With reference to what I said in the last thought on p. 152, note that children’s imagination usually has all these qualities but one, fertility, to a much greater extent. For this reason, just as they can easily become obsessed with an idea, so they can be distracted in the middle of a conversation, or while studying or otherwise occupied, so that people often say that children are bad at studying not only because they lack intelligence but also because they are easily distracted. [212] For their imagination has a great facility for detaching itself from one object and immediately latching on to another. Apart from those children whose imagination is destined for great things, and to make them unhappy when they are older, and the depth of which fixes them powerfully upon this idea or that, usually something frightening or painful, and torments them throughout their childhood, as happened to me. And it is noticeable that this depth of imagination makes them extremely jealous of their habits and routine, outside of which they are uncomfortable, frightened by the unusual, and tend to regard as an absolute disaster the failure to perform some habitual action. Pietrino,1 for example, and me. On the effect of children’s imagination in general, see p. 172, end.
A woman (a courtesan), having to say something rather disagreeable to a traveler, asked him, “Would you like me to speak sincerely?” The traveler replied, “Absolutely, please do. We travelers seek out the unusual.” (16 August 1820.)
The superabundance of imagination is what torments the children described above, and so instead of using it to explore the extraordinary, they try to turn it off or quiet it through routine. The same thing happens to adults. See the character of Lord Nelvil in Corinne.2 (16 August 1820.)
The irritant provided by grace is pleasant, like the physical irritant of taste or touch, etc. And just as the more sensitive or delicate palates or constitutions [213] are more susceptible and discerning with regard to these physical sensations, so is the spirit with respect to grace. See if you will Montesquieu loc. cit. several times before, “De la délicatesse.”1 If the corresponding effect of grace in the two sexes is much more than an irritant, the cause is not grace alone, or, in the same situations, beauty alone. But then grace stimulates a very sensitive part of ourselves, the mutual attraction between the sexes, which when aroused and inflamed produces effects that grace in itself and in any other situation would not produce even if it were present to a much greater degree. So in a painting, a woman’s grace, etc., has much more effect than a man’s, a man’s more than that of a fine horse, because the attraction we feel for our own kind is always naturally aroused more by the former than by the latter. You could say the same about a plant in comparison with a painting or sculpture of a horse, or a painting of a building, although in this case the way in which we regard the object, as being the work of man, is very significant and perhaps more effective because of that. Moreover, the same thing happens with respect to beauty. (17 August 1820.)
Illusions, however much they may be weakened or exposed by reason, nevertheless still exist in the world and play the greatest role in our lives. And it is not enough to know everything to dispel them, even when we know them to be vain. And once gone, they are not so lost that [214] a very vigorous root does not remain and live on to flower again despite all the experience and certainties we have acquired. I have seen some of the wisest, most able people, full of knowledge and philosophy, unhappy in the extreme, who lose all their illusions and long for death as the only good, and even invoke it as such on behalf of their friends: and then, shortly afterward, although unwillingly, nevertheless reconcile themselves to living, devise projects for the future, occupy themselves with securing some worldly advantage for those same friends, etc. Nor could this be due any longer to ignorance or to a lessening of their conviction from experience of the nothingness of things. The same has happened hundreds of times to me as well, when I was really desperate at being unable to die, and then went back to my castles in the air and my usual plans for the future, and even a little passing cheer. And there was no real reason for this alternation of despair and recovery, since the causes that gave rise to my despair persisted throughout those times when I rediscovered my illusions. Nevertheless, some tiny source of consolation was enough to produce this effect, and it is undoubtedly true that illusions vanish in times of misfortune (hence it is very true, as I have discovered for myself, that anyone who has not suffered knows nothing.1 I knew this, because these days you cannot not know it, but I knew it almost without knowing it, and so I would regulate myself in life). Then, when the misfortune is over or is mitigated by time and custom, they come back, with more or less strength depending on the circumstances, one’s character, physical vitality, and spiritual qualities, both inborn and acquired. Nearly all exceptionally sensitive and honest writers in depicting utter despair and disillusionment with life have reached into their own