Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  Everything, it can be said, that modern travelers observe and describe as strange and unique in the customs and usages of civilized nations is nothing other than the remains of ancient institutions, especially if these particularities relate to the cultured classes. Because nature when it is free, as it was in ancient times, and is now for the most part among ordinary people, is always varied. But they certainly won’t find anything unique or strange in the modern, and anything there is to see in other countries they can expect to have seen in their own, without the need to travel. Apart from small differences arising from the climate and the character of the population, which, however, increasingly succumb to the modern trend for uniformity in everything,1 and certainly everywhere, especially among the cultured classes, people are anxious to distance themselves from anything that is strange or peculiar to their national customs, and not to distinguish themselves from others except through a greater resemblance to the rest of mankind. And in general, one can say that the spirit of modern times tends to reduce the whole world to one nation, and all nations to a single person. There are no longer any national costumes, and fashions, instead of being national, are European, etc. Even language now is becoming one, thanks to the spread of French, which I don’t object to on the ground of usefulness but certainly do on the ground of beauty.

  [148] These days that ἔρις [competition] which Hesiod says is a gift of the Gods to promote the good and the increase of men could be said to have been removed from among nations and almost from among individuals too.1 Once nations wanted to surpass one another, now they want to resemble one another, and they are never so proud as when they think they have succeeded. Individuals likewise. What is the point, what glory or advantage can be gained from this great competition? Imitation too is quite natural, but it is useful when it encourages us to try and resemble the great and the best. But who wants to be like everyone else? And for precisely that reason avoids trying to resemble the great and the best because they are different from the rest? When we are all the same, never mind what beauty or variety we find in the world, I ask myself, what good will come of it? Especially where nations are concerned (because the harm is naturally greater in the relationships between nations than between individuals), what spur to great things, what hope of greatness would remain, if the aim is simply to be the same as all the others? This was never the goal of nations in ancient times. It is hard to believe that sharing the same customs and practices, without wanting equality in wealth, industry, commerce, etc., would not be bound to have a profound effect in these other areas and influence the general character of the nation. Shortly after Rome became a sort of Greek colony in terms of its customs and literature, it fell into servitude, like the Greeks.

  But this is a really strange thing, that while on the outside nations are on the way to becoming one person, and nowadays we can’t distinguish one man from another, each man on the inside has become a nation to himself, by which I mean that men no longer have any shared interests with anyone else, they no longer join forces, they have no homeland, and egoism keeps them within the tight circle of their own interests, with no love or concern [149] for anyone else, no ties or inner relationship with other men. This is the opposite of ancient times, for while nations on the outside were composed of a great variety of individuals, essentially, where it mattered most, or where the nation needed to be united, they were in effect a single person, in love of country, virtue, illusions, etc., which brought all the individuals together to make common cause, to be parts of a single body. On this count, it could be said that now there are as many nations as there are individuals, but they are all the same in that they have no other love or idol but themselves.1

  Here is another curious item of modern philosophy. This lady2 has argued that love of country is an illusion. She would prefer the world to be one nation and universal love to exist among all men. (That is contrary to nature, nothing good or great could come of it. Love of the group, not love of men, has always given rise to great deeds, or rather the homeland, being quite often too large, has had no impact on cautious spirits, so they choose other bodies, like sects, societies, their city or province, etc.) The result has been, in fact, that love of country no longer exists, but instead of individuals recognizing the world as one nation, all nations are divided into as many nations as there are individuals, and the universal nationhood endorsed by worthy philosophy has become individual separation. (3 July 1820.)

  What I said above about love of the group or group loyalty derives from this. All human affections derive from self-love in one or other of its many guises. Their effectiveness is greater the more they derive from a more sensitive self-love [150] and the more satisfaction they bring to it. Now, with respect to group loyalty, the satisfaction of self-love is in inverse ratio to the size of the group. The noblest spirits can tolerate a larger circle, but, if it is immense, that satisfaction will fade before it reaches the edge, which is so far from the center, that is, the individual, just as sound, smells, or rays of light fade at a certain distance from the center of a sphere. (3 July 1820.)

