Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  From this digression, not, in my view, extraneous to the subject, and returning to the matter at hand, it remains for us to consider how strange and almost absurd it was that Homer, in savage times, should have made compassion play so great a part in his poem, should have made it a chief and final source of interest, should have pursued and achieved his intention in such a way that, even today, when the other interest in the Iliad is no longer present, one perhaps cannot possibly read anything [3153] as interesting, and that he should not have minded eliciting and exaggerating compassion vis-à-vis almost exclusively the enemies of the Greeks, his compatriots, for whom he was writing, who did not greatly esteem generosity toward their enemies, indeed valued precisely the opposite quality; and that modern poets should have completely and expressly excluded compassion from the level of final interest, should for the most part have avoided allowing it to fall to more than a limited extent on the enemies of the party and Hero selected by them for praise (compassion for Clorinda in the Gerusalemme presented no difficulty for Tasso, because he has her die after she has converted, and in the same canto reveals her to be Christian by birth and by nation, with the result that compassion ultimately befalls a woman who is Christian, in accordance with the poet’s final intention), etc. etc. In truth the exact opposite would have been credible, and ought certainly to have happened.

  (1) That refinement of self-love and the sensitive faculty, which is necessary for compassion to find room in the human mind, [3154] which produces it, and with it, the pleasure which others take from it, was in no way typical of the times of Homer, indeed was more typical of the times of Virgil and the moderns, for it is born of civilization. I refer here to that form of ineffective compassion, which is what one experiences in reading a poem, which often and easily finds room in civilized minds, and which for the most part is awakened by the charme and artifice of poetry and of skillful prose writers. Effective compassion, which moves us to offer help in the miseries of others, is born of the same refinement and hence also civilization, but requires a greater degree of refinement than civilization is ordinarily accustomed to produce, greater than it produces in ordinary men, and a natural talent to be able to feel more than the ordinary, hence it is, and has been in all ages, very rare.

  (2) That which in men is referred to as the heart was of little value and was relatively inactive in the times of Homer, whereas the imagination was of great value and was most active. Nowadays, however (and it was also the case in the time of Virgil), the imagination [3155] is generally subdued, frozen, lethargic, and extinguished. It is very hard for even a great poet to revive it, to be boldly inspired by the imaginative faculty, and to be great in respect of that part which is properly attributable to the imagination and derives from it, as Homer and Dante were. If the minds of cultured men are still capable of any impression, any keen, sublime, and poetic sentiment, this belongs to the heart in particular. And in fact nowadays, among poets in verse and prose, the heart has universally and almost entirely taken the place of the imagination, it is the heart which inspires them, which they aim to stir, and on which they in fact work, provided they are able to succeed in their intent. Nowadays imaginative poets1 always display strain and effort and elaboration, and since it was not the imagination that moved them to write poetry, but they who expressed themselves from their brains and intellects, [3156] and created and manufactured an artificial imagination, they therefore rarely or never manage to resuscitate and rekindle true imagination, which is long dead, in the minds of their readers, and they produce no useful effect. I say this regarding those parts of modern writers which are purely imaginative. Lord Byron by himself is an exception to the rule, perhaps the only one. See p. 3477. But as for the effect his poetry has on its readers, I doubt whether the poems may be excepted from the ranks of other poems of the imagination. See p. 3821. Our mind is too different from his. He cannot easily restore to us that imaginative faculty which he has preserved, but we have lost forever.1 Even Homer and Dante have much to do in order to reawaken our imagination. Nonetheless, however naturally extraordinary the imagination of Lord Byron may be, it is still true that it is also in large part artificial, or rather, squeezed out forcibly, whence it may clearly be seen that the majority of Lord Byron’s poems come from a will and habit conceived from his intellect, rather than from inspiration or fantasy stirred spontaneously. Now, among epic poets it is odd that Homer, who is very ancient, should have aimed at the heart so much, and that Virgil and the moderns should have set as the final and essential objective of their poems no more than to move the imagination. For the essential and sole principal subject of their poems is a fortunate Hero and an undertaking successfully [3157] completed. Now fortune has value only insofar as wonder is concerned, which is attributable to the imagination and not at all to the heart. So much can rules and art make the greatest spirits go astray, so much can they conceal the nature of man, times, and things, deflect them from the truth, disguise from them and hide the true purpose and the true essence of those very things that they undertake, and to which those rules apply. In fact, of all the epic poems, it is the most ancient, that is, the Iliad, which with respect to the whole, to the total and not partial purpose, to the sum and not the parts, to the final and primary intention, rather than the episodic, additional, and secondary and virtually extrinsic, accidental, etc., intention, is, I repeat, truly the most sentimental, indeed, the only sentimental, epic poem; a most odd thing to say, which appears to be a contradiction in terms, and is in fact monstrous and contrary to the nature of progress and the history of the human spirit and men and the differences of times, to the respective nature of the ancient and the modern, and vice versa, etc. And it is also the most Christian poem. For it takes an interest in the enemy, the wretched, etc. etc.1