hearts and painted a picture of the state in which [215] they themselves were more or less. What then? With all their past despair, with having felt so vividly while writing the nature and force of those bitter truths and passions they were expressing, or rather being totally persuaded of them at the time in order to be able to convey convincingly that state of mind and, as a result, having felt and almost touched the nothingness of everything, still they took advantage of this sense of nothingness to crave glory, and the more acute their awareness of the vanity of illusions the more they were resolved and hopeful of an illusory outcome, and, having vividly felt and vividly expressed a desire for death, all they wanted was to find some pleasure in life. Thus, all those fundamentally disillusioned philosophers who write treatises about the wretched truths of our nature do not really seek anything with their books other than to create and enjoy a few illusory advantages in life (see Cicero, Pro Archia, ch. 11).1 It is quite true: nature is immeasurably more powerful than reason, so that, even when depressed and weakened beyond belief, it retains just enough strength to defeat that enemy, even among the very followers of reason, and at the very moment when they are preaching and extolling it; indeed, in the very act of preaching and extolling the virtues of reason over nature, they signal the victory of nature over reason. [216] Man can live only by religion or by illusions. This is a clear and incontestable fact. If you drastically curtail his religion or his illusions, anyone, even a child at the first stage of reasoning (since children live mostly only off their illusions), would definitely kill himself, and our species would of inborn and material necessity be doomed at birth. But our illusions, as I said, still survive, despite our reason and learning. And it is to be hoped that they will continue to endure in the future: but there is certainly no more direct road to what I have described than, on the one hand, the present condition of man, the growth and spread of philosophy, which continues to undermine and disperse the few illusions that remain to us; and, on the other, a positive lack of nearly all the objects of our illusions, and the state of real mortification, uniformity, inactivity, futility, etc., of life as a whole. And if such things finally force us to give up all our illusions, and what we have forgotten, to lose them forever, and have constantly before our eyes, with no escape, the pure, naked truth, there will be nothing left of the human race but the bones, like the bones of other animals that were talked about in the last century.1 It is no more possible for man to live completely cut off from nature, which we are constantly drawing farther away from, than it is for a tree cut off at the root to bear flowers and fruit. Dreams [217] and visions. Something to talk about again in a hundred years. We do not yet have an example from the past of the progression of excessive civilization and an unrestrained violation of nature. But if we do not turn back, our descendants will leave this example to their descendants, if they have any. (18–20 August 1820.)
The French are constantly repeating that Bossuet subjugated the language to his genius.1 I say that his genius was subjugated by the language, customs, and tastes of his country. The French—who always write as they converse, and are therefore very timid, or rather cowardly, as befits a nation in which a
dash of wit cancels out any more serious and weighty impression and creates more of a stir than the affairs and dangers of the State—wonder at the slightest hint of daring, and regard as labors of Hercules what in Italy and the rest of Europe are only feeble arguments for any robust, liberal, inventive, and original mind. And they are right in a way, because to be even slightly daring, where the rule is vivre et faire comme tout le monde [to live and act like everyone else], carries more risk than it would anywhere else. But, in fact, if you look in Bossuet for such great daring and such powerful eloquence, what you find is impotence rather than strength, and you see that he rises only to fall. This is invariably the [218] feeling I have whenever I read him. As soon as he gives some hint that he is about to make a powerful, sublime, or extraordinary move, and I am all on edge waiting to follow it, I find that nothing happens and he has already gone back to parler comme tout le monde [talking like everyone else]. Something that makes for labored, distasteful, and tedious reading. This has nothing to do with the inconsistencies apparent in any great genius. No genius stops so short as Bossuet. You soon realize that he is as if shackled, and his struggle to free himself is painful rather than heroic. And the reader finds himself in much the same situation. So if we wish to agree that Bossuet was indeed a genius, we have to admit that, in trying to overcome his language and his nation, he was overcome by them. I appeal to all foreigners and Italians on this point. Except that the voice of all France is so powerful it speaks for the rest of Europe. Contradiction is almost impossible. So it would be pointless to express these opinions about Bossuet. (20 August 1820.)
