Porzio, loc. cit. (p. 702), p. 126: “E se egli ec. a cui fa dubbio che ec. non l’abbia ad osservare?” [“And if he, etc., of whom it is doubtful that, etc., he had to observe it?”] Read a cui fia [of whom it may be doubtful].
Ibid., p. 134: “ed i Principi allora affermano di aver perdonato i falli quando han potere di castigarli; ma se sopraffatti da’ pericoli maggiori differiscono la vendetta, non perciò la cancellano” [“and Princes then maintain that they pardon faults when they have the power to punish them; but if when overwhelmed by greater dangers they delay revenge, they do not therefore erase it”]. This does not make sense. Read quando non han potere [when they do not have the power]. (4 March 1821.)
“Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus” [“You are never less alone than when alone”].1 Utterly true, but (despite what is generally [718] believed and said) because today one who is in the company of his fellow men is in the company of what is true (that is to say, of nothingness, and hence there is no greater solitude), whereas one who is far from men is in the company of what is false. Hence this saying, though ancient and intended to refer to the wise man, is much better suited to our own times, and not to the wise man alone but to all men, and especially to the unfortunate. (4 March 1821.)
If a man of imagination, feeling, and enthusiasm lacks physical beauty, he is to nature more or less as the most ardent and sincere of lovers is to the beloved, if his love is not returned. He throws himself fervently at nature, feels deeply all its power and enchantment, all its charms and beauty, and loves it with transports of delight, but, as if his love were simply not returned, he feels that he has no part in the beautiful thing that he loves and admires, he sees himself as outside the sphere of beauty, like the lover who [719] is excluded from the heart, the affections, and the company of the beloved. In the contemplation of and feeling for nature and the beautiful, his withdrawal back into himself is always painful to him. He immediately and lastingly feels that what he admires, loves, and feels does not belong to him. He experiences the same pain you experience in thinking about or seeing the beloved in the arms of another, or in love with another, and caring not at all for you. He feels as if nature and the beautiful were made not for him but for others (and that these others—something far harder to contemplate—are less deserving than he is, indeed do not deserve the enjoyment of the beautiful and of nature at all, and are incapable of feeling it and recognizing it, etc.), and he feels the same disgust and exquisite pain as a starving wretch who watches others enjoying a delicate, abundant, and delicious meal, with no hope of ever tasting such a thing himself. In short, he [720] sees and knows himself to be excluded and without hope, and to have no share in the favors of that divinity, and not only that, but it, I mean abstract beauty and nature, is so present to him and so close that he feels it to be inside himself, and identifies with it.1 (5 March 1821.)
Nowadays the most intriguing and interesting journeys to be made in Europe, that is in a civilized country, are those in less civilized countries that still retain some of their original nature and particularities—Switzerland, Spain, and the like. The descriptions of customs, characters, opinions, and mores in these countries are always marked by variety, singularity, meaning, and curiosity. Descriptions of the other European countries, which now do not have particularities, that is, their own character (except as regards popular mores, customs, and opinions, as I have said in another thought, p. 147, because the people always cling more tenaciously to nature), all resemble one another in regard to customs, [721] opinions, etc., no matter which nation is being described, so that they can have very little that is of interest, except in the minute particularities of social mores, etc., where the civilizing process and universal trade have not yet managed to make the world completely the same. But by and large, and in essence, and in relation to the principal things, which are significant by their nature, and not by a whim, we can now state that, where those nations are concerned, know one and you know them all. (5 March 1821.)
Wherever art, not nature, plays the main part, variety is lacking, although a sterile curiosity may stand in its place. For example, the United States differs greatly in government, customs, etc., from other civilized countries, but that is a difference of art, not of nature, a product of reason, of philosophy, of knowledge, something artificial, not natural. [722] So the curiosity it gives rise to is arid, and that variety is almost false, added on, not characteristic of things, not substantial, not inherent in the nation, and in its nature; it is, so to speak, a monotonous variety. The opposite, therefore, of the curiosity and variety that arise from thinking about Switzerland, Spain, etc., a curiosity and variety that are natural, characteristic, and innate. See the previous thought. (5 March 1821.)
We may sympathize with the unfortunate man who is not handsome, and especially if he is old, but we can hardly grieve for him. So it is in tragedies, poems, and novels, etc., as it is in life. (6 March 1821.)
