Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  From my bed I hear the ringing (striking) of the tower clock. Memories of those summer nights when I was a child left in bed in a dark room, with only the shutters closed, and suspended between fear and boldness hearing the striking of such a clock. Or the situation transferred to the dead of night, or the morning: the same silence, and I a grown man.1

  The fluency, harmony, delicacy, pliability, elegance, gracious dignity, or dignified grace, of Monti’s verse is very fine and one might say original and personal, and all these qualities are also to be found in his images, to which can be added judicious choice, clarity, lucidity, etc. And I say all these qualities since his images, too, have something fluent, delicate, pliable, easy, etc., about them. But he is quite lacking in anything that concerns the soul, enthusiasm, feeling, true, deep passion, whether sublime or, above all, tender. In truth, he is a poet of the ear and the imagination, but certainly not of the heart; and every time he is led to express emotion, whether by choice, as in the “Bardo,” or by necessity and circumstance, as in the “Basvilliana,”2 the coldness of his heart is so evident that his elaborate style and composition are insufficient to hide it. This is so even in the passages I’m talking about, where, with repulsive dryness and chilliness, he often—in fact, usually—goes off in search of passages from Greek and Latin classics, and classical expressions, concepts, and movements, in order to give them elegant expression, and leaves the reader stone cold, finding nothing here, either, but that same cultivation (which in these cases does almost more harm than good) he finds in the rest of Monti’s writing, all of which is similarly sprinkled with translations of bits from the Classics. For this is what Monti does, in the “Basvilliana” and everywhere else: translate (extremely well, but translating almost word for word) numerous passages, turns of phrase, expressions, thoughts, images, similes, metaphors, [37] etc. etc., from classic writers. It can be said that the “Musogonia,” in particular, is really a cento of pieces from (note well) Homer, Hesiod, Callimachus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and if these names (along with, perhaps, those of a few other ancient or Italian classic writers) were to be written in the margin, as in the Catenae patrum,1 there would not be a page, nor hardly even a stanza, which could not be included under those names, so that I doubt whether I could find in the entire poem as many as ten octaves that were entirely original. I’ll leave aside the fact that the poem doesn’t have a satisfactory ending, its adaptation to the circumstances of the time is strained at best, and a cento of ancient pieces to say what was said by those same ancient poets is a wretched business indeed.

  Nature, as I have said, is great, reason is small and an enemy of the great actions that nature inspires. The enmity between these two great mothers of things has been reconciled only by Religion, which alone, by proposing the love of invisible things, of God, etc., and the hope of reward in the life to come, has, with admirable harmony, conciliated reason with greatness, generosity, sublimity, actions that seem mad (such as the actions of martyrs, detachment from earthly goods, family, country, etc., scorn of death, sacrifice of pleasures and everything for the love of God, duty, etc.). It is a harmony that in the absence of religion can be found only in words, because, without hope in the life to come, the immortality of the soul, the existence of virtue, wisdom, truth, beauty personified in God, this being’s concern with respect to our conduct, etc., his love, etc., it could be said that there will never be heroic, generous, and sublime action, or high thoughts and feelings, that are anything other than real and genuine illusions, and whose price must fall as the empire of reason increases, as we see already; and that even today those great actions in which religion has no part are illusions, and that, as the power of faith diminishes in people’s minds, so in the present those sublime actions that in the ignorant past were much more fruitful than in our enlightened age are fading away. And the same can be said about the sweetness and loveliness of many ideas and opinions that in the absence of religion are only chimeras and in its presence are truths, and which reason in itself would be repelled by, for, as it is an enemy of greatness, so it is an enemy of true and profound beauty, and from the point of view of reason, as everything is small, so everything is ugly and barren in this world.