There are few things so disagreeable as seeing a writer launch into a great movement or image or sublimity, etc., only, as it were, to run out of steam. It is something that in a way resembles the futile efforts of someone who we realize would like to be a great or fine writer and is not. But while the latter is ridiculous, the former is painful. You find this in Bossuet all the time. A great push forward, you think the leap will follow, but it’s all over. Even when [219] the sequel to what he says is powerful, magnificent, etc., it no longer burns with a natural flame but is artificial and full of platitudes.1 Leave aside the times when Bossuet lacks even a spark of life and these lacunae are immense and extremely frequent. Because if the moral he is always preaching is sublime, it is sublimity of a very modest kind, belonging to the usual style of orators, and having nothing to do with enthusiasm here and now. But you want him to exhaust your emotions, etc. Don’t keep telling me what everyone knows. There is a huge gulf between excess and the lack of it. And it is unnatural for one who has abandoned himself to enthusiasm to be calm again almost immediately after he has been excited. And there is nothing more infuriating than being halted in some urgent action undertaken with the entire strength of one’s mind and body. Reading the liveliest passages in Bossuet, the sudden switch, the constant, abrupt alternation between very brief motion and absolute calm, makes you break out in a sweat and troubles you. Writers and orators may rest assured that as long as their natural powers remain undiminished (I say natural, not artificial) neither the reader nor the listener will tire. And until that moment they should not fear being guilty of excess. Which in fact is less dangerous than its opposite, in that once a reader becomes weary he no longer follows the writer and is resting even while reading. But if he is obliged [220] to stop too soon, he cannot, as in the other case, disobey the author, who clips his wings by force. To conclude, if eloquence mostly consists of movement and emotion of the sort described, and coldness and deadly dullness for the remainder, then Bossuet will certainly rank as eloquent amid the elegance of his century, as Voltaire says.1 (21 August 1820.)
It is rightly said that in society we put on a Comedy where all men play their part.2 But it was not like this for man in nature, because his actions were not aimed at spectators and bystanders, but were real and true.
We have lost everything from nature except our vices. Truly many of these are not natural, many have worsened or increased, but many are still primitive, and in any case, there is no primitive vice that does not still exist. And the more vicious they are, the less they are tempered by the virtues and other qualities that nature bestowed upon us.
Compassion3 can often be a source of love, but only when focused upon an object that is lovable either in itself or in a way that it might become so with the benefit of compassion. This is the compassion that catches the attention of the soul, and endures, and often returns. Greater misfortunes befalling an object that might be absolutely innocent but is unlovable, such as an old and ugly person, arouse only a fleeting compassion, which [221] usually vanishes with the presence of the object or the image that its stories evoke, etc. (And the mind takes no pleasure in it and does not recall it.) These need to be really vivid and effective to move us momentarily, whereas a few words are enough to make us feel sympathy toward a beautiful young woman, even a complete stranger, when she talks about her misfortune. For this reason, Socrates will always seem admirable rather than pitiful, and makes a very poor subject for tragedy. And it would be a great mistake for a novelist to make his characters ugly as well as unfortunate. Likewise a poet, etc. In any example or type of poetry whatever, poets should be very careful to avoid any suggestion of being ugly themselves, because when reading a beautiful poem, we immediately imagine a beautiful poet. We would find such a contrast really distasteful. Even more so if he were talking about himself, about his own misfortunes, his own unhappy love affairs, etc., like Petrarch, etc.
The sprightliness and all the movements and the structure of almost all birds are somehow graceful. (21 August 1820.) And so birds are usually lovable.
The compassion I mentioned for an unlovable object very much resembles and often amounts to repugnance, as if we were witnessing an animal being tormented, etc. It therefore takes some great calamity to arouse it, since even the right-minded scarcely or never feel compassion for the lesser ills of such an object. (21 August 1820.)
[222] “Ses héros aiment mieux être écrasés par la foudre que de faire une bassesse, et leur courage est plus inflexible que la loi fatale de la NÉCÉSSITÉ” [“His heroes would rather be struck by lightning than perform a base action, and their courage is more inflexible than the fatal law of NECESSITY”]. Barthélemy where he is discussing Aeschylus.1 (22 August 1820.)