  Quantum ad [as for] instead of quod attinet ad, as we say quanto a and the French quant à, is used by Tacitus, Agricola, ch. 44: “Et ipse quidem, quamquam medio in spatio integrae aetatis ereptus, quantum ad gloriam, longissimum aevum peregit” [“And indeed, though snatched away in the midst of a vigorous age, as for glory, his life was a period of the greatest extent”]. This example and its significance is omitted in Forcellini and in the Appendix. (3 July 1820.)

  What I said above is not the only reason that the fervor of Christianity diminished with the spread of the religion, that very religion which (without condemning the love of one’s country, as demonstrated by Christ himself weeping over Jerusalem) nevertheless had as one of its basic tenets universal love for mankind. Despite this, as long as it remained a sect, the zeal and ardor needed to sustain it was boundless in its followers. Once it became popular, they could no longer regard as their own something that belonged to all, and their loyalty to the group was diluted by its size, the individual could no longer find personal satisfaction, and Christianity languished.

  In addition, group loyalty makes us work for the benefit of the group and take pride in its achievements, because the individuals that belong to it feel, as a result, distinct from and superior to people who do not belong to it. Love of country, love of sect, faction, etc., as we can see, are all based on ambition, more or less disguised. Love of one’s nation is not [151] made for small minds, because they cannot feel any pleasure or desire for power over people as remote from their immediate concerns as foreigners are. Universal love lacks this fundamental ingredient of ambition, the driving force that activates group loyalty, and thus it is ineffective in nearly everyone, there being no hope of distinguishing oneself from others by acting for the benefit of a group. And once this group loyalty, which is useful for the reasons mentioned above, is extinguished, universal love does not take its place and, even if it did, it would be useless, for it does not effectively inspire anyone to undertake anything. (4 July 1820.)

  Also within, almost all people today are the same in their principles, their customs, their vices, egoism, etc. They are all the same and all separate, whereas in ancient times they were all different but all united and therefore capable of great deeds, for which we, being so isolated, are utterly unfit. And this same equality of ours (strange as it seems) is the reason for our disunity, which is born of universal egoism. (4 July 1820.)

  Universal love removes all rivalry and competition between one group and another, which is the source of the increase both of the benefits and of the prestige that the individual tries to procure for his country, his party, etc. Great men are capable of great rivalry, as with those of other nations. Little men, on the contrary, feel no rivalry except with citizens of the neighboring towns, with other families, with their own fellow citizens, etc. etc. etc. (4 July 1820.)

  Getting up in the morning, partly because of the ren
ewed vigor that rest gives you, partly because you forget your ills when asleep, and partly because of a certain renewal of life that this sort of interruption allows, you usually feel either happier or less sad than when you went to bed. In my deeply unhappy life, the least sad time is when [152] I get up. My hopes and illusions for a short time acquire a little more substance, and I call this time the youth of the day for the similarity it shares with youth in life. And as for the day itself, you always hope it will be better than the previous one. And the evening, when you find your hopes disappointed and your illusions shattered, could be called the day’s old age. (14 July 1820.) See p. 193, paragraph 1.

  Drunkenness excites all our passions, and makes us susceptible to them all, anger, sensuality, etc., and especially those which dominate in each of us. Likewise bodily vigor. Think of St. Paul’s famous “castigo corpus meum et in servitutem redigo” [“I chastise my body and bring it into subjection”].1 In fact, in a weak body, passion is powerless.

