In many manual tasks where there is some danger (of error or breakage, etc.), one of the things most needed for their successful completion is not to think about the risk and to work confidently. Thus the ancient poets not only did not think about the risk of [10] error but (especially Homer) were hardly aware that it existed, and so they worked with supreme confidence, with that magnificent lack of concern which tells us this is a work of nature, not of toil. But we timid souls who not only know that error is possible but always have the example of those who have erred and those who do err before our eyes, and so are always thinking of the danger (and with good reason, because (1) we see the corrupt taste of the century, which could so easily carry us into great error, (2) we observe the downfall of many who through a certain freedom of thought and composition give birth to monsters, such as at the present time, e.g., the Romantics), do not dare to deviate, not so much from the example of the ancients and of the Classics, which many in fact may well be willing to abandon, as from those rules (excellent and Classic but nevertheless rules) which we have formed in our minds. And so we fly low and never dare rise up with that negligence, certainty, carelessness, and I would even say ignorant confidence, which is necessary in the greatest works of art. Thus, from fear of doing something really bad we do not try to achieve anything really good, and we produce works of mediocrity, by which I do not mean that kind of mediocrity which Horace criticizes,1 and which in poetry is intolerable, but mediocre on the scale of the good—work, in other words, that displays well-wrought, studied, polished, expressive harmony, fine verse, fine language, excellent imitation of the Classics, fine imagery, fine similes, perfect choice of words (which above all betrays the presence of art), in short everything, but that is not the same thing, that does not have those timeless and universal qualities—in short no longer is there Homer Dante Ariosto, in short Parini and Monti are very fine but they have no flaws. See p. 461.
Plautus’s supreme quality2 is his comic power, which is none other than that certain liveliness of the characters obtained by means of ridicule, which enlivens the action (unlike Terence’s comedies, where there is great seriousness and so Caesar rightly says that he lacks Comic power3 because the action in a comedy is of little importance in itself and does not have the importance of tragedy, and so it remains weak, as if it were dead, if it is not continually cheered and reinforced by the ridiculous) and at the same time achieves the purpose of comedy, to deter [11] from vice, which it accomplishes principally through ridicule. But social behavior ἤθη is of little importance to Plautus. Each character behaves, it is true, as he should (at least in general) but (1) all the physiognomies resemble one another: it is always more or less the same parasite, the same father, the same unfaithful servant, the same profligate son, the same whore, etc.; (2) the features that sometimes distinguish one character from another are crudely drawn: for example, one mistress will be loyal, the other deceitful; one father pliable, the other hard; one son temperate, the other lecherous, and that’s it, etc.; (3) sometimes there is great naturalness in a certain beautiful, charming scene or in a whole Comedy, but the characters there say what any man in that situation would say, and although the speeches are entirely natural, taken from real life, and portrayed from nature with great finesse, yet they are not adapted according to the character and the particular manner of the person. In short, in Plautus you do not find a perfectly drawn, fleshed-out character, and the conduct he describes is of the genus (e.g., the father) or the species (e.g., the good father or the irascible father) and not of the individual. I notice this also in Terence, though Terence is much better than Plautus with regard to conduct and naturalness, having penetrated more deeply into the human heart, etc. Plautus sometimes fails to retain naturalness and verisimilitude, especially at the end of the comedies, where the characters are sometimes resolved too suddenly and for the convenience of the poet, when up until that moment they have been in an entirely different state of mind and also one that is contrary to such an ending. But it seems that Plautus is sometimes interested only in laughter and satire, with no concern about plausibility, and that he goes looking instead for the unexpected, not the unexpected based on plausibility that is recommended in poetry but a crude and implausible form of the unexpected, which precisely for that reason is more ridiculous, such as the end of the Bacchides, where as a punishment he suddenly makes the two old men who have arrived to challenge the prostitutes fall in love with them, and in that scene in Rudens where he introduces a contest of licet licet [very well very well] and other such retorts continuously repeated, at an important, excited moment where it is impossible that the characters should concern themselves with such games.1
[12] The word for Ovid’s art of putting things right in front of our eyes is not efficacy but tenacity, etc.
