Vivacità, leggerezza, soggettissima a prendere puntiglio, occupazione di ogni momento delle apparenze della propria esistenza agli occhi altrui: Ecco i tre gran caratteri di questa pianta che risveglia Europa nell 1808.[1]
Of Italians, those are preferable who still preserve a little savagery and taste for blood—the people of the Romagna, Calabria, and, among the more civilised, the Brescians, Piedmontese and Corsicans.
The Florentine bourgeois has more sheepish docility than the Parisian. Leopold's spies have degraded him. See M. Courier's[(12)] letter on the Librarian Furia and the Chamberlain Puccini.
[1] ["Vivacity, levity, very subject to pique, and unflagging preoccupation with other people's view's of its own existence—these are the three distinguishing points in the stock which is stirring the life of Europe in 1808."—Tr.]
CXXXVI
I smile when I see earnest people never able to agree, saying quite unconcernedly the most abusive things of each other—and thinking still worse. To live is to feel life—to have strong feelings. But strength must be rated for each individual, and what is painful—that is, too strong—for one man is exactly enough to stir another's interest. Take, for example, the feeling of just being spared by the cannon shot in the line of fire, the feeling of penetrating into Russia in pursuit of Parthian hordes.... And it is the same with the tragedies of Shakespeare and those of Racine, etc., etc.... (Orcha, August 13, 1812.)
CXXXVII
Pleasure does not produce half so strong an impression as pain—that is the first point. Then, besides this disadvantage in the quantity of emotion, it is certainly not half as easy to excite sympathy by the picture of happiness as by that of misfortune. Hence poets cannot depict unhappiness too forcibly. They have only one shoal to fear, namely, things that disgust. Here again, the force of feeling must be rated differently for monarchies and republics. A Lewis XIV increases a hundredfold the number of disgusting things. (Crabbe's Poems.)
By the mere fact of its existence a monarchy à la Lewis XIV, with its circle of nobles, makes everything simple in Art become coarse. The noble personage for whom the thing is exposed feels insulted; the feeling is sincere—and in so far worthy.
See what the gentle Racine has been able to make of the heroic friendship, so sacred to antiquity, of Orestes and Pylades. Orestes addresses Pylades with the familiar "thou."[1] Pylades answers him "My Lord."[1] And then people pretend Racine is our most touching writer! If they won't give in after this example, we must change the subject.