Breme has forgotten that philosophical observation, old though it is, that the simplest, truest, and surest means are always the last that men discover, and so it is in the arts and the professions, as in the ordinary things of life, and in everything. And so the last thing achieved by someone who feels and wants to express the emotions of his heart, etc., is simplicity and naturalness, and the first thing is artifice and affectation, and someone who has not studied and has not read and is, as these people say, immune to the prejudices of art, and innocent, etc., certainly does not write with simplicity, but quite the opposite. We see it in young children when they begin to compose: they do not write with simplicity and naturalness at all, for, if that were the case, the best writings would be those of children, whereas, on the contrary, one sees only exaggerations and affectations and refinements, albeit clumsy ones, and the simplicity that is there is not simplicity but childishness. You could say the same thing about certain popular songs, etc. etc., which, in a certain sense, are simple, but put a little of that simplicity alongside Anacreon’s, which seems unsurpassable, and see whether you think it can still be called simplicity. Hence the aim of art, which these people criticize, is not art at all but nature, and the height of art is naturalness and the concealment of art, which novices and the ignorant are unable to conceal, even though they have very little of it, but that very little shines through, and the cruder it is, the more nauseating. And Horace’s nine years,1 which Breme ridicules, were certainly not spent increasing the artifice of his writing, but in reducing it, or, rather, in increasing it in order to conceal it, and in other words to come ever closer to nature, which is the aim of all those studies and those emendations, etc., which Breme mocks, which the Romantics mock, contradicting themselves, because, while [21] they curse art and extol nature, they fail to realize that where there is less art, there is less nature.
The poet must not only imitate and depict nature perfectly but also imitate and depict it naturally; indeed, he who does not imitate nature naturally does not imitate nature. That’s why Ovid, who depicts nature without naturalness, that is, who pursues those objects to such an extent that in the end he presents them to us, and even enables us to see and touch and feel them, but only after infinite labor on his part (so that he needs a page to show us what Dante shows us in a terzina), and with more tenacity than efficacy, soon becomes tiresome and, what’s more, unpleasing, because he is unable to conceal his art, and with so much circling around the objects (not only because of rash intemperance and restlessness but also because he is unable to describe the figure without a lot of details, and if he were not lengthy he would not be clear) he displays diligence, and diligence in poets is the opposite of naturalness. What poets must seem to display, besides the objects imitated, is a beautiful negligence, and this is what we see in the ancients, who were masters of this most necessary and essential art, this is what we see in Ariosto, Petrarch, etc., this is what is lacking unfortunately even in the best and most classic of the moderns, this is what is not achieved through sentimentality, or through Breme’s system, or in modern French poetry, nor can it be achieved, because this very sentimentality reveals a certain diligence, etc., it reveals, in short, the poet who is speaking, etc.
In Ovid we see, in short, that he wants to depict and do what is so difficult with words, to show the figure, etc., and we see the work he puts into it. In Dante no: he seems to want to tell a story and do what is easy with words, and in the way that words are ordinarily used, and he describes exquisitely, and yet the work he puts into it cannot be seen, he doesn’t point out this or that little detail, and he raised his hand and shook it and turned a little and so forth (as the Romantics do in their descriptions, and in general those English or French descriptive poets, as well as prose, etc., lately so much in vogue). In short, in Dante there is negligence, in Ovid not.
Zibaldone Page 16