The French, with their pronunciation, remove the expressive sound that countless words from Latin, Italian, etc., originally had, and which is one of the greatest qualities of languages etc. etc. For example, nausea in Latin and in Italian with that au and that ea imitates marvelously the gesture a person makes and the sound that contorts his mouth and nose when he is sick. But nosé imitates nothing, and it is like things that, devoid of wit, flavor, humor, substance, etc., are just so much dross, etc. (capogatti, etc., not capigatti).1 See these thoughts p. 95.2
A very important observation about translations, and I don’t know whether it has been made by anyone else, nor can I think of anyone who has profited from it, is this. Very often we find a compound or a word that seems bold in the author (e.g., Greek) that we are translating, and in rendering it we try to find an equivalent, and having done so we are content. But very often not only was that same compound or word as it may be bold but the author formed it there and then, on purpose, and so it had a particular effect upon his Greek readers and stood out in the writing as entirely new words do, and as many words of Alfieri do for us Italians, like, e.g., spiemontizzare [de-Piedmont-ize], etc. etc.3 So when you translate, even if you have found a word that corresponds exactly, is perfectly appropriate, equivalent, nevertheless you have achieved nothing if this word is not new and does not have the same effect on us as it had on the Greeks. And here lack of attention is very common indeed. Because if you come across that word while you are translating and do not understand it, you look in the Dictionaries, and because it is the word of a classical writer, you find it explained in ordinary words, and you translate it into ordinary words; you do not consider, first, whether the author whom you are translating is the only one to have used it, and, second, whether he is the first, because it could also have passed into usage after him, and nevertheless his first use of it would have been no less bold, new, or expressive. Here is an example. Lucian in the Dialogues of the dead (“Hercules and Diogenes”) uses the word ἄντανδρον.4 Look in the lexicons and they give succedaneus, etc., but if you change it into substitute, or some such word, you do not achieve the mocking and satirical effect of that new word of Lucian’s, which means antiperson, and with its novelty has a particular beauty and a power that is especially derisory. (N.B. I am not sure whether this word of Lucian’s is his alone: I find it in the Dictionaries without examples, so it could belong to the language. It needs to be looked up in better dictionaries, which at the moment I do not have, because otherwise this example would collapse, though it is sufficient to explain my proposition and observation, whether or not it is true.) What I have said about words is also valid for expressions, phrases, etc. etc. etc.
[13] I don’t think that much heed should be paid to those who believe that certain sublime passages in the Bible surpass every other sublime passage by any other author, and who to prove it rely upon the material greatness of the imagery. For example, they say that measuring out the waters in the hollow of his hand and weighing the heavens with his palm (Isaiah 40:12) is much more powerful than hurling a thunderbolt from the heights of Athos and Rhodope and filling mortal hearts with fear, shaking Olympus with the nod of his head, etc
. etc. Certainly nothing can be said about God that is not infinitely less than the truth, and so the Bible (and the Bible much less than any other book) never says anything that in comparison with the truth is not minuscule. Yet I would venture to state that such biblical expressions are exaggerations in human poetry, and that in human poetry, in terms of poetic worth, there is far greater value in that image of Jupiter nodding his head and shaking Olympus, or Neptune who in a few strides crosses entire provinces, or that cry of wounded Mars that equals the cry of ten thousand soldiers and all of a sudden terrifies both armies, Greek and Trojan (Iliad 5),1 or the fall of that same god, who, stretched out, occupies seven hundred feet of earth (Iliad 21, 407)—greater value than in those many sublime images from the Bible, because in human poetry we need the middle way everywhere, the middle, which is the essential place of truth and nature, and which we must not step beyond even with the truth; and the sublime must stir the reader powerfully, but not overwhelm him with things that go beyond our capacity. And so for human poetry. But divine poetry, such as Scripture, must truly overwhelm and pass beyond human capacity, and therefore those images (being themselves far from exaggerated) are admirably suited for that sort of poetry, which is in all essential respects completely different from our own, and so not to be imitated by us without our falling into poetical error. In any event, I say indeed that those images are suitable to that poetry, but I do not think, as some others do, that this imagery is due to the greater feeling that the Hebrew poets had for divine majesty, rather than to oriental taste (Borgno, Dissertazione sopra i Sepolcri del Foscolo, Milan 1813, p. 86, note 1). As proof to the contrary, it is sufficient to observe the passages in the Bible which do not talk of God or of sublime things, such as, e.g., the whole of the Song of Songs, which talks instead of love and tenderness, and yet there too you find the same overblown metaphors and comparisons and excesses: and therefore truly and absolutely derived from oriental taste, to which I do not deny, however, that both poetic and divine inspiration lent added force with respect to the images and phrases mentioned above, etc.