Porzio loc. cit. (p. 702), p. 145, beginning: “ciascun vedeva che quella prima dell’altre gli anderebbe ad oppugnare” [“each saw that that person before the others would go to him and attack”]. Read egli anderebbe [he would go], otherwise it does not make sense.
Ibid., p. 155: “Che se nell’altre rocche [723] de’ Baroni fusse stata la metà di provvisione” [“That if in the Barons’ other, strongholds there had been half of the provisions”], etc. Some word or other is missing, such as di detta, di questa, di tale provvisione [of the aforementioned, of these, of such provisions], and conforms, it would seem, with what came before, where he refers to the provisions that are to be found in the castle of Sarno, when it was held by the King. (6 March 1821.)
Post ignem aetheria domo
Subductum, macies, et nova febrium
Terris incubuit cohors,
Semotique prius tarda necessitas
Leti corripuit gradum.
[After the theft of fire from its heavenly home, a wasting disease and an unprecedented troop of fevers settled upon the earth, and the doom of a distant death, which up to then was slow in coming, quickened its step.]
Horace, ode 3, ll. 29–33, bk. 1. By attributing this effect in the form of a fable to the violation of the laws of the Gods and the temerity of men toward heaven, Horace attributes it in its true meaning to the violation and corruption of natural laws, and of nature, the true cause of the increased dominion death has acquired over men. (7 March 1821.)
For p. 526. *“Rosellus Baumon observes in Masson’s Historia critica rei literariae, tome 14, p. 222, that Florus was forever imitating Horace,”* Fabricius, Bibliotheca Latina, bk. 2, ch. 23, § 2, tome 1, p. 626.1
[724] For p. 509. From this observation you may deduce that Florus, printed for the first time in 4° in Paris at the Sorbonne press, without any reference to the year or place of publication, but around 1470 (Fabricius),1 was one of only a handful of classics known and read in Petrarch’s day. (7 March 1821.)
Man is so fond of praise that, even in relation to things that he thinks are worthless and where he has neither sought nor striven to be praiseworthy, the fact of being praised still gratifies him. Indeed, it will often induce him to try and raise in his own reckoning the worth and reputation of that trifle for which he has been praised, and to persuade himself that it, or the fact of being praiseworthy in relation to it, is by no means trifling in the opinion of others. (7 March 1821.)
Poets, orators, historians, in short, writers of fine literature in Italy today, never demonstrate, you might say, the slightest force of mind (vires animi, and I do not mean by this greatness of spirit), even when the theme or the occasion, etc., contains [725] great force, is in itself very powerful, is full of life and inspiriting. But all the Italian literary works of today are inanimate and bloodless, they have no movement, no heat, no life (unless from someone else). The most life that can be found in anyone, as for example in some poet, is a bit of imagination. This is Monti’s value, and after Monti, but to a somewhat lesser degree, Arici’s. But apart from th
e fact that such value is very rare among our contemporaries, whether poets or writers, and apart from the fact that even among those few it is also scarce (because the greater part of their value lies in their style), I would further note that it is not truly spontaneous and fluent, and add that not only is it not but it cannot be, other than in someone of a truly exceptional nature.
