Cultural Amnesia (25 page)

Montale spoke several times about the salutary effects of avoiding rhyme—not just the easy rhymes into which Italian
always tends to slip, but any kind of end-rhyme at all. In the mainstream of his lyric poetry it is quite hard to find even internal rhymes longer than a syllable: he goes always for the hard
sonorities. Mallarmé recommended the same in French: “
Il faut rimer difficilement
.” Mallarmé, like Montale later, was out to
provide something grittier than the too-smooth heritage of established tricks. Poets today should have the same determination. But it’s an emphasis, not a rule: the much despised
“moon” and “June” can rhyme successfully as long as, in each case, the line leading up to the last word is sufficiently intense. The most difficult way to rhyme is not to
rhyme at all, and yet maintain coherence. The hard
part of doing that is to square unrelenting vigilance with the free play of the mind that will let a new idea break through
to the surface. (Strict rhymes
force
new ideas to the surface, as depth charges do to a submarine.) Established rhyme schemes leave more room to relax,
which is probably why they are best for comic verse. But Dante didn’t choose the
terza rima
in order to set himself a simple technical requirement so
that he could relax when not fulfilling it. He made every passage of verse a technical requirement throughout; made it evident that he was doing so; and made part of his poetry from making it
evident. As Contini says (
Varianti
, p. 320), a constant of Dante’s literary personality is continually to make technical reflections on poetry. The
technical reflections amount to an ordering of natural wealth. Contini calls Dante’s verbal talent “lexical magnanimity” (
Varianti
, p.
322). When I was young, the department in the
Reader’s Digest
called “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” caught my restless attention.
While still in very short pants I learned a lot from that department, and still can’t see much wrong with the term “word power”; but “lexical magnanimity” is better
because it gets the generosity in.

Generosity, however, can be gush when uncalled for. Even in Dante’s time, Italian ran easily to gush. Dante pretty
well invented the Italian language we read and hear today. The ideal version of the Italian language, say the Italians, is Florentine Italian spoken by someone from Siena. The Sienese are less
likely to murder the “c” sound by aspirating it. But the language they speak with such melody is the one invented by Dante and his friends in or near Florence. Even then, though, it
could be a torrent like the Arno in flood, and especially when aspiring to the lyrical. As Contini explains, Dante saw how part of the task would be to keep his
lirismo
in check rather than to let it rip. Much later on and in another country, we find that Laforgue liked the same thing about Tristan Corbière, who was a
wild man, but used common speech—sometimes very common, from the gutter or the brothel—to chasten the worn-out lyrical effects that not even Victor Hugo was able to render obsolete
all by himself. Poeticized poetry will always crop up again of its own accord; you can tell it is a weed because it looks too obviously like a flower, and grows again during the night. Ernst
Robert Curtius (in his book of collected essays,
Gesammelte Aufsätze
, p. 312) borrowed Laforgue’s idea to praise the prosaic stretches in
Eliot’s
East
Coker
, the poetry that was not like poetry. In our time, the greatest exponent
of deliberately prosaic poetic diction was Philip Larkin. Recently in Melbourne, when I was trying to tempt a young admirer of Larkin’s poetry to begin learning enough Italian to make a
start with Dante, I told her that the dialogue in the Paola and Francesca scene in Canto V of the
Inferno
sounds as natural as Larkin’s narrative tone
in “Dockery and Son,” and that when Dante stands back to deliver a clinching moral, the sonorities are just like Larkin’s: magisterial because unaffected, the same language
intensified without being notably heightened—a dignified squaring of the shoulders rather than a climbing onto stilts. With so finely calibrated a control of tone, Larkin could have written
verse forever without rhyming even once. It is very interesting that he usually chose otherwise, and rhymed solidly throughout the poem. The big, matched stanzas of his showpiece poems like those
in
The Whitsun Weddings
are, without striving to prove it, technically challenging beyond anything attempted by the Thomas Hardy he so much loved. Larkin
got them, in fact, from Yeats: another self-disciplinarian on the grand scale. In some of Larkin’s later poems, he will take the
ottava rima
stanza
and deliberately make the rhymes approximate, but the structure is still strictly present behind the altered façade. Compare Larkin’s “Church-Going” with Yeats’s
“Among School Children” and look for the contrast. There isn’t one.