The effectiveness of expressions is very often the same as their novelty. It frequently happens that the much-used expression is more robust, truer, more energetic, and yet its being much used enervates it and takes away its strength. And if the poet substitutes an expression that is less robust, perhaps even less appropriate, but new, he will produce a real effect on the imagination of the reader and will stir images in him that the other expression would not have been able to evoke; and the phrase will indeed be more effective, not in itself but because it is new.
In Monti’s poetry (especially the Cantiche),2 we may observe the [14] beauty novelty effectiveness of the images, particularly the sublime ones, but also every other kind, the softness and I would say nimbleness, agility, ease of expression; the great felicity in expressing very difficult things and images, the easy swift nobility of the style, and that nobility afforded by the choice and arrangement of words (or by one or the other separately) to things and images that are in themselves ignoble or almost so; the sublimity and grandeur of its fantastical imaginings, the grace and power of description, the facility and felicity of certain very disparate rhymes, as of certain proper names, remote from the main subject but brought in with admirable boldness and freedom (in which facility Monti had a great precursor, apart from Dante, in Menzini in his Satires), the effectiveness of many expressions achieved through novelty, etc. etc., all of which create a style that is distinctive, elegant (and this elegance, this nobility, etc., is also very often obtained with suitable Latin words, which are very dexterously, casually, and gently introduced into the composition), effective, noble, proper, and a kind of poetry that can be described as original, having many shades of color that are not to be found in Dante, who is always fiercer, and, as for style, rarely so soft and supple and harmonious and carefree and graceful and even delicate, etc. etc., the sureness and confidence of touch, both in terms of the expression and in terms of the idea, the images, etc.
Great truths, but they need to be considered well. Reason is the enemy of all greatness: reason is the enemy of nature: nature is great, reason is small. I mean that it will be more or less difficult for a man to be great the more he is governed by reason, that few can be great (and in art and poetry perhaps no one) unless they are governed by illusions. Thus it happens that those things which we call great (an undertaking, for example) are generally out of the ordinary and consist of a certain disorder. Now, this disorder is condemned by reason. Example: Alexander’s undertaking: all illusion. The extraordinary seems to us to be great. Whether it is actually greater than the ordinary, abstractly speaking, I am not sure: perhaps sometimes it will even measure quite a lot smaller on an abstract scale, and when this strange and famous man is strictly compared with another ordinary and unknown man, he will be found to be the lesser. Nevertheless, because he is extraordinary he is called great: even smallness when it is extraordinary is believed to be, and is called, greatness. Reason does not allow any of this, and we are in the age of reason (if only because the world has aged and is more experienced and colder) and few can now be or are great, especially in the arts. Even someone who is truly great now knows how to weigh and understand his greatness, how to dissect his character in cold blood, examine the merit of his actions, foretell how he may act, write meticulously with acute and detailed reflections about his life. Great enemies, terrible obstacles to greatness: even illusions are now clearly understood as such, and they are fostered with a certain [15] self-satisfaction, in the full knowledge, however, of what they are. How is it possible, therefore, for such illusions, once discovered, to be sufficiently lasting and strong? And for them to inspire us to great things? And, without illusions, what greatness can exist or be hoped for? (An example of when reason is in conflict with nature: a sick man is absolutely incurable and will certainly die in a few days. His relatives, in order to feed him as his illness now requires, suffer real hardship in providing for him; they will sustain losses from doing so even after the sick man’s death, and the sick man will obtain no benefit and may perhaps even be harmed because he will suffer longer. What does naked, dry reason suggest? You are mad if you feed him. What does nature say? You are barbarous and wicked if you do not do everything possible to feed him. It should be noted that religion sides with nature.) It is nature, therefore, that presses great men to great actions. But reason pulls them back: and so reason is the enemy of nature, and nature is great and reason is small. Another proof that reason is often the enemy of nature can be seen in the benefit of toil (as much for health as for everything else), which nature finds repugnant, and, in the same way, in the repugnance of nature to a hundred other things that are either necessary or highly beneficial and therefore encouraged by reason, and vice versa in the inclination of nature toward many other things that are harmful or useless or forbidden, unlawful, and condemned by reason: and with these appetites, nature often tends to harm and destroy itself.