Reading is to the art of writing as experience is to the art of living in the world and knowing about other people and other things. Extend and apply this observation, especially to what has happened to yourself in studying language and style, and you will see that reading has had the same effect on you as experience with respect to the world. (22 August 1820.)
Machiavelli says that if you want to preserve a kingdom, a republic, or a sect, it is often necessary to draw it back to its beginnings. Likewise all political writers. See Montesquieu, Grandeur, etc., from the middle of ch. 8 onward, where he talks about the Censors. Giordani on the poems of the Marquis of Montrone applies this saying to the imitative arts.2 By beginnings, I mean not when the arts were in their infancy but the early stage when they began to have some consistency. (The same could be applied to language.) And I mean in the same sense; in order to preserve men, that is, to make them happy, it is necessary to call them back to their beginnings, which means nature.—“What madness. Don’t you know that man’s perfectibility is demonstrated?”—“I see that all the other works of nature demonstrate the opposite, that they cannot be perfected, but, rather, being altered they can only be corrupted, mainly by our own hand. But man thinks of himself as somehow outside nature, and not subject to the natural laws that govern all living things, and hardly regards himself as a [223] work of nature.”—“Meanwhile man is more perfect than before.”—“So perfect that, without religion, he finds it preferable to die by his own hand than to go on living.” If the perfection of living beings is measured in terms of unhappiness, so be it. But what indication of their level of perfection is there other than happiness? And what else is the pur
pose of existence, if not its perfection? The fact is that today it seems absurd to call men back to nature, and the real and constant aim of the wisest and most profound philosophers is to distance us ever more from it, though at times they believe the opposite, confusing nature with reason. But even without that confusion, they believe that man will be happy when he lives entirely in accordance with pure reason. And then he will kill himself by his own hand.1 (23 August 1820.) See p. 358.
“Τὴν σωματικὴν ἄσκησιν συμβάλλεσθαι πρὸς ἀρετῆς ἀνάληψιν” “conferre ad virtutem capessendam” [“Physical exercise contributes to the acquisition of virtue”], was a teaching of the Cyrenaic sect or the true followers of Aristippus. Laertius, in Aristippus, bk. 2, § 91. (23 August 1820.)
“Μηδέν τε εἶναι φύσει δίκαιον ἢ καλὸν ἢ αἰσχρὸν, ἀλλὰ νόμῳ καὶ ἔθει” [“Nothing is right, virtuous, or shameful by nature, but by law and custom”]. Teaching of the same sect. Ibid., § 93. (24 August 1820.)
Lord Byron in the notes to The Corsair2 (and also perhaps in his other works) gives historical examples of the effects of the [224] passions and of the characters he describes. Wrongly. The reader should feel and not be told that your description, etc., conforms to reality and nature, and that such a character or such a passion in those circumstances will produce such an effect. Otherwise, the delight of the poetry will be lost, and imitation when it falls upon unknown objects does not produce wonder even if it is very accurate. We see this in comedies and tragedies where certain really extraordinary characters, despite being authentic, fail to make much impression. See my discourse on the Romantics1 on other objects of imitation. And, as it fails to produce wonder, so it also fails to produce feelings or emotion, or any correspondence of the heart with what we read or see performed. And poetry is transformed into a treatise, and the work of the imagination and the heart is given to the intellect. In effect, Lord Byron’s poetry, which is very warm but whose warmth, for the reason stated, is not communicable, is for the most part an extremely obscure treatise on psychology, and not a very useful one at that, because the characters and the passions he describes are so strange that they do not correspond in any way to the feelings of the reader but strike in an awkward fashion, almost like angles or shards, and the impression they create is much more external than internal. We are only really interested in people like ourselves, and, like allegorical beings, plants, or animals, etc., people [225] of extraordinary character are not suited to poetry. Aristotle himself said that the protagonist of a tragedy should not in fact be wholly wicked or wholly virtuous.1 You can sneer at Aristotle as much as you like, and for his teaching on this point too (as I believe they have), but in the end your psychology, if it is true, must lead you to the same place and to rediscover what you already knew. (24 August 1820.) See p. 238, thought 1.
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