Democrazia e arte

An essay ("Democracy and Art") by this Italian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

In my opinion we commit an abuse, if not a play on words, when we say 'aristocratic art.'  In every work of art there is always a technical part that cannot be penetrated, understood or savored except by those who have at least been initiated, or by those whose studies specialized in the field.  But this work of art always contains an ideal foundation, an arsenal of sentiments, all of which triggers such passions and breathes life into such images that the populace gains an understanding.  Through these sentiments the populace feels itself to be in spiritual communion with the work; that is why the populace feels part of it, relives it, and receives from it an illusion of a better life.  And for this reason it palpitates and rises with a force of ascent that it did not know it possessed, all of which is akin to the effect of a suggestion.

In order that the artist place himself in a direct relationship with the soul of society, precisely this power of sympathy, which both influences and dominates this soul, constitutes the popularity of a work of art.  So when we say 'aristocratic art' we cannot but mean that artificial and well-crafted art consisting solely of an ingenious combination of words, of verses, of rhymes, made in accordance with the precepts and caprices of a special poetic code, manipulated and accepted by a privileged cenacle, and living outside the movement of contemporary life.  The art, in short, of the Euphuists, of the Alcovists, of the Parnassians, of the Pre-Raphaelites, of the Decadents: the mechanical art of John Lyly and de Góngora, of Marino and Bainville.

Now if democracy could come to kill this art of the refined and the haggard, we should have nothing to complain about; in fact, we should be elated since everything that is false does not have a right to human life.  But democracy probably will not even notice these loons, who confuse a work of art with a rebus or a puzzle, and will leave them to delight and indulge themselves in their void.  If democracy could destroy art, it ought, first of all, to destroy the organic and physiological conditions of genius, restrict the concomitant cerebral convolutions, and diminish the weight of the brain.  But the day that democracy were to produce in the populace such a cerebral degeneration would be the day the populace would vanish from history.  The struggle for life is the supreme law of the populace; the most powerful force in this struggle is precisely intelligence, and if democracy decreases intelligence and suppresses genius, it will deprive itself of all possibilities of triumph and survival.  This seems to be a steep price to pay. 

On the other hand, we see that the nations or peoples who triumph in terrible battles are exactly those which manufacture the greatest number of ingenious devices, namely, instruments and arms more precise or better suited for victory.  Could it be said, then, that scientific genius in such a case may be the product of the new democratic society and that poetic and artistic genius would not have a reason to exist?  Yet nothing reasonably induces us to imagine a society of men so alien to all elevated and generous passions, so deaf to all the great emotions that the spectacles of nature produce in all living things, that it would not concede any place to the manifestations of art.  Science itself, considered the enemy of the life of art by hypochondriac or superficial minds, constantly opens new horizons to the genius of the poet and the artist, and liberates for him more and more the flight towards the infinite.

It has also been observed that for a work of art to be born and to live, it has need for certain societal and political conditions which democracy would not be able to furnish.  Thus has the last trench of the pessimists been gloriously broken by the arguments of Vittorio Alfieri and Ugo Foscolo, by now so old and doddering in all its elements that I really do not know by what shamelessness on our part they may be confined.  For an artist to be able to work he mainly has need for liberty.  This liberty is doubtless greater in a democratic government.  Thus it does not make sense as to how democracy could possibly be the enemy of art when it affords it the primary and most essential condition of its existence, that of liberty.  Furthermore, the artist has need for a certain independence from the daily necessities of living: there are activities, in other words, from which came the mouthfuls of food that Berlioz would eat at the feet of the statue of Henri IV. 

Now the artist who can and knows he can use his talents freely in a democratic government and produce works worthy of the attention of a greater number of citizens, is certainly in a better position to earn his mouthful of bread that day than both the artist constrained to placate a despotic government or the artist obliged not to displease a prince, from whom, in the end, one may expect meager subsidies, a quandary that has persisted for many centuries from the satire of Ariosto, to the weepings of Tasso, to the adulations and threats of Aretino.  If the life of poets and artists at the courts of princes – especially Italian princes – was miserable, it has now become a most common thing: and the portent of democracy reducing them to greater misery is contradicted not only by logic, but also, on a daily basis, by facts.  Indeed, the more that States approach the democratic ideal, the less difficult will become the life of all men of genius, for whom the nascent liberty always opens new pathways and honors for their livelihood, increases those conditions favorable to the impartial appreciation of their works, and provides the tools for the rapid and broad diffusion of these selfsame works.  This liberty also protects their rights and augments their compensation in accordance with the pleasure and utility which these works bestow upon the greater number of persons.