I have just finished reading Lodovico di Breme’s observations in issue no. 91 of the Spettatore on modern or Romantic poetry,1 whatever we want to call it, and because I have seen a series of arguments that might cause confusion and concern, and by nature am never far from doubt even about things that are regarded as beyond doubt—for that reason, having in mind the answers that can and should be given to those arguments, I am writing them down for my own peace of mind. The writer (like all Romantics) wants modern poetry to be based on the ideal that he calls pathetic and which is more commonly described as sentimental, and he rightly distinguishes between the pathetic and the melancholic, the pathetic being, as he says, that depth of feeling which is felt by sensitive hearts through the impression that some natural thing has upon the senses, e.g., the bells of the place where one was born (as he says) and I add the sight of a country landscape, a ruined tower, etc. etc. This, in short, is the difference that he claims between modern and ancient poetry, for the ancients did not experience these f
eelings, or much less than we do; so, according to him, we are superior to the ancients in this, and since it is in this, according to him, that true poetry consists, we are therefore infinitely better poets than the ancients. (And this is the poetry of Chateaubriand, Delille, Saint-Pierre, etc. etc., not to mention the Romantics, who are perhaps different to some extent, etc. And the pathetic here is what the French call sensibilité [sensibility] and we might call sensitività.) So then we must arouse this pathos, this depth of feeling in the heart, and in this, naturally, the poet’s highest art consists. And this is where Breme and all the Romantics and the Chateaubriandists,2 etc. etc., go off course. What is it that excites these feelings in men? Nature, in its purest form, as it is, as the ancients saw it: natural circumstances, not brought about deliberately, but arising spontaneously: that tree, that bird, that song, that building, that wood, that hill, [16] all as it is, without artifice, and without this hill being remotely aware that it is supposed to arouse these feelings, or that something might be added in order to arouse them, no art, etc. etc. In short these objects, in short nature in and of itself and by its own inherent force, not borrowed from any other thing, awakens these feelings. Now, what did the ancients do? They described with such simplicity nature and the objects and circumstances that awaken these feelings by their own force, and they were able to describe and imitate them in such a way that we see these very objects in their verses, that is, we seem to see them, as far as that is possible, as they are in nature. And because in nature they awaken these feelings in us, they awaken them equally also when they are described and imitated with such perfection, all the more because the poet has chosen the objects, has placed them in their true light, and through his art has prepared us to receive that impression of them, whereas in nature objects of all kinds are merged together and, because we see them often, we pay them no attention. (This is where the great faculty of the imitative arts comes into play, because of the extraordinary manner in which they present common objects, that is, imitated in such a way as to be considered important in poetry, whereas in real life they were not, and we draw from them those reflections, etc. etc., which in real life, because they were common, they did not provide us with, etc. etc., as Gravina describes in his Ragion poetica.)1 In order for those objects to produce such feelings, we have to take them on their own terms, and there the ancients achieved this great effect which the Romantics seek, and they achieved it in such a way that they captivate us and exalt us and immerse us in a sea of sweetness, and all the ages and all the centuries, and all the great men and poets who came after them, are witnesses to this. But wait: when these poets so imitated nature, and prepared this flood of feelings