The creative power of the mind pertaining to the imagination is the exclusive property of the ancients. Ever since man became permanently unhappy and, what is worse, knew that he was, [726] and thus realized and confirmed his unhappiness; ever since, furthermore, he came to know himself and things so much more deeply than he should have, and the world became philosophical, imagination, truly strong, fresh, fertile, creative, fruitful imagination, has no longer belonged to anyone but children, or at most to people with little education or instruction, and they are no part of my argument. Though the mind of the poet or writer may be born full of enthusiasm, genius, and fantasy, it no longer yields to the creation of images except reluctantly and against his intruded or shall we say renovated nature. When his mind does yield, it does so ex instituto, ἐπιτηδὲς [deliberately], by force of will, and not by inclination, by a power extrinsic to the imaginative faculty and not inherent in it. The power of such a mind when it abandons itself to enthusiasm (which is no longer so frequent) turns to emotion, [727] feeling, melancholy, sorrow. A Homer and an Ariosto are not made for our times or, I believe, for the future. The other nations have therefore very judiciously and naturally turned the sinew, strength, and central purpose of poetry from imagination to emotion, a necessary change and one directly depending on the change in man. This is what happened, proportionately, with the Latin writers, except for Ovid.1 And Italy, too, when its poetry first began, that is, when it had true poets, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso (except for Ariosto), appreciated and abided by this change, indeed, set an example for the other nations. Why then are we turning back now? I would like the times to turn back, too. But our unhappiness, and the knowledge we have, and ought not to have, of things, is increasing rather than fading. What then is this craze for wanting to do the same as our forefathers did, when we are so much changed? For resisting the nature of things? For wanting to mimic a [728] faculty that we do not have, or have lost, that is, the direction of things has made it unfruitful and sterile for us, unfit to create with? For wanting to be Homers, when the times are so very different? So let’s act as people did in Homer’s day, let’s live in the same way, let’s remain ignorant of the things they were ignorant of then, let’s attempt the exertions and bodily exercises that were customary in those times. And if all this is impossible for us, let us learn that, along with life and the body, the mind has changed, too, and that its alteration is a necessary, enduring, and ineluctable consequence of the alteration of the others. Some will say that owing to their climate and their nature the Italians are more imaginative than other nations, and that the creative aspect of the imagination, even though nearly extinguished in others, still lives, therefore, in them. I wish that it were so; I who since childhood and early youth have felt in myself, and see in [729] others, even in poets with the highest reputations, that it is not true. If foreigners, too, assert as much, either they are deceiving themselves, as is the way with distant things, since whatever is distant will tend to seem utterly beautiful or remarkable, or they simply mean in comparison with other peoples, and never absolutely, or in comparison with the ancients, because even Italian imagination, as a result of the universal progress of human affairs, has languished and become exhausted in such a way that, where creation is concerned, it has almost nothing left but that disposition which comes from the will and bidding of man, and not from its own intrinsic virtue and inclination.
But I’ll tell you the real reason that Italians, in contrast with everyone else, know no poetry these days except imaginative poetry, and are utterly lacking in sentimental poetry. In the midst of this idleness, [730] this boredom, these frivolous occupations, or rather dissipations, without purpose, without life, in short, without a homeland, wars, civil or literary careers, or other objects of constant thought or activity, the Italian is not capable of feeling anything deeply, and in fact he feels nothing. Since everyone is now a philosopher, the Italian, too, has sufficient philosophy both to make him ever unhappier and to extinguish or rather to deaden the imagination that nature would have bestowed on him, but not enough to attain an intimate knowledge of the passions, the emotions, and the human heart, and to depict it as a living thing; besides, even if he were capable of knowing these things, he would not know how to depict them, since one must agree that the Italians of today lack most of the study required to write things that are, like these, very difficult. The result is that Italians, even though they may be deeply moved when they set about writing, either fail at the very start to find anything and, not knowing what to say, have recourse to generalities, [731] or, striving to express exactly what they feel, cannot, and write like children.
For all these reasons, then, since Italians are incapable today of writing poetry of the emotions, they resort to poetry of the imagination, to which they devote themselves not by nature or vocation but by will and choice. And therefore they either do not succeed at all or do so only by imitating and following the ancients, as a child follows its mother, and in the way (between ourselves) that Monti did, who is not a poet but the most exquisite of translators when he is stealing from the Romans or the Greeks, and who, when he steals from the Italians, as from Dante, is a very shrewd, refined modernizer of the old style and the old language.