  One of the circumstances in which it is barbarous to follow reason, and irrational but consistent with religion to follow nature, is, e.g., that of a father who sees his child so afflicted as to have to live a life that is absolutely unhappy, to have to suffer always and without relief, amid acute pain, amid the lack of all pleasure, amid perpetual emptiness, amid burning shame for his physical imperfections, etc. To desire the death of this child, who let us assume is also ill, beyond the help of doctors, dying, or not only to desire it but not to be saddened by it, rather to be consoled, not to grieve bitterly over it, is reasonable and barbarous, and, being barbarous and unnatural, is also contrary to the principles of religion.2

  [38] I do not know whether anything so disagreeable can be done to another as to make the clumsy offer of a very inferior gift to someone who has given you a splendid one. By so doing you show scant appreciation of the gift you have received in comparison with the one you offer in return as though it were adequate recompense, and make it clear you think that the gift received has already been requited without the need for gratitude. And the donor who in giving the gift took satisfaction in himself and expected from you both a recognition of the benefit bestowed and gratitude (however necessarily and foreseeably fruitless that might be) discovers himself in the act of his greatest satisfaction bereft of the reward for his sacrifice, and, what is more, unable to complain about it, except to himself, loudly and excessively, as do those who encounter ingratitude. This frustration of hope in the wake of a sacrifice, and also perhaps an effort made to bring it about effectively, produces in man a feeling of extreme disgust.1

  Extraordinary men who have distinguished themselves from the run of their contemporaries in their exploits, way of life, conduct, etc., method, etc.—whether by application or by nature alone or by both of these (as is, anyway, more commonly the case)—existed in ancient times and have existed in more recent times, and have probably existed at all times, but it is curious to observe the difference between the different eras measured by the gap between these extraordinary men and their contemporaries. Because, for example, Rousseau2 and Alfieri have passed for extraordinary men in recent times, just as Democritus, Diogenes, etc., once did in Greece, and so many other philosophers, who continued in Rome up until Marcus Aurelius and beyond. And this sameness of effect is absolute. But if we measure its cause, that is, the difference between Alfieri’s customs and those of the present day compared with the customs of Diogenes and those of his Greek contemporaries, we will find an infinite disparity between the size of the two differences, that concerning Diogenes being incomparably greater. From this it follows that, speaking in absolute terms, these two differences differ considerably in weight, even though each respectively has the same intensity and measure and value. Which shows that today’s customs vary from those of the ancients not only in quality, so that the behavior of Diogenes would pass today for madness, but also because to stand out in relation to them you need much less extravagance than you once did (employing this term in a positive sense, to mean singularity, strangeness, etc.), so that if someone today differed as much in his customs from the present norms in absolute terms as Diogenes did from the Greek, he would pass, not just as unusual, as Diogenes did, but as crazy, even if, in relation to quality, the difference was in accordance with and proportionate to the customs of today. You needed a bigger dose in ancient times to obtain the same effect that you obtain today with much less, and the successive and proportionate reduction or increase in this dose can be calculated also for the periods between these two extremes of ancient and modern, which truly are extremes, not only chronologically but also philosophically speaking. The calculation of this dose can serve as a thermometer of customs [39] also if it is transposed from periods to nations, for there is no doubt
that the dose is currently much lower in France than any other country, etc., and likewise in antiquity and in every age it differs between one population and another.

