286
NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. vn. OCT. o, 1920.
The writer means that inspiration (vi-
^tjrazioni) and the spiritual necessity for
^expression must govern literary creation.
P. 11. "This servile imitation [of the ancients] jand this miserable and illiberal bent of mind is the greatest obstacle to advancement which a -.genius can have."
" Beading is the most substantial food of the .-soul ; it is th source of all its more beautiful gleams ... .1 sem arid wish that the spirit of the -.ancients may inspire me, but I have certainly no Jceen desire to use them.... A truth of equal weight should be no less respectable in our mouths .'than in that of any accredited ancient writer."
P. 14. " And it woxild be a very delightful thing,
- Sn my opinion, the desire to make room and
prepare rules for our new works, but not with old 'laws abrogated entirely and extinct."
" Live in the old, think and write in the modern fashion : every age is submitted to and afflicted fcy this disease of affecting too much the imitation of the ancients."
P. 20. " We have need of great things in our iiead, of great arsenals of perception, of knowledge, of gleams. It must be an immersion, a steeping (enzuppamento), a delirium of fancy (ubriachezza -di fantasia) kept on through the years, and the years melting away to a deep, incessant whirlpool .-of infinite ideal species, then rising from it all .-dripping, glutted, sprinkled, so to speak, and flooded, the arts have emotions perfect and un- known to the crowd, and although they are many .in number and diverse, yet so harmonized in ..themselves that every mind reached by such .profusion is bathed in an abyss of light. There remains no more hope of distinguishing them by reasoning than the little genii of a poor streamtet -can be distinguished among the Nereids and Tritons of the sea."
A beautiful passage of pure poetry where the writer strives to describe the intuitive
nature of inspiration and the spontaneity of literary creation.
P. 24. " We are of those who demand that a writer should necessarily know of all, and we 4esire that every word of his, if possible, should bear an impress, an image, and that the whole of 'his work, having all the savour, should be an indistinct unknown, and if I may explain myself thus, an oglia podrida of new and choicest gleams."
P. 31. "It is necessary that objects should impress the will ; and the actions of this will, by means of effluves, of inundations and spiritual 'irradiations, make themselves felt instantaneously in movements so mysterious and so varied of so many liquids and solids that one cannot conceive it as being slower than the velocity of thought."
Thought and will work spontaneously from
the imprest ion and, acting through the spirit, -reach perception and immediate expression. Inspiration is a spontaneous and mysterious ihing.
P. 28. " There is a vast number of words expressing almost every kind of thing but more often emotions of the soul or the diverse operation -of the intellect and spirit, and they have been ^always in use from the earliest times, varied only a |
little in inflection, according to the progress of
that Dialect, and remain almost the same in
every language. Words express the inner essence
of the thing explained."
P. 29. " Adam named all things by their true name ; the only explanation that can be given is that he named them in such a way as to transmit by means of the hearing to the intellect the most perfect image of their Nature."
P. 30. " The first men had the use of their tongue by infusion : hence it is indubitable that speech belongs to those many children of the Divine spirit which degenerate with use."
P. 32. " And concerning that which has been said of the force of words which, in their original form, explain as closely as possible the properties of things, I say also, as happens not only in those words, but in derived ones, and as I remark in all the non-barbarous languages of the present that languages always express the varied character of diverse nations and the climate, the tastes and habits of different nations."
On this foundation he sonstructs a scientific theory of language absolutely modern in tone and application.
P. 40. " Besides, where have we that infallible code of good taste, by the rules of which we can, with closed eyes, let our pen be guided by our mind, sure of pleasing in this way every fine genius of our times and going on, celebrated and praised, through the darkness of all the ages to come? "
P. 41. "I await some production of your spirit : I would desire to see YOU thinking by yourself that which you write, and I seek only to acquire new visions and see new things."
P. 42. " Besides, each person considers things diversely according to the diversity of his own perceptions, which are truly that coloured crystal which tints other things with its own colour and although different, yet they can be easily verified. It is true that at another time such "differences in perception would attain such a pitch of heroic eccentricity as to prefer Virgil and even Tasso to the great Homer, and to pre- sume at midnight to see more clearly all men than in broad daylight by dint of syllogisms, and pretend, with four pedantic reasons, to raise a bulwark against the universal consensus 01 all the nations to the wonder of every century."
P. 47. " It is said that spirits are like keys, which open here, open there, according as their minds are more or less worked."
P. 50. "It may be said then that beauty in itself alone is a flower, which is to say, a pleasant, delightful thing but ultimately stupid and dead."
P. 60. " Even if it is true that the varieties of poetry are imitations and reflection, yet they are not at all on that account the same thing."
P. 61. "There is another thing, which I directly esteem as very important and believe to be unremarked as yet and that is, that to read the great Poets and to penetrate to the very inner- most of their thoughts, there is nothing so neces- sary as that glow of fancy, and that emotion, and that fervour of the creative spirit, which is held as necessary to the Creator of the Poem .... In Poetry one must not have regard at all to the trite, usual course of reasoning, but only to that superhuman impulse, which, without taking stock