  (3) The ideas and principles of generosity, equity, humanity, charity toward one’s enemy both in opinions and sentiments and actions, were born, one might say, after Homer, once the most ferocious, implacable, eternal national hatreds typical of men still close to nature had been moderated.2 Such principles are mostly common and effective in modern times, when there cannot be national hatreds, there being virtually no nations, and no individual considers, as they used to do in ancient times, the enemies of the nation as his personal enemies, who moreover are not actually enemies either in sentiment or deed, but enemies [3158] solely of his king, etc. Indeed, these principles today degenerate into total indifference toward the nation’s enemy, which makes it virtually indistinguishable from its friend. Now, is it not marvelous that Homer’s poem should be a hundred times more impartial and generous toward the enemies of his own nation, than modern poems are toward the party opposed to the one celebrated in them? So much so that, if we wished to investigate the sentiments of the poet himself in the Iliad, and looked merely at their expression, we would barely be able to tell today whether Homer was Greek or Trojan, or of another nationality entirely, and in the latter instance, which of the two nations he favored in his mind.1

  (4) Today, as I have already mentioned [→Z 564], and to some degree in Virgil’s time too, we may say that public interest no longer exists, save only in those few persons who administer public affairs, and who represent the public, [3159] or who rather, one might say, compose and constitute it. And indeed it is reasonable and proper to say that public interest in others no longer exists (and those who govern do not read poems). Nowadays, therefore, poems whose subject is merely some national success or glory, can be of little interest, or much less so, certainly, than at the time of Homer. But misfortune, and most especially misfortune suffered by those most unworthy of it, is always of private interest to each man. There is no one who does not consider himself to be unfortunate, and who then does not prove to be so, and equally there is no one who considers himself to be deserving of the misfortune that befalls him.1 Such dispositions, despite being common to all times, are most apparent today, for as a result of political circumstances, life no longer has anything worthwhile with w
hich to concern and distract itself, and moreover the light of philosophy is very soon dissipated, or is suffocated at birth, or completely obstructs any illusion of happiness. Thus even irrespective of compassion, it was [3160] much more appropriate today than it was in the times of Homer to give the misfortunes of men more scope in epic poems, because today the sentiment of unhappiness is more keenly felt in civilized nations than it ever has been in the human race, and is, so to speak, the dominant sentiment and idea, from which no one is able any longer to find a way to distract themselves. The individual unhappiness of men is, so to speak, the character or mark of this century. This is completely the opposite of what it was like in the time of Homer, which possibly enjoyed the greatest happiness or least unhappiness that man can enjoy in his social state, and that always results from great activity of life, and from great and strong illusions, both of which were very characteristic of those times, especially in Greece. Therefore misfortunes recounted by poets today cannot fail to be of great interest, more so than at any other time, and at all times, because the sense of their own misfortune is the most universal and continuous feeling men have today, because men naturally love to speak [3161] about their own affairs and hear others speak about them too, because each of them looks at unhappiness as though it were his own personal property, because men take a singular delight in those who most resemble them, and cannot find a more universal point of similarity than unhappiness, because each of them takes pleasure in seeing his own sentiments in others or in reading about them in the poets, because he counts it the height of fortune every time he encounters, either in life or in books, some notable conformity either of case or circumstance or opinion or character or thought or inclination or way of life or custom, with his own, and because each man consoles himself in his misfortunes with the vividly represented example, and with seeing those misfortunes as if celebrated or wept over in others (and this in illustrious subjects and circumstances and persons and events, such as those narrated in epic poems), for it heightens his opinion of himself,1 as though the poet’s song had his own unhappiness as its subject, and because as he reads he is being stirred as if by his own misfortunes. For in truth, if in reading the poets (verse or prose writers) or their stories we feel [3162] moved by those true or fictional calamities, and we allow ourselves to be moved to the point of tears, we believe perhaps that we are weeping for the miseries of others, whereas in fact we are more often and more truly, or more keenly, bemoaning our own miseries at that same point, or mixing the thought of the one with the other, and this mixing (whose achievement must be the poet’s purpose and his true and proper and due art) is the main reason for these tears. This is what happens to us (as in the theater, etc.), as it did to Achilles weeping for his old father and the short life reserved to him, etc. etc., over the head of Priam, a sublime, beautiful, and very natural picture drawn by Homer.1 Misfortunes, when they are national or in some other way belong more particularly to the readers, will always be of more interest, due to the greater similarity and proximity, which is not that of unfortunate men in general, and because the passage in the mind of the reader from those calamities to his own is that much easier and swifter, etc. Hence it will always be very important for the subject of the poem to be national, and such subjects shall always be preferable to others, and nationality will contribute greatly to the interest.

