IDLING IN ITALY

IDLING IN ITALY

STUDIES OF
LITERATURE AND OF LIFE

BY
JOSEPH COLLINS

AUTHOR OF "MY ITALIAN YEAR"

I loaf and invite my soul

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1920

Copyright, 1920, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published September, 1920

TO M. K. C.

... Io vengo di lontana parte,
Dov'era lo tuo cuor.

PREFACE

Nothing obstacled my pleasure so much when I first went to Italy as unfamiliarity with its literature. Every one who would add to his spiritual stature and his emotional equanimity by tarry in Italy should have some intimacy with the Bible, with mythology, and with Italian writers, especially the poets. I sought books about books but was not very successful in finding them. Interpretative articles on men and books which are so common in British and American literature are exceptional in Italy. One who is ambitious to get even a bowing acquaintance with them must make the introduction himself. In 1918 an enterprising Italian, Signor A. T. Formiggini, attempted to supply such introduction by the publication of a literary review called L'Italia Che Scrive, a monthly supplement to all the periodicals. He has had gratifying success.

My purpose in publishing the essays on fictional literature in this volume is in the hope of awakening a larger interest in America in Italian letters and to aid in creating a demand for their translation into English. I shall be glad if they serve to orient any one who is bewildered by his first glance into the maze of Italian modern, improvisional literature.

Americans go to Italy by the thousands, but very few of them take the trouble to acquaint themselves with her history or with her ideals and accomplishments. This is to be regretted, for proportionately as they did that their pleasure would be enhanced and their profit increased. Moreover, it would contribute to better mutual understanding of Americans and Italians.

The remaining chapters are the outgrowth of experiences and emotions in Italy during and after the war.

Some of these essays originally appeared in The Bookman, Scribner's Magazine, and The North American Review, and I thank the editors of those journals for permission to make use of them.

CONTENTS

• chapter  page
• 1. Literary Italy  1
  2. Literary Italy (continued)  25
  3. Gabriele D'Annunzio—Poet, Pilot, and Pirate  44
  4. The Futurist School of Italian Writers  70
  5. Giovanni Papini and the Futuristic Literary Movement in Italy  88
  6. Two Noisy Italian Schoolmasters  107
  7. Improvisional Italian Literature of To-Day and Yesterday  121
  8. Fictional Biography and Autobiography  148
  9. The Literary Mausoleum of Samuel Butler  159
  10. Saints and Sinners  173
  11. Woman's Cause Is Man's: They Rise or Sink Together  185
  12. Postbellum Vagaries  198
  13. World Convalescence  214
  14. Banquets and Personalities  236
  15. Sentimentality and the Male  251
  16. The Play Instinct in Children  263
  17. "If a Man Walketh in the Night, He Stumbleth; but if He Walketh in the Day He Seeth the Light of This World"  277
  18. The American Eagle Changes His Perch  293

IDLING IN ITALY

CHAPTER I
LITERARY ITALY

There is something about the word Italy that causes an emotional glow in the hearts of most Americans. For them Italy is the cradle of modern civilization and of the Christian religion; the land where modern literature and science took their faltering first steps; the garden where the flowers of art first bloomed, then reached a magnificence that has never been equalled; the land that after having so long agonized under the tyrant finally rose in its might and delivered her children, carrying the principles of personal liberty to a new and noble elevation.

We have an admiration and affection for her that one has for a beautiful mother whose charm and redolency of accomplishment has increased with time.

In recent days there have been countless numbers on this western continent who feel that Italy has not had recognition from the world of her decision, her valor, and her accomplishment in shaping the World War to a successful end. Their interest in her has been quickened and their pride enhanced. They look forward with confidence to the time when she will again have a measure of that supremacy in the field of art and literature which once made her the cynosure of all eyes, the loadstone of all hearts. They hope to see her on a pedestal of political, social, and religious liberty worthy of the dreams of Mazzini, which shall be exposed to the admiring gaze of the whole world.

Already there are indications that she is making great strides in literature and a generation of young writers is forging ahead, heralding the coming of a new order.

It can scarcely be expected that Italy will achieve the position she had in the sixteenth century when Ariosto and Tasso, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Bandello and Aretino, Cellini and Castiglione gave to literature an unrivalled supremacy. But it may be legitimately hoped that Italy will give up the servile admiration and imitation of foreign literature, and particularly of the French, which has been so evident during the past one hundred years, and at the same time while taking pride in her cinquecento accomplishments, even in the glories of her romantic period, realize that the vista which appeals to the children of men to-day is that obtained from looking forward and not backward.