for their readers, they themselves either did not feel it or did not say they felt it. Very simply, like shepherds, they described what they saw, and added nothing of their own—and this is the great failing of ancient poetry, why it is no longer poetry, and why the moderns beat the ancients hands down, etc. etc. And the Romantics do not see that, if these feelings are produced by bare nature, then to awaken them you must imitate bare nature, and that those simple things and innocent objects, which by their own force, unknowingly, produce those effects in our minds, have to be transported as they are, no more no less, into poetry; and that, when they are so well and divinely imitated, with the added wonder and attention to minute detail that in real life went unnoticed and yet are seen in the imitation, they must awaken in us the very same feelings that those Romantics are looking for, the feelings that they cannot remotely awaken in us; and that when the poet speaks in his own voice, and the more he adds of his own, the less he imitates (as already noted by Aristotle, to whom we go back, like it or not, without realizing it);2 and that the sentimental is not produced from the sentimental but from nature, as it is, and it is necessary to imitate nature as it is, and as the ancients imitated it, so that a very simple simile of Homer’s, without pangs and fainting fits, and an ode by Anacreon awaken a host of fantasies, and fill the mind and heart incomparably more than a hundred thousand sentimental verses; because here speaks nature, and here speaks the poet. And they do not see [17] that this great ideal of our times—this intimate understanding of our heart, analyzing, predicting, identifying each of its tiny emotions one by one, in short this psychological art—destroys the illusion without which poetry will never exist, destroys greatness of soul and of actions (see what I wrote in another thought [→Z 14–15]),1 and that while man (broadly speaking) distances himself from that childishness, where everything is strange and wonderful, where the imagination seems to have no limits, from that childishness which was proper to the world in the time of the ancients, as it is proper to each man in his own time, he loses the capacity to be seduced, he becomes false and wicked, he is no longer able to be excited by something that he knows to be vain, he falls into the clutches of reason, and, if he is still moved (because only our mind has changed, and not our heart), this blessed mind hunts out all the secrets of this emotion for him, and all inspiration vanishes, all poetry vanishes; and they do not see that the language of nature is lost, and that this sentimentality is nothing other than the aging of our soul, and no longer lets us speak except artfully, and that that sacred simplicity, which cannot disappear from nature because nature does not age with man, and which alone can stir in us those true, sweet feelings we are searching for, no longer belongs to us, as it belonged to the ancients; and that, moreover, to speak as this simplicity speaks, and as nature teaches, and to awaken those feelings which only nature can awaken, we have no choice in this pitiful century of reason and enlightenment but to flee from ourselves and see how the ancients, who were still children, spoke, and how they saw and depicted the sanctity of nature with eyes that were neither malicious nor prying but innocent and utterly pure—in short, they do not see that they, as friends of nature on its own, come in fact to preach art, while we friends of art come truly to preach nature. Here it would be relevant to discuss affectation, which is the general fault among the fine arts and encompasses almost all faults, and how the sentimental can easily be pure affectation, and how very often, instead of awakening the feelings that it would like to, it extinguishes them, when perhaps a certain natural object seen or depicted was awakening them, and how these feelings are of an infinite modesty, etc. etc. But to reduce modern poetry, as Breme does, to pathetic verse alone (distinguish it as much as you like from melancholy, as I said above), as if the sublime, the impetuous, the exultant, the jubilant (I well know that even joy can be pathetic, but not in the cases I am speaking about), gracious naturalness, and, in short, almost all the poetry of the ancients, the epic, the lyric when it’s not sentimental, the songs of triumph, the descriptions of battles, the psalms of David, the odes of Anacreon, etc. etc. etc., were not poetry, or at least no longer seem so to people today, or at least should no longer be cultivated by people today (though it’s not clear why, unless the two previous points are also accepted): does this not look like a