Zibaldone
Page 69
From these considerations it follows that today the wiser and more learned man is, that is, the more he knows and feels the unhappiness of truth, the more he loves the solitude that makes him forget it, or removes it from his sight, whereas in his original state the more ignorant and uneducated man was, the more he loved solitude. And these days, too, the more unfortunate man is, the more he loves solitude, whereas in the past, and originally, misfortune drove him to seek out the conversation of men, in order to flee himself. Today, such a flight from himself is impossible in society for the deeply unfortunate, and deeply sensitive, and knowledgeable man, because the presence of society is simply the presence of misery, and emptiness. For, since emptiness cannot be filled by anything but illusions, and illusions are not to be found in society as it is today, it remains the case that it is better filled by solitude, where illusions [683] are easier today because of the distance of things, which have become hostile and deadly, and the opposite of what they were in the past. (20 Feb. 1821.)
“His company” (that is, the company of Antonio Giacomini) “in the colleges of magistrates was sometimes not very much to the liking of certain people. Nonetheless, his opinion generally prevailed over that of others, and especially in the Council of Eighty and of Requests and Documents, where in the case of such BROADER consultations the authority of PRIVATE citizens much more readily yields and gives way to true and well-grounded arguments than it does in magistracies with a SMALLER NUMBER OF MEN.” Jacopo Nardi, Vita d’Antonio Giacomini, Lucca, Francesco Bertini, 1818, pp. 85–86.1 (22 Feb. 1821.)
Nardi, etc., loc. cit. above, p. 83: “Di quelle doti e di quelle virtù che o per natura o per instituto e lezione tutte furono sue” [“Regarding those gifts and those virtues which were all his either by nature or by education and learning”]. What’s lezione [learning] doing here? Apart from the fact that Nardi himself on p. 102 says that “he had not cultivated the sciences.” Read ed elezione [and choice], as opposed to natura [nature]. But see the other ed. of 1597, Florence, Sermartelli, 4°. (23 Feb. 1821.)
[684] Lorenzo de’ Medici, Apologia, etc., at the end: “Non mi sarebbe tanta fatica” [“It would not be so great a difficulty for me”]. Read stata [have been]. The error is in the Lucca ed. published by Francesco Bertini after Nardi, Vita del Giacomini, last page, 136.1 I don’t know about the other printings.
Δι.a ᾿Εκεῖνο δ’ οὐ βούλοι’ ἂν, ἡσυχίαν ἔχων
Ζῇν ἀργὸς;
Συ.b ᾿Αλλὰ προβατίου βίον λέγεις,
Εἰ μὴ φανεῖται διατριβή τις τῷ βίῳ.
[Honest Man: Look, wouldn’t you rather have peace of mind,
And no work to do?
Sycophant: No, that’s a sheep’s life, having no apparent
Purpose in one’s life.]
Aristophanes, Pluto, or Wealth, Act 4, Scene 3.2 (23 Feb. 1821.)
For p. 241 … that the world, or a good part of the world, is what in Greek is termed diglottos, and we might say bilingual. As in truth today almost the whole civilized world is bilingual, that is to say, speaks both its own particular language and, if need be, French. Except for France itself, which is not bilingual, not only the mass of the nation but also men of letters and the learned, few of whom [685] understand well or really know how to speak another language apart from their own. Whether this derives from national pride or from the fact that, because their language is used throughout the world, they do not need another to explain themselves to anyone at all, or, with regard to the understanding and use of foreign books, from the ready availability and quantity of translations that they have, this is not the place to inquire. (23 Feb. 1821.)
The Italian language is at risk not only from foreign words and phrases and expressions, and from all that is barbarous in origin, but also (and principally) from a tendency to lapse into the timorousness, meanness, impotence, aridity, geometric spirit, and excessive regularity that we have several times noted in the French language. Indeed, for a century or more our language has been losing the use and almost the memory of those countless particularities and felicitous irregularities in which its fluency, omnipotence, variety, [686] quickness, strength, naturalness, beauty, genius, taste, specific character (ἰδιώτης),1 and flexibility consisted. I am not speaking about those inversions and transpositions of words, and those entangled periods characteristic of Latin but so deeply inappropriate in our language, which, if we except Boccaccio and Bembo, and in a milder form Della Casa, have not, I think, been adopted and accepted by any good Italian writer. I am speaking, rather, about that liberty, that abundance of very varied kinds of diction—thanks to which our language took a different path from the French of the Academy,2 and was open to every style, and so was far from the danger of lapsing into the arid, the monotonous, and the mathematical—and, in short, all those qualities which made it very similar in genius, nature, power, and intrinsic merit to the classical languages, and in particular to Greek, which it was close to even in its particular and special forms, that is to say, not only in genus but also in species, just as it is very close to Latin in the individual qualities of words and phrases. But these days our language is in the process of losing, indeed [687] in the hands of most writers it has already lost, these true, characteristic, intrinsic, and native qualities, and I hold this to be the case even with those writers who, albeit with great difficulty, manage nonetheless to avoid barbarisms. (And here you should refer to what I have said elsewhere [→Z 111] regarding the manner in which these same writers’ Italian words and phrases make a poor showing in a framework of language that, though it may not be barbarous, is not Italian, either, so that ancient accidents appear in a completely modern and different substance.) And thus our language, too, was lined up in single file, as Fénelon, if I am not mistaken, used to say of French.1 This leads me to think that we must be very much on our guard, and all the more so given the propensity, spirit, and trend of the age to become wholly geometric, and the imminent risk our language runs of geometricizing itself permanently and forever, running dry, losing every native grace (even if it preserves words and expressions and excludes barbarisms), becoming as uniform as French is, whereas now it may be termed an aggregate of several languages, each adapted to its subject, or even to one [688] or another writer. Once it has become impotent in this way, the Italian language, instead of containing virtually all the styles (in accord with its nature, and that of all beautiful and natural languages, such as those which are ancient and not purely rational), will contain just