Now it not infrequently happens that the most sublime and brilliant works are misunderstood, or not understood, or neglected.  This occurs at the present time as it has in every other era, in Italy and elsewhere, because a work of genius is essentially rebellious and anarchic.  It tends to modify the social environment, and will never be able to be fully appreciated until the conditions of this environment have been changed and the minds of men are driven by historical forces towards that luminous ideal first espied from the darkness by the genius with other eyes.  An ideal towards which he turns all the power of his flight and all the enthusiasm of his generous soul.  Moreover, if history offers us very few examples of geniuses fully understood during their time, I do not believe that library and archive researchers of any countries can boast of having discovered geniuses who remained not understood and obscure for many centures in their respective nations.  Genius is sooner or later recognized; and if its epoch does not come to understand it, it will also leave us traces which will reveal it and make it admired in the future.

In centuries past the greatest danger to an artist and to a philosopher was to see, along with his body, his work devoured by flames, damned by errors and predominant prejudices.  But in this case we also see his work, if not his life, emerge victorious from ruination, and from the sacrifice of the author, we see it succeed as something almost sacred and imposing to the hearts and minds of mortals.  In fact, I do not believe that it would be possible to name a work of any scientific or literary value which has been destroyed and erased from the memory of man by the efforts of political or religious fanaticism, which have committed so many works to abomination and to the flames.

And so, if a work of genius always emerges victorious from the innumerable obstacles and dangers it has traversed surrounded by tyranny, one is forced to conclude that the improvement of political and social conditions in accordance with democratic ideals will make the manifestation of genius even easier and its power more widely diffused.  And its victory less hard-won.

Akhmatova, "Годовщину последнюю празднуй"

A work ("Our anniversary we'll mark") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Our anniversary we'll mark – 
Our last; today, you know, was then:  
That snowy night of diamond spark,   
Of our first winter's sweet content.   

Imperial stables give off steam,
In darkness sinks the Moyka's flow, 
The stifling sky spites moonlight dreams,    
And where we're destined I can't know.

Between grandpa's and grandson's tombs, 
A weed-strewn garden so unfurls. 
As prison's madness nearby looms,  
Funereally the lanterns burn.

The Martian Field in icebergs shines,  
Lebyazhii nests in crystals clear. 
Whose lot can then compare to mine,
If in his heart are joy and fear?

And like that wondrous bird in flight, 
Your quiv'ring voice my shoulder charms.  
And, heated by the sudden light,
The snowy ash turns silvery warm.

Vincere

In this film's opening scene an old Catholic apologist has just finished addressing a crowded room of black-clad gentlemen and the odd lady or two.  When he introduces his opponent in debate, a "socialist" by the name of Benito Mussolini, we are surprised to behold a lean young man (this is the eve of the First World War) with a full head of hair and a moustache.  Perhaps this physical appearance is even more shocking to us, who know Mussolini as very bald, very shaven, and very stocky, than his revelation as an adherent to the radical left.  But as the future Italian dictator states later in a somewhat different context, "only a mule does not change paths."  Since communism and fascism are akin, respectively, to driving on the left and driving on the right – the same narrow road, the same elite driving club, and the same pedestrians run over without a shred of remorse – our Mussolini (Filippo Timi) simply begins as one type of mule and ends up like another.  

And how does Mussolini respond to what presumably was the usual ponderous logic of Catholicism?  With accriminations of hypocrisy and greed?  No, strangely, with a dimwitted parlor trick: "I challenge God.  If he does not strike me down in five minutes, it means he does not exist."  How this argument could fool a kindergartner is beyond me; yet it fools the young lady smiling smugly in the back of the room (Giovanna Mezzogiorno).  Petite, with gigantic pores in her skin and even more gigantic regret in her eyes, our woman chuckles under her breath at the comments.  Yes, she has always hated God.  She hates God for dealing her such a lonely hand, for making her needy and pathetic in a country filled with the ruins of ancient structures and women's hearts.  And she hates society for not noticing her, although admittedly we will come to understand there is not much to notice (following society's lead, Mussolini acknowledges her merely as a speed bump as he plows through the hecklers).  In a more avant-garde film the director might indeed have waited the entire five minutes of screen time, perhaps out of no small sympathy with young Mussolini's socialist cause.  But we race through it and we will spend our time racing through everything – to victory, one supposes, from the title's boastings.  And so it should not surprise us in the least that God has not risen to the challenge of this clownish braggart in unrequited love with his own destiny ("With the guts of the last Pope," he declares, "we will strangle the last King"), because God has never witnessed anything like Benito Mussolini.