BENEDETTO CROCE

Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) was the philosopher of twentieth-century Italy. One says
“the” philosopher because nobody else came close, and even those intellectuals who disagreed with him most violently—Giovanni Gentile, who pledged allegiance to Fascism, was
one of them—were obliged to take account of what he said. A practising politician as well as a political theorist, Croce was impressed by Mussolini in the beginning but soon saw the
threat to liberalism. He went into internal exile and continued with his writing. After the war Croce was offered the presidency of Italy but declined, although in other respects he was
crucial to the rebuilding of the country’s liberal institutions. Lending him almost irresistible force as a thinker was the riverine flow and clarity of his prose style, fully equal to
Shaw at his best, but without the paradoxes. Unfortunately no comparable stylist ever tried to translate him, and although some of his central works were brought over into English, they never
had the influence that was their due. (An admirer of R. G. Collingwood would object to these assessments, but few admirers of Collingwood are aware that his indebtedness to Croce attained the
level of mimicry, which always belittles the original.) In the 1960s I
learned quite a lot of Italian by reading almost everything Croce wrote, and emerged from the
experience with a lasting admiration for his range of understanding. When he didn’t understand something, however, he brought all his powers of expression to bear on saying the wrong
thing: a salutary lesson in the relationship between style and substance.

Attempts to determine the place of art have, until now, looked
for that place either at the peak of the theoretical spirit or in the vicinity of philosophy itself. But if, so far, no satisfactory result has been obtained, might it not be because of the
obstinacy of looking too high? Why not turn the attempt on its head, and instead of proposing the hypothesis that art is one of the highest grades, if not the highest grade, of the
theoretical spirit, propose instead the inverted and opposite hypothesis, that it is one of the lowest, even the lowest of all?

—BENEDETTO CROCE,
Problemi di estetica
(PROBLEMS IN AESTHETICS), P. 13

A
S ALWAYS,
CROCE
defeats ordinary expectation by looking for the creative impulse in the natural instinct rather than in the developed mind. The secret of his fecundity as a thinker was to open up
possibilities rather than close them off, and he always did so by demoting the adept. According to him, a heart in the right place, rather than a mind in a high state of training, was the more
likely source of truth, and the only source of creativity. Art, far from being the furthermost refinement of intelligence, came before thought, and was as natural as breathing. Croce’s
guess was that the first human beings sang before they spoke. He was certainly right that they drew before they wrote, and wrote poetry before they wrote prose.

Such propositions from Croce, when taken all at once, can sound like paradox-mongering. But he made them
consistent. Over the vast range of his fundamental works—leaving the incidental works aside, which it takes a separate room to do—the key concepts are thoroughly and concretely worked
out, abetting each other without friction. The
best way of summing up their effect is to say that they show how the instinct to live and grow is channelled through creativity
towards mentality. If he had given the mind the precedence over art, he would have been inhibited in his explanatory powers. He did the opposite, and released them. Released, they could give a
reasoned account of what he saw in the street: all the busy littleness that was so astonishing in its prodigality and variety of imagination. He always thought that there must be something wrong
with an overarching concept if a necessary mental activity withered in its shadow. For a philosophy to be true, he believed, its proponent had to be able to write history. (One of the reasons he
thought religions were incomplete philosophies was that no religion can tell the truth about the past.) For an aesthetic to be valid, its proponent had to be able to write criticism. That second
idea was especially valuable to his successors. Its effect was to humanize in advance the Italian critical tradition as it extended without a notable break into the modern period. Italy’s
left-wing theorists, for example, unlike those in other countries, have always felt obliged to show due tact when treating the arts as a political expression, thereby acknowledging Croce’s
warnings against doing such a thing to any degree at all. (Not even the red radical Gramsci could afford to ignore Croce.)

One of Croce’s precepts was paraphrased by Eugenio Montale when he said: “It isn’t the
man who wants to who continues the tradition, it’s the man who can, and sometimes he’s the man who knows least about it.” It was one of the sentences that made Montale almost as
famous a critic as he was a poet, but he would not have been able to write it if he had not read Croce first, and Montale’s very next sentence was one that Croce could have written himself.
“To this end, programmes and good intentions are of little use.” Montale’s echo of Croce—or, if you like, Croce’s presaging of Montale—is an example of the
continuity that makes Italian literary culture so satisfying in its coherence. We should remember, however, that there are Italians who find it too coherent, to the point of being hidebound. They
would prefer a story big enough to get lost in, in the way that we get lost in ours. We don’t feel obliged to read our philosophers before we read our critics. In Italy there is one
philosopher whom everyone has to read before they read anything else, down to and including the instruction manual for a new washing machine.