Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  For p. 1825. Love of God in the state that Christianity calls absolute perfection is only and can only be a love of self applied solely to one’s own good, and not to that of one’s fellows. Now this is precisely what is called egoism. (9 Oct. 1821.)

  How different the clothing of our country people is from the way the city people dress. Yet because we are used to seeing it, this difference has no impact on us, and doesn’t strike us as at all deformed or ridiculous, as does even a minor difference in the dress of a foreigner, [1883] etc. The same can be said of the ridiculous clothing of our friars, priests, nuns, etc. (10 Oct. 1821.)

  How it helps with the appreciation of the beauties, e.g., of a poem, or a painting, etc., to know that it is famous and highly esteemed, or that it is by an author who is famous and highly esteemed! My view is that if a man of impeccable taste reads, e.g., a classical poem and knows nothing of its reputation (which may often happen with things that are modern, or not yet famous, or not yet known by everyone to be so), even if he reads it attentively, he will not find, feel, or recognize a third part of the beauties, will not experience a third part of the delight that is experienced by someone who reads it as a classical work, and that he himself may experience when rereading it in that frame of mind. It is my view that we would not be as delighted as we are today, e.g., by Ariosto, if the Orlando Furioso were a work that had been written and come to light this year. It follows that the delight we get from a work of poetry, [1884] the fine arts, eloquence, and other things having to do with beauty grows in proportion to time and to fame, and is always (other circumstances permitting) less in the person who tastes them first, or among the first, that is to say, in contemporaries, etc., than in the person who comes to them after a certain period of time. Although universal and enduring fame is necessarily founded on merit, nonetheless once fame has been born of merit through fortunate circumstances, the former serves to increase the latter, and the advantage and delight of a work may perhaps in very large part no longer derive from merit but from fame and opinion. We have to create reasons for pleasure in order to experience it. Beauty is only beauty to a very great extent because we think it is. Observe, then, how great a role fortune has in the fate of human works, and in the fame or obscurity of men. It is certain that if a poetic work whose merit was absolutely equal or superior to that of the Iliad were to come to light today, and we set aside [1885] envy, cabals, superstition, and pedantry, the mere difference brought about by prejudice (inevitably, because Homer came so many centuries before us) would mean that the most tasteful and impartial of readers would find absolutely and incomparably greater delight, and sense of beauty, from reading the Iliad than from reading the new poem. So small a part of beauty consists of things and qualities that are intrinsic to and inherent in a subject, and independent of circumstances, and invariable, and so small a part of the delight that beauty gives derives from causes that are constant and essential to the subject, and common to all subjects of the same kind, and to all the individuals and times that are able to enjoy them. (10 Oct. 1821.)

  A man famous for dissipation and wild excess and erotic conquests and unfaithfulness in love has a powerful effect on women through this fame alone, but perhaps more on modest, timid women who are used to being faithful, than others. Shamelessness, dash, [1886] effrontery, etc., are always lucky in love, and are as it were indiscriminately necessary and successful with every sort of woman, because they are virtually the only means of prevailing. But considered simply as a means of being pleasing to and having an effect on the first kind, it is certain that it is more effective with women who are modest, retiring, fearful, unused to intrigue, etc., than with their opposites.

  Conversely, a man who is serious and reserved, or modest and affable, without pretensions and without recklessness, a man who does not throw himself at women, either because he does not know how and does not dare to, or because he has no wish to, a man who is withdrawn, etc., has a much greater impact on women who are dissipated, bold, used to flirtation, used to being courted, etc., than on those whose characters are similar to his own. The latter, indeed, take a dislike to him straight away, or are quickly bored, whereas with the former it is just the reverse. Also men who are awkward, timid, etc., in short, unskilled in how to behave or converse with women, lacking in ease, experience, etc., also a certain air of inexperience, simplicity, innocence (the opposite of shrewdness), of naturalness, etc.—while these are liable not to be at all to the liking of women like themselves, they may appeal to a woman who is very much at ease, [1887] experienced, shrewd, and free in her dealings, in her conduct, and in every habit and custom, and seem graceful to her, etc.1 (10 Oct. 1821.)

  I have said [→Z 343–45, 1243–44, 1768, 1807] that the Italian language never gave up its ancient riches. Here’s how this point should be understood. All the nations, all the languages of the ancient and the modern world, fully formed and unformed, literary and unliterary, civilized and barbarous, have always given up step-by-step, and step-by-step continue to give up old words and phrases, as they do, and as a consequence of, and in proportion to, their giving up old customs, opinions, etc. The riches that, in my view, the Italian language has never given up, are those that are more or less obsolete, and infinite in number and very beautiful, and can again be of infinite use to it, but not strictly speaking old words and expressions, that is, those which today either cannot be easily and commonly understood, or can be understood but do not have the appearance of being natural and spontaneous, rather than being fished out of the Classical Libraries. Italy means to have renounced these words and expressions, like all other nations, neither more nor less. Only the pedants [1888] deny it, or do not acknowledge this renunciation to be for the good, and protest against it, and neither abide by it, nor admit it.