madness that it’s hard to believe entered the mind of a sensible man? Is Virgil therefore not a poet except in the fourth book of the Aeneid, and the episode of Nisus and Euryalus, or wherever? So [18] will there be no more than one kind of poetry? And in one work must there be no more than one single tone? (And after all this they complain to us about the monotony of the ancient fables.) But what is this? Have we completely changed our nature? Is there no longer joy unless it is half melancholic, no longer anger, no greatness or loftiness of thought without that added touch of pathos, etc. etc.? (And if poetry is imitative art and its purpose is to give delight, and is not supposed to imitate a single thing or a single delightful thing, etc. And generally it doesn’t seem that Breme takes much notice of nature and the purpose of poetry, which consists in giving delight by means of the wonder produced by imitation, etc.) But these are lunacies, and it’s pointless to speak of them. By following Breme’s reasoning with care, it can be seen that there is a hidden but very real and fundamental contradiction, in his system as in that of the Romantics. At firs
t he says that the ancients believed everything and were convinced of any number of absurdities, and that ignorance, fear, and prejudice, which provided great material for their poetry, can no longer provide it today; in short, he evidently appears to reach the conclusion that our poetry needs to be rational, in proportion to the lights of our time, and in fact he says that it must now be fed by religion, philosophy, the laws of society, etc. etc. And so say the Romantics. But if this is so, the illusion has disappeared, and if the poet is unable to create illusion, he is no longer a poet, and to talk about a rational poem is just like talking about a rational animal, etc. etc. And the Romantics, far from writing rational poetry, go looking for any number of superstitions and the craziest things that could ever be imagined. Breme then says that the imagination of today is still as strong as ever, and wants to be “invaded, snatched away,” etc., “and even seduced” (just what we needed), provided it is not by things “entirely arbitrary or distant from that Truth,” etc. In these words, and especially in that even and that entirely, I can most clearly detect the anxiety of the metaphysician who, seeing the line of his reasoning twist and bend, seeks to find a way out through words. But since you finally state that our imagination needs to be seduced (and Breme later confirms this, without any hesitation, in several other places), your reasoning completely collapses, because when one of us settles down to read a poem, knowing that he has to be seduced, and desiring to be seduced, he believes as much in what is more false as in what is less false, he believes in Milton as much as in Homer, as much in Bürger’s ghosts as in the underworld of the Odyssey and the Aeneid. And it’s pitiful to suggest that fictions must not be entirely arbitrary: as if today’s imagination might be deceived by only so much, and no more, and as if our intellect, in the midst of reading and the deception of the imagination, did not understand equally the falsehood of Klopstock’s inventions and that of Homer’s and Virgil’s. Everything depends on whether our imagination can and must be seduced by poetry or not. If it can, then all your arguments are stuck together with spit, and the poet must seek to seduce as he thinks best, and if he is unable to seduce, the fault is his, not that of the genre he has chosen. Breme (and probably all his followers as well) makes another mistake when, talking about Greek mythology, he says that “nature is life,” that human imagination and poetry take pleasure in imagining that everything is alive, in other words that everything is conscious of being, and here he talks at length in praise [19] of this source of modern poetry, which consists in not looking at anything with indifference, in “giving meaning to everything and recognizing life in all its possible forms,” in other words, in bringing nature to life through “ideas that are poetically analogous,” etc. etc. Therefore, not only does he allow nature to be brought to life but essentially he wants it to be, and he proposes to contrast this vital system with mythology, etc., and, as an example of how this bringing to life is different from what the writers of mythology did, he uses a passage by Lord Byron in which he attributes fragrant sighs to a rose in love.1 But wait a moment. He doesn’t want nature to be brought to life so individually, let us say, and indirectly, as the writers of mythology did, by personifying emotions and gods and plants, etc.; rather, he wants it brought to life directly, without converting