The woman's name is Ida Dalser and that is all we really know about her.  Inevitably she will be one of very many, and yet she will continue to delude herself – indeed, Vincere can be understood as the running diary of her delusion – that she is the only woman whom Benito Mussolini has truly loved.  We might tend to feel sorry for someone in her predicament, but then it becomes clear that her lot in life will comprise the sum of her disastrous decisions.  For that reason Ida smiles and yet we do not like her; there is something serpentine about her gaze, her crater-like pores suggesting a sponge for Mussolini's drivel.  Not long after her attendance at the 'debate' with Mussolini the renegade, she encounters Mussolini the lamster, and somehow he recognizes her and allows her to huddle with him in the shadows.  He does what seems natural in such tense situations: he kisses and embraces her, although we are keenly aware that his main motive might only have been to hide his face from the passing law enforcement officials.  When he leaves wordlessly (he has still not spoken to her) she realizes that her hand is covered in blood.  At their third and most fateful meeting, she espies him spearheading a protest march and does what any by-the-book stalker would do: she runs amidst the crowd as it is being manhandled by policemen and neatly slides a note into his lapel pocket.  He tracks her down – for all their directionlessness, men tend to focus when easy sex is in the offing – and they make love (her interpretation) or conquer each other's circuitry (his).  Her first words to our ears, uttered during this encounter, are "my love," but his face reflects distance and almost possession, his eyes rolling away from the woman who so desperately wants to become his wife.  When he laments his lack of financing to start a radical newspaper, she sells everything she owns to help him.  He feigns pride with an attempted refusal and then adds that he will "consider this a loan," although we understand that he is a distinguished graduate of the one-way loan school.  Within a year she will bear him Benito Jr., and soon thereafter will her cruel fate be revealed to no one except herself, as we have long since anticipated the series of obstacles and roadblocks that allow the most famous man in Italy to separate his existence from that of a nugatory admirer.  An admirer, we should add, who needs to be silenced.

Vincere is uncommonly good, perhaps because it includes little of the common and even less of the good.  History seems like a running joke that, if told often enough, stops sounding funny, and the lone event of any gravity is the relationship between Mussolini and Ida – and that seems to be solely Ida's opinion.  If these pages were at all interested in labels we could call the work a highly stylized and thus ironic Mussolini propaganda film filtered through the mind of the cause's most dedicated revolutionary.  It is typical among the juntas, overthrows, and putsches of the world that the most committed partisans do not occupy the highest links in the chain of command.  These duties are reserved for natural despots, and who was more natural a demagogue and populist than the founder of Il Popolo d'Italia?  Indeed, in the second half of the film Mussolini is only shown on news reels (still prevalent in movie theaters at the time because Mussolini was nothing if a thespian), and he disappears from our view as he has from Ida's.  Mussolini has likewise few peers in betraying and ignoring former friends and lovers, and even reins in his usually insatiable urges when at a Futurist Expo Ida shows up, so to speak, ready for action.  He will be resurrected in the form of his grown son (also played by Timi), who with some genetic advantage impeccably imitates his father's cadence and mannerisms, although both of them have much of the demeanor of a professional wrestler.  When Ida is given medical advice, it comes in two flavors: the first is the admission by one of her doctors that he knows she is sane and so she should simply attempt to be an exemplary fascist wife, for her good and that of her son; the second is the panel physician's advice – the kind she doesn't want to hear – declared with the camera solely on her so that we may gaze upon her slowly crumbling face.  And why is she suddenly subject to so much medical attention?  I'm afraid less discreet reviews than this one will give the whole matter away, so we will just add that the scenes of medical attention are among the film's most effective because they are the most ironic.  Ida simply doesn't comprehend that Mule-so-lini hasn't really changed his path at all.  And don't believe that those five minutes pass as quickly as poor Ida might think.

Pascal, "Vanité de l'homme"

A work ("The Vanity of Man") by this French thinker.  You can read the original here.

We are not satisfied with the life we have within ourselves and within our own being.  We long to live within others' notions of an imaginary life, and we try very hard to keep up such an appearance.  We work incessantly to embellish and conserve this imaginary being, and in so doing we neglect our real existence.  And if we have either tranquility, or generosity, or faithfulness, we hasten to make them known in order to append these virtues to this existence contained within our imagination.  In other words, we detach ourselves from them in order to join them in that other realm; and we would quite willingly be cowards so as to acquire the reputation of being brave.  This is an extensive sign of the nothingness of our own existence, of our being content with neither one nor the other, and of our renouncing one for the other!  For infamous is he who would not die to save his honor.

The sweetness of glory is so great that we love it regardless of its association, even if it is associated with death.

