason, which saw the truth, but of my imagination was this. The necessity and advantages of death, which were real, for me were a kind of illusion of which my imagination grew fonder, and the advantages and hopes of life, which were illusory, stayed deep in my heart, as though they were reality. That letter from such a friend reversed everything. In short, without imagination this life is a massacre, and the most extreme misfortune becomes even worse and resembles hell itself when you are stripped of the shadow of illusion that nature is always wont to leave us. If, when some irremediable calamity befalls you, or in any other painful situation, you reveal your suffering to a friend, and he confirms entirely what your own reason has already told you and takes away every vestige of hope and seems to accept that your misfortune is total and irreparable, you fall into utter despair.
From such considerations, learn how to conduct yourself when consoling someone afflicted. You should not act as if you find his misfortune unbelievable, if it is true. You will not convince him, and you will dishearten him unnecessarily, depriving him of compassion. He is quite aware of his misfortune and by recognizing it you concur with him. But in the deepest recesses of his heart, a faint illusion survives. You should believe that even the most desperate people preserve this, as a constant gift of nature. Take care not to extinguish it and err on the side of playing down his troubles at the risk of appearing unsympathetic, rather than confirming something [140] in which his imagination still conflicts with his reason. Even if he exaggerates his woes, you can be sure that in his innermost being he feels quite the opposite, I mean really deep down, somewhere hidden even from himself. You must concur not with his words but with his heart, and in doing so, you will impart a measure of reality to whatever faint illusion he still has. In the opposite case, you will deliver a final, fatal blow. Solitude and the desert would have consoled him better than you because he would have been at one with nature, which serves always to cheer or console. I am talking about very serious, real misfortunes that reduce us to despairing of life, not of trivial ones, which indeed we exaggerate in order to be believed, or of those arising from some grand illusion or passion, when perhaps a man seeks and courts despair and shuns all comfort. (26 June 1820.)
Suffering or despair that arises from great passions or illusions or from any misfortune in life is not comparable to the drowning feeling that results from the certainty and vivid sense of the nothingness of all things, and the impossibility of happiness in this world, and from the immense void you feel in your soul. Misfortunes, imagined or real, may also induce a desire for death or even death itself, but that suffering has more life in it, indeed is most alive, if it comes from imagination or some passion, whereas the other kind of suffering I am describing is all death. The [141] death produced directly by misfortunes is a more living thing, whereas this death is more sepulchral, without action, without movement, without warmth, almost without pain, but with a boundless oppression and distress like that provoked by the fear of ghosts in childhood or by the idea of hell. This state of the soul is the effect of total, absolute misfortune, of a great soul once filled with ideas, then utterly stripped of them, and also of a life so evidently barren and monotonous that it makes the vanity of everything visible and palpable, because it lacks the rich variety of fantasies with which merciful nature supplies us daily in order to prevent our realizing this inevitable and palpable truth. And so, despite the fact that this state of the soul is most rational, perhaps the only one that is rational, yet because it is so contrary, perhaps the most directly contrary, to nature, we know of very few people—Tasso is one—who have experienced it.
Language is a skill that men have learned. The variety of languages is proof of this. Gestures are natural and learned from nature. A skill (1) can never equal nature; (2) however familiar it is to men, there are occasions when they cannot use it. Thus, in moments of great passion, (1) because the power of nature is extraordinary, the power of words is inadequate to express it, (2) the man is so overwhelmed that the use of any skill, however familiar, [142] is impossible. But since gestures come so naturally, y
ou will see him spontaneously reveal what he is feeling through gestures and movements that are often very animated, or with inarticulate shouts, shudders, moans, etc., that have nothing to do with words, and can be counted as gestures. That is, unless the passion produces the total immobility that is the usual effect of great passions in their first moments, when he is incapable of action. In the succeeding moments, while unable to use language, that is, the art of speech, he is still capable of actions and movement. For the rest, you will always see him silent. Silence is the language of all powerful emotions, love (even at its sweetest), anger, amazement, fear, etc. (27 June 1820.) See the end of this page.1
In the transports of love, in your dealings with the beloved, in the favors you receive from her, even the most extreme, your trembling heart does not so much experience happiness as seek it, always feeling a great lack, something less than what it hoped, a desire for something more, no, much more. The best moments in love have a kind of peaceful, gentle melancholy, when you weep without knowing why and almost resign yourself calmly to misfortune without knowing what it will be. In such moments of calm, your soul, now less agitated, feels almost full and can almost taste happiness. (See Montesquieu, Temple de Gnide, canto 5, after the middle, p. 342.) So even in love, which is the state of soul most rich in pleasure and illusions, the best part, the surest route to pleasure and a shadow of happiness, is pain. (27 June 1820.)
“Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent” [“Lesser cares speak, great ones are struck dumb”] is the epigraph in No. 95 of the English Spectator, without giving the author’s name.2
[143] What does it mean if, among all the imitators of classical works and authors who can be found, not one has succeeded in achieving a level of fame, I don’t say equal to, but even approaching, that of the original? Given that it is easier to inventis addere [add to something already invented] and improve upon it than to invent something that is perfect from the start, and given that there have been many imitators of great ingenuity, especially in Italy, at a time when imitation was a fashion that appealed to even the best artists (like Sannazaro imitating Virgil, Tasso imitating Petrarch, etc.), it is unlikely that there has never been an imitation that was equal to the work imitated and consequently deserved to be held in the same esteem as the original. But the fact is that, where art and literature are concerned, once a work has been recognized as an imitation, this is sufficient to rank it far below the original model, and in that case, as in many others, fame depends not so much on the absolute and intrinsic merit of the work as on the situation of the writer or artist. So, imitators, whoever you are, abandon all hope of achieving immortality, even if your copies really are worth much more than the originals.1
In its poetic career, my spirit has followed the same course as the human spirit in general. At the beginning, my strength lay in fantasy, and my verses were full of images, and through my reading of poetry I was always trying to benefit my imagination.2 I was indeed very sensitive to feelings, too, but I did not know how to express them in poetry. I had not yet meditated on things, and as for philosophy, I had only the merest glimmer, and then in the most general terms, and with our customary delusion, that in life and the world there must always be an exception in our favor. I have always been unfortunate, but my misfortunes at that time were full of life, and they made me despair because it seemed (not really to reason but to a very sound imagination) that they denied me the happiness that I believed other people enjoyed. In short, my condition then was exactly the same as the ancients’. [144] It’s quite true that even then, when my misfortunes took hold of me and tormented me very much, I became capable of certain emotions in poetry, as in the last canto of the Cantica.1 The total transformation that took place in me, my passing from ancient to modern, happened, you might say, in the space of a single year, that is, in 1819, when, deprived of my sight and the constant distraction of reading, I began to feel my unhappiness in a much bleaker way, I began to abandon hope, to reflect deeply on things (in these thoughts I have written in one year almost twice as much as I wrote in a year and a half, and on subjects concerned with our nature, as opposed to my earlier thoughts, which were almost all about literature), to become a professional philosopher2 (instead of the poet I was before), to feel the incontrovertible unhappiness of the world, rather than knowing about it, in part also because of a state of bodily languor, which removed me even further from the ancients and brought me closer to the moderns. At that point, imagination in me was greatly enfeebled, and although the faculty of invention grew in me enormously, indeed that was almost its beginning, it was mainly directed either to works in prose or to sentimental poems. And if I set to writing verse, images came to me with the greatest difficulty, indeed my imagination had almost dried up (even apart from poetry, that is, in the contemplation of beautiful natural scenes, etc., as now, when they leave me hard as stone). Instead, those verses were overflowing with feeling. (1 July 1820.) So, we could well say that, strictly speaking, the only poets were the ancients, and the only ones now are children, or young people, while the moderns who go by the name of poet are really philosophers. And, in fact, I became sentimental only when, having lost imagination, I became insensible to nature, and wholly dedicated to reason and truth, in short when I became a philosopher.
It has often been observed that while Academies of science have perhaps helped to develop science, promoted and facilitated [145] scientific discoveries, etc., literary Academies have proved harmful to literature. In fact, Academies of science have almost never followed a particular philosophical system, but have left the field open for the discovery of the truth, whatever system might be favored by it. And it was particularly difficult to follow a system with regard to the natural world, since the aim was to promote discoveries that can be derived only from the true, and you cannot predict what they will reveal and to what system they will be best adapted. If they had followed a system, that would have prejudiced their science, just as literary Academies prejudice literature. The fact is that although the latter has its own rules, spelling out these rules, insisting upon them, and turning them into a code has never benefited literature. All the great Greek poets came before Aristotle, and all the great Latin ones came before or were contemporaries of Horace. But would it not be beneficial for good taste to be promoted and promulgated and established as the norm for literary works? Good taste is certainly desirable in a nation, but it must be found in each individual and the nation as a whole, not in a professorial lawmaking body, and a dictatorship. In the first place, it is difficult to promote works of genius. Honors, glory, applause, and rewards are efficient means to encourage them but not the honors and the glory that come from the applause of an Academy. The ancient Greeks, and the Romans, too, had public literary competitions, and Herodotus wrote his history to be read in public. This is a very different stimulus from that of a small group of highly educated, cultured people, where the effect can never be the same as that in the people as a whole. If you aim to please critics you must (1) write with caution, which is fatal, (2) look for out-of-the-way topics, subtlety, wit, and a thousand other trifles. Only the people as the audience can stimulate originality, greatness, and [146] naturalness in a composition. In the second place, if promoting genius does not help and incentives do not work, restraint will kill it, by which I mean restraint imposed by other people, not by one’s own judgment. If you lack judgment the case is hopeless. Literary magistrates cannot foster literary talent if the basic requirements are missing, namely fine judgment and good taste. But if taste is corrupted, would it not help to promulgate it, reestablish it, etc.? It might, I mean Academies might be able to prevent people from writing badly, but not to make them write well. Arcadia was established to counteract the legacy of the seventeenth century. It did so, but the Arcadian style is a term of abuse in Italy for the sort of poetry that is neither fish nor fowl. So what remedies are there for bad taste? I repeat what I said at the beginning of my thoughts [→Z 4]. Nearly every civilized natio
n, after its golden age, experiences a period of decline and then recovers. But, after this, a number of truly great writers comparable to the first (in literary terms, not as regards ideas or philosophy, etc.), in other words another golden age, is something I have yet to see. In the best centuries, great writers had good models to follow, not bad examples to avoid. The former can be useful, the latter are harmful. I mean that there were bad writers, but they did not amount to a class, since taste was good on the whole, and people could forget about them; and people knew more or less that they did not like them rather than why they did not like them. Certainly, there was no precise idea of their failings, errors were not scrutinized in detail, and we can see that even the best writers made childish mistakes. So, knowledge of good and bad was neither consistent nor broken down into tiny detail. Natural good taste took care of everything. Once corruption sets in, literary scholars rise up in dismay. Scruples, fear, subtlety take center stage. They measure [147] every word, watch intently, tread warily, every law, every rule, every idea is clearly defined and circumscribed, every case is foreseen, taste is no longer natural but artificial, or becomes so, because none believe they can be satisfied with natural taste, art and criticism reach their height, nature is lost (perhaps faring better in a corrupt period than in one that follows), works are born that are perfect but not beautiful. (2 July 1820.)
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