Tag: history

I never cease to be impressed by the cultural environment experienced and described by men from other times. For me, it is immersing myself in a parallel reality that I would think impossible if there were not so many testimonies in different languages and from different times. Everything seems to point to me that I and my circumstance are the exceptions. Every time I go through these diaries, letters and the like, it is not without a smile on my face that I make my notes. Letters! There are no letters anymore; the epistolary genre has become almost poetic. And to think of all this literature conceived under the smell of ink, feathers, lamps, sturdy furniture… and outside theaters, operas, soirees… is a whole reality that impresses above all by its contrast. Perhaps it is all very well, and it is a privilege to be able to appreciate it with this charm only conferred by time…

I interchange Carpeaux and Burckhardt, and it is a real pleasure to be silent so that these intelligences may speak out. Carpeaux, it is impressive, always seems ready to introduce us to a new author, to take us physically through time and space, giving us his inexhaustible culture, painting cities, filling us with distant atmospheres, all this with a style that seems to blend the talent of an artist and the experience of a hundred lifetimes. Burckhardt, on the other hand, seems from the top of a tower, protected from the upheavals of his time and of all times, observing them all, analyzing them with the impartiality of a scientist and the inclinations of a dilettante. His prophecies are impressive. If unintentional, as Carpeaux himself suggests, they show a precise and unique understanding of the evolutionary processes of the culture and time in which he was inserted. It is truly a pleasure!

D. Pedro II, this man whose life contains a moving tragedy, a tragedy that became even more accentuated after his death, was not capable of putting it in a fair measure in the few verses he composed. They are weak verses, almost innocuous for someone who does not know his biography. But someone who knows it, and imagines the state of atrocious sadness in which they were written, the immeasurable grief of the man whose virtue was paid for with the most revolting injustice on the eve of his death, this person will forgive the aesthetic defects and will sincerely sympathize with the author’s misery. But here lie two moral problems that are hard to admit: the first, that art is indifferent to the sincerity of the author—in art, the most skillful may surpass the most sincere, even if his art amounts to a complete falsification of himself;—the second, that the moral elevation contained in the work matters little, as does the character of what it evokes. It is regrettable… The drama of D, Pedro II is the drama of a Camões, but of a Camões wronged in life and not rewarded by history, that cursed insensitive in which were deposited the last hopes of the noble soul corroded by grief. Would it be different if the verses were better? How useless to answer it…