Pride counterweighs all our miseries.  For whether it hides them or reveals them, it glorifies itself in the knowledge of them.

Pride seems like such a natural possession amidst our miseries and our errors that we would even forsake a life with joy, provided we may still speak of it. 

Vanity is so entrenched in the heart of man that even a boor, even a kitchen boy, even a picklock boasts and seeks out admirers.  Yet Philosophers too wish themselves some part.  Those who write against glory wish for glory for having written so well; and those who read wish for themselves the glory of having read.  And I who write this, perhaps I have such a wish; and perhaps those who read this text will also have it. 

Despite the sight of all the miseries that surround and touch us, that hold us by the throat, we have an instinct in these matters that lifts us and that we cannot repress.

We are so presumptuous that we would like to be known by the whole wide world and even by those people who will come when we will no longer be there.  And we are so vain that the estimation of five or six people in our vicinity amuses and satisfies us.

The most important thing in life is the choice of profession, and here chance plays its part.  Custom and habit make masons, soldiers, and roofers.  He's an excellent roofer, he says; and when speaking of soldiers he says that they are all mad.  Others are just the opposite: there is nothing greater than war, and everyone else is just a bunch of scoundrels.  We make our choice from having heard in our childhood how people praised certain professions and contemned others, because naturally we love virtue and hate imprudence.  These words move us; it is only in their application that we sin.  And the force of habit is so strong that there arise entire nations who are all masons, and others who are all soldiers.  Surely nature is not quite so uniform.  Thus it is custom and habit that do this, that train nature.  But sometimes even nature overcomes custom and keeps man to his instinct despite his habits, be they good or bad.    

Curiosity is merely vanity.  Most often one only wants to learn of something so as to have the opportunity to talk about it.  We would not travel by sea solely for the pleasure of gazing upon it, or without the hope of ever broaching the subject in conversation with someone else. 

We do not worry about being held in high esteem in those places we pass through quickly.  But when we have to tarry there a bit, we begin to worry.  How long does it take for us to feel this way?  A period in proportion to our futile and meager stay.

Few things console us because few things afflict us.

We never keep to the present.  We anticipate the future as too slow and seek to hasten it; or we recall the past so as to stop it from moving too swiftly.  So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not our own, and do not think at all of the only time that belongs to us.  And so vain are we that dream endlessly of those times which do not exist and let pass by, without reflection, the only time that remains.   This is because, normally, the present wounds us.  We hide it from our sight because it afflicts us.  And if we find it somehow agreeable, we regret watching it slip away.  We try to support our present by our future, and we think of possessing things that are not in our power for a period of time at which we have no assurance of ever arriving.

May each of us examine his thoughts.  There he will always find himself occupied with the past or with the future.  We almost never think of the present; and if we do it is only so as to derive wisdom from it and to possess the future.  The present is never our goal.  The past and the present are our means, and the future alone is our aim.  In this way, therefore, we never actually live.  But we may hope to live; and since we are always inclined to be happy, it is dubious that we will ever be if we continue to aspire to a bliss other than what we can enjoy in this life.    

Our imagination enhances the present time so powerfully owing to its continual reflections and so diminishes eternity owing to our lack of reflection upon it, that we make from eternity a nothingness and from nothingness an eternity.  And all this has roots so alive in us that all our reason could not protect us from such indulgence. 

Cromwell was about to ravage all of Christianity, the Royal Family was lost, and his own family more powerful than ever -- without, of course, that small grain of sand in his urethra.   Rome itself would have trembled before him.  But that piece of gravel, which was nothing after all, lodged in that particular place, and there he was dead, his family brought down, and the King reestablished.

Lermontov, "Сон"

A work ("Dream") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

In noonday heat, in Daghestanian vale,
I lay unmoving, lead’s soft fleshy nest;
A wound of smoke, a deep and savage gale,
As drop by drop sweet life oozed from my breast.

I lay alone upon the valley sand,
Around me ledges of each cliff grew tight;
And sun–sent yellow peaks burnt in their brand,
And burnt in me, asleep in death’s black night.

But, shining, I then dreamt of farthest fires:
An evening feast in distant homeland mine;
Twixt maidens young with garlands thick as pyres
Came merry talk about my fate’s fierce line.

But one did not enjoy warm banter's crowd,
Alone she sat, in deepest thought apart;
And saddest dream her soul, unold, did shroud,
God knows what weight still burdened this young heart.

And Daghestan’s lost vale became her dream:
A body known to her lay there in smoke;
A breast bled black, a hole of leaden steam,
Life pouring dry in coldest mortal choke.