  Coming now to focus my discourse more specifically, I would say that despite the fact that we are not Greek, and despite the fact that a good twenty-seven centuries have elapsed since the Iliad was written or sung, with all those countless and substantial disparities which such a long length of time has brought to the spirit and to the outward and inward [3163] circumstances of men and nations, it nonetheless interests us incomparably more than the Aeneid, which was written in much later times and hence was more akin to our own times, and was aided greatly, as we have said, by the interest in the Iliad itself; more also than the Gerusalemme, more than other such poems, all of which may be said to have been conceived the day before yesterday, especially if compared with the Iliad. I would say that it interests us much more, in the sense of the total and final interest, the product of the poem as a whole, spreading and winding through the entire body of the poem. Such interest, understood in these terms, is almost entirely absent from the poems that derive from the Iliad. It should not be confused with the pleasure which the reading of such poems can cause in us, which derives from style, imagery, emotions, and other such things which in essence have nothing to do with the final and principal purpose and the resolution of the poem; nor with particular (episodic or nonepisodic) interests scattered here or there, which are neither final nor continuous [3164] or perpetual, but are born of this or that part and not of the whole and entire poem; nor, finally, with that interest which derives merely from the story line, an interest which is born purely of curiosity and does not aspire or contribute to, or tend toward, anything other than the mere desire to be informed of the resolution of the plot, and which ceases once the conclusion is known, a form of interest which is quite uninteresting and superficial in intellectual terms, an interest which may be consummate in poems, plays, or works which are of no interest, indeed, is never consummate or principal, or even very notable or appreciable, save in poems, dramas, and works of no intimate or profound interest which have minimal poetic value, because to awaken, feed, and satisfy curiosity is an effect that has nothing to do with the nature of poetry, nor can it be anything other than accidental and secondary to it. Thus the poems deriving from the Iliad may be read with much pleasure, in that on occasion they do awaken some more or less keen or long-lasting interest, [3165] but they lack almost entirely that total, final, and perpetual interest in which the Iliad, after 27 centuries, supremely abounds, among non-Greeks, and against which the worth and degree of quality of the wholeness and entirety of an epic poem, or indeed any other poem, must unfailingly be measured.

  Hence, to return at last to the point with which I began, I would conclude that, contrary to what is said and believed, while the poem of the Iliad may perhaps be outdone in respect of its details or secondary qualities, such as, for example, in point of style, or some part of style, some image, some part or quality of invention, while it may, perhaps, be outdone in some part of its development, as in the way the outcome is more carefully concealed where Homer appears to reveal it intentionally before time (and even in this sense one could perhaps defend him, for in any case only the interest of curiosity is harmed, with which Homer, either because it was superficial and unpoetic, [3166] or perhaps because he was narrating things known universally to the nation at that time, did not trouble himself unduly), overall, in the entirety of its design, idea, and purpose and the actual result of the whole, all other epic poems fall well short of it. See pp. 3289–91. I would also add that they are inferior in this precisely because they pursued a unity which Homer did not set himself, as a result of that same increase and establishment of art which fashioned and governed them and which they pride themselves in, but which Homer himself did not know; and that they fall short precisely because of that increased perfection of design which is attributed to them in preference to the Iliad, and this alleged perfection is what constitutes the greatest and most essential flaw in their design, a flaw which no one recognizes in them but whose effects cannot fail to be felt, and which people attribute to causes that are not the true ones, while wrongly requiring those poems to produce effects that are not truly compatible with the design which is so praised in them, and without which they would have censured them; and finally that Homer, [3167] ignorant of this art (which was born of him), and following only nature and himself, derived from his own imagination and intellect an idea, a concept, a design for the epic poem that was much truer, much more in conformity with the nature of man and poetry, more perfect, than the others, who had him as their example, and who in looking to him, when the faculty from which he had produced these models had been reduced to art, and poetry was determined, marke
d, and constrained by rules, could not even come close to achieving.1 (5–11 August 1823.)