  A powerful imagination is one thing and a fertile imagination another, and you can have one without the other. Homer and Dante both had powerful imaginations; Ovid’s and Ariosto’s were fertile. This distinction should be kept clearly in mind when we hear a poet or anyone else praised for his imagination. The former can easily make us unhappy because of the depth of the sensations, the latter on the other hand cheers us up with its variety, with the ease with which we can dwell on objects and quickly abandon them, and, consequently, with its wealth of distractions. The resulting personalities are very different in each case. The first is serious, passionate, usually (nowadays) melancholic, profound in its feelings and passions, and all too likely to suffer greatly in life. The other is humorous, lighthearted, erratic, inconstant in love, high-spirited, incapable of the soul’s strong and enduring passions and suffering, quick to console itself even in the greatest misfortunes, etc. You can see in these two models a true portrait of Dante and Ovid, and see how the difference in their poetry [153] corresponds exactly to the difference in their lives. Observe also the different ways in which Dante and Ovid perceived and coped with exile. Thus, the same faculty of the human mind can produce contrary effects, depending on qualities that almost turn it into two different faculties. I don’t think that a powerful imagination is much suited to courage, for it can vividly represent danger, pain, etc., so much more vividly than reflection, which tells what the other shows. And I believe that the imagination of brave men (which they must possess, since enthusiasm always accompanies imagination and arises from it) belongs more to the fertile kind. (5 July 1820.)

  Everyone to some extent talks and gesticulates to himself, but particularly people with well-developed imaginations, who find it easy to behave as if the imagined were present. In the comments he wrote on his tragedies, Alfieri tells us that he used to do this, especially at a particularly passionate or heated moment.1 This habit is particularly common in children, whose imaginations are much more lively than those of adults. (5 July 1820.)

  I believe that many ancient words that are assumed to have different origins derive simply from mistakes in transcription that were made very long ago, making them seem different when they were really the same. I am led to believe this by the material similarity of letters or characters, and the uniformity of meaning. For example, δασὺ means the same as λάσιον [hairy, shaggy], and the λάμβδα Λ and the δέλτα Δ are two very similar characters, which can easily be confused in writing. I cannot believe that these two words, with the same meaning, and the same except for their endings, which is not relevant, and the first letter, which is what we are discussing, have nothing in common. And I believe many other examples could be found, in both Greek and Latin, where the substitution of one or two letters [154] for others that are similar in form has meant that grammarians did not suspect their common origin. (5 July 1820.)

  From what Montesquieu says in the Essai sur le goût, “Des plaisirs de l’ame,” pp. 369–70,1 it follows that the rules of literature and the fine arts cannot really be universal and applicable to each of us. It is true, of course, that in the important and fundamental respects we are all alike, and therefore the underlying rules of literature and the fine arts are universal. But many small and medium differences exist between one population and another, between one individual and another, and especially between one period and another. If all men were shortsighted, as many are, architecture would be faulty in many respects and would need to be corrected. And vice versa. In fact, it really is defective for those people. Eastern peoples have always been, and still are, much more agile, exuberant, and creative by nature than Europeans. Thus, that superabundance that we note in their poetry, etc., while it might be a fault for us, could well not be, or less so, in a people whose minds were naturally more capable of appreciating and understanding the poet’s style. You could say the same about obscurity, what for us is an excess of metaphors, hairsplitting, too much minute detail, pomposity, etc. etc. You should make the same distinctions between European countries and not condemn one type of literature because it is different from what we regard as classical. The prototype or ideal form of beauty does not exist and is simply the idea of propriety. That the ideas of things existed before the things themselves, in such a way that they could not exist otherwise, was a dream of Plato’s (see Montesquieu, ibid., ch. 1, p. 366),2 whereas their mode of existing is in fact arbitrary and depends on the creator, as Montesquieu says, and there is no reason that they should be made in one way rather than another, apart from the will of him who made them. And who knows whether there may be another, or more, or an infinite number of different systems of things so diverse from our own that we could not even conceive of them? [155] We may have rejected Plato’s dream, but we hold on to the dream of an imaginary ideal of beauty. (See the discourse by G. Bossi in the Biblioteca Italiana.)1 Now, if the idea of propriety is universal, but the judgment and discernment of which things go together depends on opinion, character, custom, etc., it follows that literature and the arts, which, for the reasons given earlier, are subject to universal rules at some basic level, nevertheless in many respects must differ enormously according not only to the different natures but also to the many variable qualities, such as opinions, taste, customs, etc., which give men different ideas of relative propriety.