one, namely, the dry and stunted language of reason and the so-called exact sciences, a language that in reality is suited only to the latter. Such will be its fate, as we can see in every type of subject, and even in the modern Italian poetry of the vernacular poets. This is precisely what happened with the French language, because it, too, in the beginning, and before the Academy and especially the age of Louis XIV, was not at all one, but, rather, its original, intrinsic nature greatly resembled the nature of the true Italian language and of the classical languages. It was full of particularities and of lovely and most natural irregularities; full, too, of variety; completely under the control of the writer (take note of this fact, which accounts for the difficulty of writing, as also of understanding, our language compared with French) and ready to take on whatever shape and dress the theme or the writer’s character demanded, or that the latter wished to give it; adapted [689] to the most diverse styles; full of vigor, or of grace, truth, character, clarity, and expressiveness; intrepid; in no way averse to bold flights, as it later became; speaking to the senses and the imagination, and not uniquely, as today, to the understanding (though the Italian language is also able to speak to the understanding alone, if it so wishes); supple, sturdy, or delicate as the need arises; full of sève [sap], blood, and color, etc. etc. Some traces of the above qualities may be seen in Sévigné, and in Bossuet, and in other writers of that period, so that if it had continued to be as I
have said, it would never have been universal, and with that I have said all that needs saying. And if before its fatal reform it had had as great a number of devotees as Italian had, and if they had led it forward in accordance with its original character, and from there to perfection, as our own was led, what I am saying [690] about the first and original nature of the French language would be still more apparent. This nature can be conjectured effectively if we consider its earliest writers, but it is not something that can be fully felt, because the language did not have a perfect writer in that early form, or did not have one who was perfect enough. Nor did that early form of the language ever achieve stability; when it was given a stable and universal form in the nation, it was reduced to what it is today, namely, to being in every possible genre of writing a series of very precisely phrased and ordered sentences and thoughts rather than a discourse. Where understanding and utility leave nothing to be desired, but the imagination, the beautiful, the delightful, nature, the senses, etc., leave everything to be desired. (24 Feb. 1821.)
The sixteenth century is the one and only true golden age, of both our language and our literature.
Where language is concerned a great many disagree with what I am saying, and would have it that its true golden age was the fourteenth century. But let them take note. Almost all writers of the sixteenth century, Tuscan or non-Tuscan, have used our language [691] fittingly and well, and more or less all of them can as a rule employ its elevated style, so that a writer from the present day whose language had as many qualities as the least of the mediocre writers of that time would be admired and studied. This is not at all the same thing as admiring the success of France, where as far as language is concerned nearly everyone writes well. Note what I have said elsewhere [→Z 324, 685–90] about the immense gap between our own language and French, and it will seem no small miracle to you that a language as difficult, varied, rich, vast, supple, and as much at the writer’s command as Italian is should have a period in which all or most wrote it well, and in every sort of subject and style, including every category of writer, and even those things that were and are written fluently and unreflectingly, as is the case with letters and the like, so that the sixteenth century is always a nearly [692] perfect model for the correct use of the Italian language for all the ages. Those who disagree will say that the same thing occurred in the fourteenth century.1 I will let this assertion pass, though on closer inspection it may well prove to be utterly false. But even supposing it to be utterly true, how surprising is it that someone writes well whose very act of writing cannot be separated from the reason for writing well? For we say that the fourteenth-century writers wrote well, precisely because they were of the fourteenth century; and anything and everything that is from the fourteenth century, or that imitates and resembles the writing of that century, is approved of and said to be well written, simply because it belongs to the fourteenth century. And to that century is accorded the authority to regulate our judgments on the beauties of the Italian language, and not to us the authority to judge whether that century used beautiful language. I know and say that it used it most beautifully, and I agree with and applaud those who, with all due qualifications and conditions, make the writers of the fourteenth century the models [693] or the foundation and source of correct Italian language valid for all ages. All the founding fathers of all the elevated and beautiful languages (as in the case of Latin, etc.) have had such authority, and indeed had it not through some whim or prejudice on the part of their successors but through the power of nature actually working within those founding fathers, and because nature is the principal source of the beautiful. But that does not mean that these qualities derived from the founding fathers’ own merit, or that they (with very few exceptions) devoted any study to the beauty and order of the language. In the way that Homer, for example, certainly did not strive to follow and put into practice the rules of the epic poem, which did not yet exist, on the contrary, they were derived from his poem, and his style then became the rule. But Homer, being the supreme talent that he was, studied nature, men, and the beautiful in order to create the rules that did not yet exist, whereas the fourteenth-century authors were almost all men of little note and profoundly ignorant, who would write down the first thing that came to their [694] pen. Indeed, whatever came to their pen is judged to have been the finest flower of our language, and I would not say unjustly, but certainly through no merit of their own. See p. 705. I would further add that, aside from the Tuscans, very few in that century wrote our language tolerably well, whereas by contrast in the sixteenth century the whole of Italy wrote correctly and elegantly, so that the fourteenth century, even if the above reasons were not valid, could not be deemed the best for our language, or bear comparison with the sixteenth century, except in the case of Tuscany.