  According to Bacon of Verulam, “all faculties reduced to art become sterile.”1 Upon which very true judgment I shall make a brief comment, applying it in particular to poetry. Faculties reduced to art become sterile, in other words people find no way of enlarging them, as they did when the faculties were still formless and nameless and without their own laws, etc., and for this there come to mind (in the sense of the verb sovvenire used by Tasso)2 4 reasons. The 1st, that hardly anyone thinks any longer of adding to a faculty that has already been established, ordered, settled, and reckoned to be perfect, because everyone is content and satisfied in the thought that the matter is closed. This did not happen before it was reduced to art, when whoever happened to cultivate this faculty racked his brains to enlarge it because it did not have the name of art; when it acquired that name, even if in effect it was no richer than before, it seems that it already had everything. The 2nd (and this is particularly relevant to poetry), because many of those who apply themselves to poetry, indeed the great majority (you can say the same proportionately of the other faculties), do not dare to break any of the established rules or step an inch over the line marked out by their predecessors, in the pedantic belief that you cannot make poetry without sticking to the rules, in short the 2nd reason is pedantry. The 3rd, which is more common among people of sense and judgment and ability, and even excellence, is custom and habit, from which they are unable to detach themselves, partly in relation to themselves, and partly in relation to others. In relation to themselves, because, having acquired the habit of reading, hearing, writing those particular kinds of poem, tragedy, etc., they cannot do things any differently, however free they might be of superstition. In relation to others, because they dare not abandon current usage, and, even if they are not slaves to prejudice, when it comes to composing a poem they cannot summon up the courage to seem extravagant by imagining things not felt before. When it comes to publishing a dramatic action and putting it on before the public, if they did it as they fancied and without adapting it to the usual form, they would expect universal derision and condemnation. If they composed a different form of epic from the one the whole world is accustomed to, they think, and rightly up to a point, that they are going to be accused of cheating on the names, since an epic cannot be accepted as an epic unless it is in this accustomed form. And it is in fact the case that if someone calls his work a tragedy, the public expects what is usually understood by a tragedy, and if it finds something altogether different it laughs at it. And not without reason, because the bane of our age is that poetry has already been reduced to art, so that to be truly original you need to break, violate, scorn, completely abandon customs and habits and the idea of names, genres, etc., accepted by everyone. This is a difficult thing to do, from which even the wise reasonably abstain, because customs should be respected, especially in things like poems, which are made for the people, and the public should not be misled with false names. [40] And to write a new poem that has no name at all1 and cannot be given one from the known genres is certainly reasonable, but it requires a boldness that is not easy to find, and also encounters innumerable real obstacles, not all of them imaginary or pedantic. The 4th and strongest and most substantial is that even when a good poet wants to move away from every received idea, from every form, from every custom, and he begins to imagine a poem that is all his own, without constraint, it is really hard for him to be truly original, or at least to be original as the ancients were, because at every turn, even without realizing, without wanting to, despising it even, he will still lapse into the same forms, the same uses, the same parts, the same means, the same devices, the same images, the same genres, etc. etc., like a trickle of water running through a place where other water has run—however much you divert it, it will always run downhill and find the course that is still damp from the water that flowed before. For nature of its own accord provides ideas that are always new and always different, and if one poet were not known by another, there would scarcely be two poets who had written similar poems because this could only happen by chance, which is so unlikely to produce such coincidences that everyone can see how rare they are in every genre. Thus, when examples were scarce or nonexistent, Aeschylus, for example, invented first one then another tragedy without established forms or uses and, following his nature, varied naturally with each composition. Likewise Homer, writing his poems, roamed freely through the fields of imagination and chose whatever he liked because everything was in effect available to him, there being no previous examples that put up a fence around them and shut off his vision. In this way, it was with difficulty that the ancient poets happened not to be original, or rather they were always original, and if they were similar it was by chance. But now, with so many customs and so many examples, with so many notions, definitions, rules, forms, with so much to read, etc., however much a poet might want to leave the beaten track, he keeps coming back to it, and, with nature no longer working by itself, the poet’s mind is always naturally and necessarily influenced by acquired ideas that circumscribe the effectiveness of nature and diminish the inventive faculty. If that were not the case, in spite of the innumerable poets there have been, the inventive faculty (I’m talking about the inventive faculty of a true poet) would be perfectly capable by itself of finding ever new things, untouched by others, at least in that way, etc., naturally and without effort.

  One of the great proofs of the immortality of the soul is the unhappiness of mankind compared with the animals, who are happy or almost happy, when anticipation of ills (which does not exist in animals), passions, discontent with the present, the impossibility of satisfying our own desires, and all the other sources of unhappiness make us inevitably and essentially wretched because our nature makes it so, and cannot change. It is a demonstration that our existence is not finite within this temporal space, like that of the beasts, because it goes against the laws we see followed constantly, in all the works of nature, that there should be an animal, and this the most perfect of all, indeed the lord of all others and of this entire globe, which contains within itself an essential unhappiness and a kind of contradiction with its existence, for the fulfillment of which there is no doubt that happiness is required, proportionate to the being of that particular substance (which for mankind is impossible to achieve), and a formal contradiction with the desire to exist, which is inborn in man, as it is in all animals, and indeed, proportionately, in all things. For someone who is desperate for future life very reasonably detests his present one, is weary of it, suffers from it (an unnatural thing), and kills himself, as we see (impossible among the beasts). For a man to kill himself is a great proof of his immortality. See 5th Roman night, conversation 6.2

  [41] The prima donna (of the theater, of a certain age) does not wish to renounce her ancient rights.