  Similarly, you can see how pointless is the absolute conviction that, because music is especially pleasing to human beings, it must have an effect on animals. You must distinguish between sound (in which I also include song) and harmony. Sound is the material of music, as color is of painting,2 marble of sculpture, etc. The natural, distinct effect that music has on us derives not from harmony but from sound, which electrifies and shakes us from the very first note, even if it’s monotonous. This is what makes music special compared with the other arts, although a fine, bright color does affect us, but to a much lesser extent. These are natural effects and influences, not beauty. Harmony modifies the effect of sounds, and in this respect (which belongs only to art), music is indistinguishable from all other arts, because the virtues of harmony consist in imitating nature when they express something, and in following the idea of the propriety of sounds, which is arbitrary and different in different countries.3 Now, it is not difficult to suppose that sounds have some effect on animals, but it is not necessarily so, or necessarily the same sounds that affect people (we know that among men some nations enjoy sounds that are quite different from ours, and which we would find intolerable). [156] Their organs and, independently of these, their whole way of life are different from ours, and we cannot know what effect this difference has. However, if it is not too great, or if there is at least some affinity with us in this respect, sound will make some impression on such animals, as we know from reading about dolphins and snakes. (See Chateaubriand.)1 But harmony is beauty. Beauty is not absolute; it depends on the ideas that each person has of why one thing fits better than another, so even if the abstract idea of harmony could be conceived by animals, it would n
ot follow that their ideas of harmony and beauty would be the same as ours. And so it is not music as art but its matter, sound, which has an effect on certain animals. And indeed, how can we expect animals to enjoy our harmonies, if so many men do not enjoy them? I am talking about all the different individuals there are among us, and I am talking about nations, like the Turks, whose music to us sounds dissonant and tuneless in the extreme. Unless some animal exists of such a similar disposition to our own that it could hear in music, if not all, at least some of the harmony we hear, so that it could judge to be harmonious the same things that we do. That effect is much more unlikely than the one for sound described above, but it is not altogether implausible. (6 July 1820.)

  Given the distinction between sound and harmony, the one having a natural effect independent of art and common to all human beings (a random effect of nature and unnecessary in the abstract), the other a natural effect in the abstract, but depending concretely on art, you can understand why animals, while sometimes influenced by music, are not affected by the other arts. And it is because the material of music is, by its very nature, so effective in human beings generally that it’s not surprising that its power should extend to some animals that are perhaps more analogous to humans than others as far as this aspect of their nature is concerned. But this is not true of the material of the other arts, apart from colors, which, [157] as they have a natural effect on human beings, so also, by the rules of analogy (which are relevant not because we are obliged by nature to observe them but because we can see that they are observed),1 I surmise that they might give some delight to animals as well, and perhaps there might be proof of this. In any case, apart from music, which has a natural effect independent of art, animals are not affected by the material used in other arts and therefore cannot be influenced by the art itself, not having the same concept of beauty that we do, and that even among ourselves can differ widely. And as for the imitation of real things that naturally arouses our admiration, maybe this has the same effect on them without our being aware of it, and it could be that they do not understand and mistake the imitation for the real thing, or it could even be (and this would seem most likely) that they are confused about what is real and what is an imitation, inasmuch as they lack our knowledge of the craftsmanship and of the technical difficulties involved in such imitation, etc. etc., all of which are what produce wonder. And, in fact, you will see that among many barbarous peoples the beautiful imitations of our own arts, instead of arousing great wonder, hardly move them at all.