As for literature, no one disagrees with what I say here, since the fourteenth century had three or four famous men of letters, but for the rest it had not literature but ignorance. When I say, however, that the sixteenth century [695] is the best, the golden age of Italian literature, and indeed that on the strength of this it surpasses not only all the other Italian centuries but even all the best centuries of foreign literature, this observation would have much greater weight in Italy and abroad, be more favorably judged, and carry greater conviction if what I am about to say is borne in mind.
First of all, the universality I have observed in that century with respect to correct language is also observable with respect to correct style, and this in all genres, in relation both to themes and to writers, in the more familiar and everyday forms of writing, etc., in short, in relation to all the features I have observed regarding language p. 691. Through study, and the correct application of Greek and Latin rules, the style of the sixteenth century had generally acquired such nobility and dignity, and such a wealth of other qualities, that it had almost attained perfection, except for a measure of obscurity and complication, deriving in large part from the undue length of the periods, and the superabundance [696] of rhetorical figures, and the inordinate and inordinately extended concatenation of ideas. This was a vice wholly characteristic of that century, which thereby sought perhaps to impart to discourse the gravity that it admired in the Latin authors but that should have been obtained by other means (such as the many others that this same century admirably employed); a vice unknown, it may fairly be said, to the fourteenth century, and to all the other centuries, no matter how vicious; a vice arising also out of an immoderate study of the Latin authors, imitation of whom is perilous in this regard, as well as in relation to transpositions; a vice that could have been to a great degree corrected through a closer study of the Greeks, but especially the first and best of them, for the more modern Greeks (though worthy) likewise succumbed to this fault, and to a kind of writing more Latin than Greek; a vice such that I can’t tell whether it pertains more to style or to language; a vice, finally, that, though perhaps ineradicable, may be greatly [697] mitigated by means of different punctuation, as many have done with the Latin authors, who indeed had great need of it, sometimes because of the length of the periods, which were divided up by full stops, and especially, and always, because of the nature of their construction. Such perfection was never seen in any style whatsoever, whether Italian or foreign, before or after that century, from the Latin authors onward (I refer here to style, not thoughts). No other nation has achieved it, even in its best centuries, and perhaps the same degree of perfection that foreign style attained in its golden centuries will turn out not to have been as universal in the national writers of that time as such perfection was in Italy in the sixteenth century.
Second, the literary merit of the sixteenth century is less [698] well known, and esteemed somewhat less than it truly deserves, because the supreme and singular wealth of that century is not known. If we except the Tuscan writers in large part recorded by the Crusca as supplying examples of the correct use of the language and therefore chosen to make up series, and to serve as lux
ury objects, and for other such motives, and reprinted because of the uses to which they had put the language, the other Tuscans, not used by the old Crusca, and the greater part of the non-Tuscan sixteenth-century authors are read by virtually no one, known to be of merit by very few scholars, known by name only by a very few others, and unknown by name or anything else by the great mass of literary people, the rest of present-day Italians, and absolutely all foreigners. And yet there is a very large number of such writers who, despite being so neglected, are nevertheless truly excellent and deserving of esteem, study, and immortality, even more than or as much as those who are known. And they lie in those old printings, at the mercy of the worms and the dust [699] (if, indeed, they ever have been printed, e.g., Baldi’s history, of which Perticari speaks, is manuscript),1 in the back of bookshops, very inaccurately and crudely printed, and with no one caring to look at them. From the handful of notable little works from the sixteenth century that have been reprinted in recent years, and from those which have been proposed for reprinting, and which, as we have seen, are perhaps not inferior to any already well known and famous works, one may gauge what riches there are in that century, and how much of our glory is obscured and buried by the forgetfulness, ignorance, idleness, and heedlessness of the present time. If, then, we consider how many fewer of the good sixteenth-century writers are known to the totality of Italians than are known to men of letters, who are themselves ignorant of so many, and how few of those universally known to us are known outside Italy, it will no longer surprise us to find that in Europe the fame of [700] the literary sixteenth century is now a matter of names rather than of facts, and a residue of ancient tradition rather than a current opinion, for the sixteenth-century authors known outside Italy can be counted on our fingers. The same, indeed, might be said, relatively, of all the rest of our literature. But foreigners are perfectly justified in not knowing more about it than we ourselves know, given that we generally find ourselves in more or less the same position.