  As to how the Italian language, in contrast with French, can and does have infinite riches, which may be obsolete and old in point of fact, but are not old in value, form, or coinage, I will now proceed to explain.

  First of all, the Italian language, unlike French, never underwent a reform issuing from a single source and authority, that is, from an Academy that was recognized by the nation.1 The effect of this was to restrict the language to the words in general use at the time of the reform, or which were then about to come into use, and to deprive the nation entirely of the liberty to employ whatever was good, intelligible, and unaffected in the capital of the language that was no longer in customary use but had been used in earlier times. The kind of language from which French could then have salvaged a very great deal. We have never stripped the ancients of all their authority and reserved it exclusively for the moderns, or restricted [1889] and confined it to a single body and its age.

  This reform was very natural in France, unlike every other nation. In the same way that the spirit of society, which constitutes the entire character and life of the French, forms the nature of their customs, so of necessity, it forms that of their language, in every age. Now because it is a natural effect of the spirit of society to make people uniform, and at the same time as making customs uniform, to make language uniform as well, it is also natural that this uniformity should be understood as being restricted to the people who are there at any given time, not to those who were there before. So it follows that the French, as they must, want to live and speak the way their modern, living compatriots do, not their compatriots of the past, because if they did that, they would be different from their contemporaries, which is a mortal sin for a Frenchman, and a quality that is incompatible with the spirit of society, insofar as it exists, in any nation. Thus, because the reform of the French language had to introduce uniformity, it had no [1890] choice but to discard everything that was old (being out of kilter with what was modern), everything that was not in present and current use, no matter how excellent and beautiful it was. For, in the matter of language, it could only make the contemporary uniform with the contemporary, not the contemporary with the ancient, an impossibility both in itself, and bec
ause a language doesn’t return to the past, exactly as it was, unless every kind of custom and opinion also returns to the past.

  It follows from the spirit of society in the French that, although their language (to mention it here in passing) seems the least subject to change or corruption in light of the countless constrictions that bind and define it, it is, on the contrary, the most subject imaginable, not only as regards words and expressions but also as regards its character.1 It cannot be enough for the spirit of society to make the modern one with the modern. For its own perfection it needs ceaselessly to make the present one with the present. And since customs and opinions never stand still, [1891] any more than language, it follows that because every novelty that is introduced in either the former or the latter immediately becomes universal among the French, and becomes a rule, the written and spoken language of the French must significantly change its capital and character, I don’t say every century, but every ten or 20 years. If, then, you add the supreme coerciveness, unity, and totally defined nature of the French language, which is of necessity averse to every innovation, especially pertaining to the spirit of the language, you will see that from this aversion there must follow rapid, significant, and inevitable corruption, or rather corruptions, as many as there are short periods of time during which their language takes on new forms matching new customs.1 Especially in view of the speed with which customs and opinions change, which are much greater in France than anywhere else, because the march of the human spirit, speaking in national terms, is faster in the nation in which society is more tight-knit, active, and extensive. The French language is therefore bound [1892] to change appearance in such a way that it will no longer be recognizable as the language of the reform, and so on successively, so that the language of one or two centuries later will no longer be recognizable as that of one or two centuries before. And it won’t be long before the classics of the age of Louis XIV are less understood by the French people as a whole than Dante is by present-day Italians. In short, the French language, precisely because the spirit and advance of the nation remains the same as that which gave rise to the reform, is in constant need of another, similar reform with the aim of authorizing a new language and making it classical, and discarding the relevant past one. And it will need it more often, because the pace is getting faster and faster.1 This is demonstrated by the facts, if you compare the words and spirit of the French of today with those of the time of Louis XIV, so little distance away.

  Returning to the point, our language has never suffered similar reforms, just as no other has done apart from French, given the differences in national circumstances. For if we wanted to consider the Accademia della Crusca’s activities as a reform, this reform would have been the opposite of the one in France, because it would have restricted our language to the old and the authority of old writers, and ruled out the moderns, and the authority of the moderns,2 something that being repugnant to the nature of living language is not worth discussing. [1893] Rather, the study of language and the classics has faded with the passage of time and the shift in studies and outlook in Italy, countless words and idioms that are fresh and living though old in fact have fallen into disuse and continue to do so all the time, and since they can be used without any scruple, so from time to time, here and there, one or another is brought into use by someone in a way that everyone understands, and no one denies or can deny that they recognize and feel it as Italian. And as long as our language keeps its own proper spirit and character (which, in truth, it does not keep today except in very few, but which it cannot legitimately lose, that is without becoming corrupted, like any other language), the capital of these riches will last forever.