it into individuals, and “recognizing life in all its forms, not exclusively the human form,” in short, he wants everything to be alive and sensitive, not just human beings everywhere. But Breme does not see, and the Romantics do not see, that the people who are supposed to bring nature to life, these poets, are men and cannot naturally and by intimate impulse imagine life in objects, unless it be human life, and that this bestowal of human thoughts and forms and emotions upon inanimate objects, Gods, and even his own feelings is so natural to man that in order to remove this vice from him he would need to be remade.2 He does not see that the idea, e.g., that inanimate things have a life that is different from our own is so repugnant to our instinct and our nature as to belong to what is called bad taste, the taste we call Gothic, the taste we call Chinese; or that the poet must follow neither reason nor metaphysics (even allowing that reason prefers in things that are not alive a life that is different from ours rather than the same, and likewise when you talk about the Gods, etc.) but nature and instinct, and that, insofar as one can argue from this instinct, if, e.g., a horse had reason and imagination, it would attribute to God (the horse would then be rational, hence let no one be offended by what I say) and to inanimate objects, etc. etc., the figure and the feelings and the thoughts of a horse, and the other animals likewise (and this thought is not mine but that of the ancient Xenophanes because many things are old that are thought to be new, and much wisdom is ancient, which we think those brains could never attain).3 He does not see that, if the rose sighs and is in love, the rose in the poet’s mind is absolutely nothing other than a woman, and that wanting to suppose that this living rose is not alive like us, though possible for the metaphysician, is completely impossible for the poet and for his listeners, who are not metaphysicians but ordinary people, and he does not see that Lord Byron himself was unable to give his rose—nor will all the Romantics in the world ever be able to give the slightest thing—emotions and senses that are anything but human because we can barely persuade ourselves that other emotions and senses can exist, let alone imagine what they are like, etc. etc. As for the art of writing and composing poetry, which Breme seems, for the most part, to scorn, I can deal with that in a few words. This imitation of nature, this awakening of feelings that you people want—is it easy or difficult? And is everyone who feels them sure, provided he starts writing, that he will immediately communicate them to others, or not? If the answer is yes, my congratulations, and I look forward to seeing the result. If not, if this thing is the most difficult of all, [20] if, when you have had an idea, you have completed barely half the journey, if thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced and felt deeply some emotion have written and not succeeded in moving others and their writings are read by no one, if endless examples and reasons prove how great is the power of style, and how one and the same image used by a skillful poet has great effect and by an inferior poet none, if Virgil without art would not have been Virgil, if in poetry a fine body clothed in rags, by which I mean fine meanings without fine style order choice, etc., is insufferable, unreadable, and condemned, not by prejudice but by time, that incorruptible and implacable judge, if with the appropriateness, elegance, nobility, etc. etc. etc., of words, of language, and of ideas, with choice, with order, with arrangement, etc. etc., an infinity of absolutely essential virtues is gained by poetry, then art, and the most thorough study of art, is necessary, especially today, for the reasons that I have described several times in these thoughts. And we see that the great writers, those whom the whole world reveres, those so infinitely above biased judgment, those who in the end if they are not truly and eternally great then there is no longer anything great nor is there hope of greatness, we see that Cicero (and eloquence is very similar to poetry) studied his art and his language and grammar and the Greek examples more thoroughly than can ever be imagined, etc., and with this study became not a man of no consequence, or a pedant, or an imitator, or whatever else but a Cicero, and if, dear Signor Breme, Cicero as a writer and orator does not appeal to you, nor does Pindar, or Horace, then I will bid you a swift good night, and I am sorry for not having realized it earlier. (And it has already been observed above that the primitive must be learned from the ancients.)
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