I shall take a cursory glance over the literature of the nineteenth century preparatory to a survey of that of the twentieth, and note some trends and their significance: the dislocation of habitual ways of looking at things, of modes of thought, and of peeps into the future caused by the French Revolution; the outlook for the Italian people which seemed to be conditioned by the Napoleonic occupation; the imminence of a change in the way in which the world was likely to be ordered and administered suggested by the fall of thrones and governments. Such events could not fail to be reflected in the literature, particularly in imaginative literature as parallel conditions to-day are being reflected in literature, practically all of which is burdened with one topic: destruction of privilege and liberation from archaic convention that freedom and liberty shall have a larger significance—in brief, making a new estimate of human rights. With the powerful political and religious reaction that was manifest in all Europe after the French Revolution there developed a kind of contempt, indeed abhorrence, of antique art and literature because it was pagan and republican. The deeds of men, their longings, their aspirations, their loves, their hatreds, their melancholies; the beauties of nature, their potencies to influence the emotional state of man and particularly to contribute to his happiness; the liberation of mankind from galling tyranny and the universal happiness that would flow from further liberation were the themes of writers. These coupled with neglect and disdain of the heroes of antiquity, mythological and actual, caused a romantic literature which moved over Europe like an avalanche.

Italy contested every inch of the threatened encroachment upon its soil, and one of her poets, Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803), who was most potent in resisting it, stood out to the end for the classic ideal. The period of his greatest mental activity and creativeness antedated the French Revolution, and although he was in Paris when it was at its height, its significance in so far as it is reflected in his writings was lost upon him. The same is true of Giuseppe Parini (1729-1799), who, during the last fifty years of the eighteenth century, had great vogue in Italy because of a poem called "Il Giorno" ("The Day"), in which "The Morning," "The Noon," "The Evening," and "The Night" of a Lombard gentleman was depicted to life and satirized.

The writings of Ugo Foscolo (1776-1827), which were given far higher rating by contemporaries than by posterity, foreshadowed the yielding of the classic traditions. But it was not until Cesarotti published a translation of MacPherson's "Ossian" that the floodgates of romance were opened for Italian literature. It was published at Padua (1763-1770). From that date imaginative and lyric literature of Italy began to devote itself to celebrating Italy's glorious past, to anticipating its future glories, to recounting and satirizing contemporaries, to pillorying the crimes of the tyrants who had fastened themselves upon Italy, and to exposing the corruptions of its governments.

Its promoters were obsessed with the idea that they must get away from the classic traditions. They sought to avoid the stern realities of life, its sufferings and its tragedies, and instead to depict beauty, pleasure, and happiness. They exalted the comedy and suppressed the tragedy of daily life.

It has often been said that Italian romantic literature had its origin in the Società del Caffè founded in Milan in 1746. But like many other dogmatic statements, it should not be accepted literally. "Il Caffè," published by the Accademia dei Pugni, was not romantic. Its iconoclastic attitude alone toward literary tradition may entitle it to a certain influence as a remote precursor of the romantic movement. The publication which fought the battle for Romanticism was the Conciliatore (1818-1819). Around it was constituted the Romantic school which produced Grossi and the others. Most of its followers in the beginning were Lombardians, therefore under the espionage of the Austrian Government. They were particularly Tommaso Grossi, the author of a romance of the fourteenth century entitled "Marco Visconti," of "Ildegonda," and "I Lombardi" (the best seller of its day), and Giovanni Berchet, who, though of French descent, was the most Italian of Italians, and spent a large part of his life in exile in Switzerland and England.

Soon the Romanticists were given a political complexion—they were resigned to their fate of being slaves to Austria—at least they were accused of this by the classicists. In truth they were digging the trenches in which were later implanted the bombs whose explosion put the Austrians to flight.

The predominant figure of the romantic period was Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873). It is no exaggeration to say that he carried fame of Italian letters to greater numbers of people the world over than any writer save Dante. In 1827 he published a novel, "I Promessi Sposi" ("The Betrothed Ones"), which Walter Scott said was the best ever written, and this opinion was seconded by Goethe. He had shown his emancipation from classicism in two earlier plays, "Carmagnola" and "Adelchi," but it was not until the romance above mentioned and which earned his immortality that the romantic triumph can be said to have occurred in Italy. The men who carried the movement forward were Pellico, Niccolini, Grossi, D'Azeglio, Giordani, Leopardi, Giusti, and many others.

Among these the two who have been most favored by posterity are Silvio Pellico (1789-1854), principally because of the book in which he described his experiences in Austrian dungeons, "Le mie Prigioni" ("My Prisons"), and Leopardi, the intellectual giant of an arid epoch. The immortality of the former is founded in sentiment, of the latter in merit.