But nonetheless the Italians, despite the nature of the times and of poetry, throw themselves at a genre that today cannot help being either strained or imitative, and they do this because they find it much simpler than sentimental poetry. [732] (1) No one doubts that for certain talents in particular, who have very little strength, or are little used to applying their strength, and eagerness, and ardor, etc., imitating is much easier than creating. And Italians today, when writing poetry, almost always imitate, when they are not transcribing, as they often are, and as Arici does, and that is called copying. (2) Just as a narrative is easier than a drama, because in a drama every error in imitation is obvious, and a much more precise correspondence with nature and with the truth is required, so too for Italians today—who, as I have said, do not feel and do not have enough knowledge of the human heart—the imaginative genre, in the end an arbitrary affair, where one can also dazzle, as Ariosto did, is much easier than the sentimental genre, where nature and truth must be followed exactly, step by step, and where each person’s heart is a very alert, [733] acute, and rigorous judge of the truth or falsity, seemliness or unseemliness, naturalness or stiltedness, efficacy or weakness, etc., of inventions, situations, sentiments, ideas, expressions, etc. And the imaginative faculty can in some way be feigned or forced, or at least commanded, but the sensitive faculty never can. And so it is no wonder if those modern Italians who, in the circumstances described above, still decided to publish sentimental works were greeted by catcalls, or deserved to be. All the more so because if imitation (and these writers have all devoted themselves entirely to the imitation of foreigners) is unbecoming to the imaginative, it is even more so to the sentimental, for the same reason that feeling can be neither feigned nor procured, at any rate not forcibly. Thus, all sensible people, Italian and foreign, agree in saying that Italy lacks the sentimental genre. [734] But they do not perceive that this amounts to saying and admitting that present-day Italy lacks literature, and certainly poetry. As if the genre in question were characteristic of this or that nation, and not of the times. As if nowadays the general condition of men allowed for another genre of poetry, and as if lacking the sentimental genre were not the same as lacking poetry.
Sentimental poetry belongs uniquely and exclusively to the present time, just as true and simple (by which I mean unmixed) imaginative poetry belonged uniquely and exclusively to the Homeric age, or similar ages in other
nations.1 From which we might well conclude that poetry is scarcely proper to our times, and not be surprised if it now languishes, as we see, and if, I won’t say a true poet, but true poetry is so rare. For the sentimental is founded upon, and springs from, philosophy, experience, and knowledge [735] of men and things, in short, from the true, whereas the original essence of poetry lay in being inspired by the false. And if we consider poetry in the sense in which the term was first used, the sentimental can hardly be said to be poetry, but rather a form of philosophy or eloquence, except that it is more splendid, more ornate than the philosophy and eloquence of prose. It may also be more sublime and more beautiful, but only by means of illusions, to which much could undoubtedly be conceded in this kind of poetry, too, and more than is allowed by foreigners. (8 March 1821.)
From its beginnings up to the end, the Greek language never ceased to enrich itself, and to acquire ever more elements, and new words in particular. There is virtually no Greek writer, of whatever period, who, when he comes to light, cannot serve to enrich the Greek lexicon with something new. [736] During every period in which correct Greek was in use (a very long time span, that is, at least up until Constantine, since St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom are quoted, I believe, in the Glossary as well as in the Lexicon), the language was enhanced by new words and even phrases not found in the earlier authors. And these additions were all drawn from deep within itself, for the Greek language was exceedingly averse to anything foreign; rather, it found the ability to say all it needed, and to match new words to new things, in its own roots and in the immense fluency and abundance of its compound words, without having recourse to foreign assistance. In short, the wealth and nature, and not only the richness but the natural and particular fertility of the Greek language, was sufficient on its own to deal with everything new that needed to be expressed, like a country so fertile that it could feed [737] any number of new inhabitants or foreigners. And this may be seen plainly in what is happening today, since in such a wide range of times, customs, and opinions, in so many novel forms of knowledge and discoveries, we have recourse to the Greek language whenever we need to represent and name anything new, especially if it is scientific. No living language, even though the living languages are contemporary with our knowledge and discoveries, deems itself equal to this task, and we call on a dead and very ancient language for the purpose of signifying and enunciating those things which are beyond the reach of thriving living languages. The French Revolution, by demanding new words for new things, populated the French and also the European lexicon with new Greek words.1 Physics, chemistry, natural history, mathematics, [738] military strategy, naval studies, medicine, metaphysics, politics, and every kind of science or discipline, even though renewed and very different from those practiced and known by the ancient Greeks, even though entirely new, found in that language enough capital for the needs of their nomenclatures. Every new science or discipline begins by taking its name from Greek. And even though it has been extinct for centuries, this language remains forever inexhaustible, and suffices for everything, and it could be said that man will lose the power to know, apprehend, and discover, and all sources of the knowable will be exhausted, before the Greek language loses its capacity for expression and the source of its names and words has dried up. Such a use, even if I disapprove of it and condemn it for the reasons I have given elsewhere [→Z 48, 50], does nonetheless make plain and palpable the immortal omnipotence of that language.
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