  Inasmuch as the Italian language was applied to literature, that is to say, was formed, before all the modern cultured languages, it follows that its formation, and therefore its character, is [1894] properly speaking of an ancient nature. So, unlike French, it cannot give up its ancient riches without giving up its character, and itself. It could well give up this or that word or idiom, with the passage of time the greater part of its early words and idioms could also become antiquated, but the form of its words and idioms whether new or old must correspond to them, so as to correspond to its character; otherwise, it cannot avoid being a composition of discordant elements and structures and tendencies, and becoming corrupted. For this is what in the end the corruption of all languages consists in, and the present corruption of the Italian language is of this kind.

  The same is true, proportionately speaking, of the Spanish language, whose golden age and whose literature is the second in Europe, in order of time.

  The English language may, in large part, be placed on a par with French. The literature and formation [1895] of the German language is the last in point of time in Europe (since I do not believe that Russian, Swedish, etc., can be considered to be fully formed, and furnished with their own literatures).1 Nonetheless, it has not given up its ancient riches, Germany’s circumstances being utterly different from those of France. I doubt, however, if the ancient can fare as well in the German language, which was formed and reduced to literature the day before yesterday, as in the Italian language formed 6 centuries ago. And it could very well lose, and will lose its ancient riches (which anyway cannot be many, nor of much use, being prior to the formation of language) without becoming corrupted or deformed or losing its character, by contrast with Italian.

  From these observations it would follow that the corruption of the Italian language, and proportionately that of Spanish, was today all the easier and almost inevitable the more ancient was its perfection, and the more different it was in character to that of modern times. Now, I [1896] agree that it is very easy to corrupt the language because not paying attention to, not studying the language, and not mastering it, is very easy, and that’s what we do; and that it is harder nowadays to write well in our language than in any other. I maintain, however, that in its ancient perfection it contains the essential principles for conservation, that its true character brings with it the elements needed to make it endure, and endure in such a way that whereas other languages will very soon be corrupted, ours (if we subject it to the observation that it requires) will always manage to preserve itself as it was, or rather to return to such a state.

  The modern becomes ancient, and everything that today is ancient was modern. So it is that the modern formation of French or of German simply proves that their corruption will be more distant, not that they are not subject to corruption. Furthermore, the modern becomes ancient all the more quickly, the more the world advances, because its pace accelerates in proportion to its advance.

  What needs to be observed are the elements and nature of how [1897] the perfection and character of a language is formed. Now the French language, formed in times that to us are modern, contains in itself the principles of corruption and alteration I have observed above because, according to the nature of modern times, it is subject in its form to the servitude of reason. Whereas the Italian language, formed in times that to us are ancient, and according to the character of such times, essentially endowed with the liberty of nature, capable of an indeterminate multiplicity of forms, styles, and virtually of languages, can never become corrupted, provided an eye is kept on conserving these very qualities, without which its true and original character cannot subsist. Hence, although of ancient character, indeed precisely because it is of ancient character, the Italian language is and always will be capable of all that is or will be required to be modern, always tempering its different styles to the nature of the arguments. [1898] It is, therefore, succeeding and will succeed in adapting itself as much to the ancient as to the modern, that is to say, to beauty as much as to truth, and to nature as much as to reason, because the latter is contained in nature, but not vice versa. And it will also be able to combine the two attributes of beauty and truth in a single style.1 Just as the Greek language, the true daughter of nature and beauty, was as well suited to philosophy as are perhap
s any of the modern languages, which still have recourse to it for their philosophical needs; just as it was preserved uncorrupted for so many centuries and through so many vicissitudes; just as one can presume with certainty that the Greek language, if it still lived, and still retained its own original character, would be eminently capable, and perhaps more so than any other modern language, of describing all modern things, as is borne out by our seeing how many of them we would not know how to name if we did not have recourse to that language; just as the Greek language would adapt [1899] to analysis, to every subtlety of our modern reason, without for that reason losing any of its beauty, its ancient character, and its adaptability to ancient nature, because nature may be considered to be ancient.

  It is profoundly true that the more incorruptible the Italian language is in theory, the more in present circumstances is it more corruptible than any other in practice. The reformers of modern corrupt style, instead of preserving the liberty essential to its character, take that liberty away from it, and as well as corrupting it by this means alone, they also ensure that others corrupt it, while liberty is the chief and indispensable means to preserve it against this evil.1 Others do not study the language, do not know it, simply avail themselves of its liberty, without considering how it should be applied and used, they do not know what the resources of the language are, and instead of these latter, they employ foreign resources, etc. The ancient character of the [1900] Italian language seems at first sight incompatible with that of modern things. Without endeavoring, and therefore without discovering how to reconcile these characters (which cannot be known if you do not know the language), the former is sacrificed to the latter, or the latter to the former, or they are monstrously combined and harm is done to both. Whereas the Italian language must and can retain its ancient character while adapting itself to modern things, be beautiful while addressing truth, appear ancient also, as it is, while not failing to take modern usages into account and adapting to them without any strain.