  What I said above [→Z 40] about the difficulty of abstaining from imitation is confirmed both by the example of Metastasio, who, if what Calsabigi says in his letter to Alfieri is true, never wished to read French tragedies, and by what Alfieri writes about himself in his Life and among other things about Caluso, who refused to let him have a tragedy by Voltaire that he wanted to read while he was about to compose one on the same subject.1

  There is an enormous difference between the comedy of ancient Greek and Latin writers, Lucian, etc., and that of the moderns, especially the French. The difference is very well known and immediately apparent. But as for analyzing it and defining what it consists of, it seems to me to be this, that for the ancients, the comic consisted principally in things, for the moderns, in words (and by modern I mean mainly the most modern comic plays, satires, and other comic writings because Goldoni, for example, had that ancient and Attic style of comedy and likewise our oldest plays and Berni, etc., unlike, I believe, even the older French writers, like Boileau, etc.). The comedy of the ancien
ts was truly substantive, it always expressed and put on view something comic with, so to speak, body, while the moderns give us a shadow, a spirit, a breeze, a breath, a puff of smoke. The former filled you with laughter, the latter allows you barely to taste it and smile; the former was solid, the latter transient, the former long-lasting material for inexhaustible laughter, the latter the opposite. The former consisted in images, similes, comparisons, stories, things to make you laugh in short, the latter in words, generally and broadly speaking, and is born of a particular combination of words, a misunderstanding, a certain verbal allusion, a little play of words, one particular word, in fact, so that if you remove that allusion, take those words apart and rearrange them, eliminate that misunderstanding, substitute one word for another, the comedy dissolves. But Roman and Greek comedy is solid, stable, firm, it consists in things less transient, vain, aeriform, as when Lucian in the Ζεὺς ἐλεγχόμενος [Zeus Catechized] compares the Gods suspended from the spindle of the Fates with minnows dangling from a fisherman’s rod.2 And the Greek and Latin writers were the most implacable and zealous inventors of these images, these sources of ridicule, and they found among them things so obscure and at the same time so richly funny it’s incredible, like the fragment by Philemon Comicus in Vettori’s Variarum lectionum, bk. 18, ch. 17.3 And novelty was something completely ordinary in the comedy of the ancient comic writers, according to the comic power of each of them. And even when there weren’t images, similes, etc., the banter was always more substantial, more corporeal, with more things in it than the modern kind. But there are no two ways about it these days, especially in France, what used to be called Attic salt and amused the Greeks, the most civilized people of antiquity, and the Romans now seems coarse. And it may be that Horace4 too had a similar view when he spoke ill of the witticisms of Plautus (the exemplar of the kind of comedy I am talking about among the Romans) and [42] indeed Horace’s Satires and Epistles do not have the same robust comedy as the ancient Greeks and Romans, but neither by a long way are they as subtle as modern comedy. Now, thanks to witticisms, even the comic has become spiritual, so refined that it is not pure liquor anymore but an ether, a vapor, and this alone is deemed comedy worthy of persons of wit and good taste and good manners, and worthy of refined society and civilized conversation.1 The comic in the old comedies was also produced to a great extent by the actions that the characters were brought onstage to perform, and here, too, in pure action, there was no small source of wit, as in Maffei’s Cerimonie, a play full of true ancient comedy, as when Orazio has to climb in through the window so as to avoid all the ceremony at the front door.2 Another great difference between ancient and modern comedy is that the former was taken from popular or domestic things, or at least not from the finest conversation, which anyway did not exist then, at least it was not so refined. But modern comedy, French especially, revolves principally around the most exquisite society, the affairs of the most refined aristocracy, the domestic adventures of the most fashionable families, etc. etc. (as did, proportionately, Horace’s comedy, too), so that the ancient was a comedy that had body, like the blade of a sword that is not too sharp but lasts a long time, whereas the modern has a very fine point (more or less, according to the times and the nations) and so in the twinkling of an eye, it is worn down and finished, and can’t be felt by ordinary people, like the first cut of the razor.