The poet who had greatest popularity in Italy at this time was Giuseppe Giusti (1809-1850), a satirist who chose verse as his medium. Although posterity has not given him a very high rating, his "Versi" are still widely read in Italy. His most appealing possession was ability to express in scannable, rememberable, singable verse what may be called every-day sentiment, to depict simple characters whose virtues every one would like to have, and to interlace political satires with the most panoplied, pathetic, patriotic sentiments. There is no safer way to sense to-day the sentiment of the first half of the nineteenth century of Italy than to read Giusti's poems. His "All'Amica Lontana" ("To the Friend Far Away"), "Gli Umanitari" ("The Humanitarians"), and his poems of spleen and of dream have a sprightliness and freshness as if they were of yesterday. Dario Niccodemi has recently borrowed the title "Prete Pero" from one of Giusti's poems for a comedy in which is depicted the conduct of a simple, honest, pious priest confronted with the conflict of ecclesiastical instructions and war problems. Giusti's brief life was a strange mixture of potential joy and actual suffering. In the vigor of his manhood he was seized by a painful disease, and to his sufferings was added the mental agony caused by fear of hydrophobia.

Giuseppina Guacci Nobile (1808-1848), of Naples, a contemporary of Giusti, had great popularity as a poetess of sentiment. She sang of love of country, of art, of husband, of children, of heaven, and when the sadness of the times was so profound that she needs must sing of hate she died.

Three poets of northern Italy must also be mentioned. Francesco Dall'Ongaro, who, though born in the Friuli, went to Venice when he was ten years old and lived for the rest of his life in the northern provinces, had a tremendous popularity in the revolutionary period of 1848 because of a little collection of lyrics called "Stornelli"; Giovanni Prati, of Dasindo, Trent, whose permanent reputation as a poet depends upon his ballads, became widely known through his poem "Edmenegarda"; and Aleardo Aleardi, born at Verona in the early years of the nineteenth century, whose best-known book, "Le Prime Storie," was extensively read.

The pillars of the romantic movement were soon erected in Central Italy by the writings of Leopardi, Niccolini, and Giusti.

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) had a personality that has fastened itself upon Italy, even unto the present day, in a most extraordinary—one might even say, inexplicable—way. He was laconic, silent, morose, introspective, solitary, celibate. His filial love was readily overdrawn; he loathed his ancestral home and environment; he contended with ill health from infancy; he was denied the understanding friend, save one, whose behavior toward Leopardi has been criticised severely. He wandered solitarily about central Italy wrapped in the mantle of introspection and veiled in melancholy until 1833, when he settled at Naples, and there he remained four years, until he had attained his thirty-ninth year, when he died under most distressing circumstances. Ranieri, in his "Sette Anni di Sodalizio con Giacomo Leopardi," gives this description of Leopardi's appearance: he was of moderate height, bent and thin, with a fair complexion that inclined to pallor, a large head, a square, broad forehead, languid blue eyes, a short nose, and very delicate features; his voice was modest and rather weak; his smile ineffable and almost unearthly.

It is not easy for a foreigner to understand the exalted estimation in which the poetry of Leopardi is held in Italy to-day. To do so one must needs sense the spirit of the times when he lived. The "whatever is is right" day of Pope had been succeeded by a day of tragedy the like of which the world had perhaps never known, and things would never be again as they were. Leopardi sung this change. He was the poet of pain and of despair, the versifier of Schopenhauer's philosophy. He sang of melancholy, but he was never reconciled to supine resignation. Though classical in form, his poems are steeped with the romantic spirit. Although a supporter of the romantic school, he scarcely can be called an exponent or upholder of it. A familiarity with his writings is an integral part of the education of all cultured Italians, and nearly every schoolboy can recite parts of the poems "To Italy" or "The Quiet after the Storm."

Leopardi considered it was harder to write good prose than good verse. Greek thoughts were clearer and more vivid to him than Latin or Italian. It is a pitiable picture that Ranieri draws of him in Naples, suffering from consumption and from dropsy, unable to read, turning night into day, having dinner at midnight to the discomfiture of the household, having to be nursed and entertained, disliking the country, and living in abject terror of the cholera which then raged in Naples.

De Musset praised his work. Sainte-Beuve did homage to him, and at an early date made his name familiar to French readers. The judgment of posterity is the one that counts and not the judgment of individuals, and Leopardi is Italy's greatest modern poet. De Sanctis said of him: "His songs are the most profound and occult verses of that laborious transition called the nineteenth century." His death marked the close of the first romantic period in Italy.

Gian Battista Niccolini (1785-1861) wrote tragedies, historical romances, and poetry, the best known of which is "Arnaldo da Brescia." The Florentines have erected a noble monument to his memory in their Westminster Abbey—the church of Santa Croce.

Massimo D'Azeglio (1798-1866), diplomat, statesman, and man of letters, played a very conspicuous part in the political and social life of his day, and left an extraordinarily interesting account of it and of his period in "I miei Ricordi" ("My Recollections"), which no one desirous of acquainting himself with the social life of the risorgimento period fails to read.

A literary production of this period which must be mentioned, not because of its merits but because it is a sign of the times, was that of Cesare Cantù (1804-1895), a universal history in thirty-five volumes, which went through forty editions. It displays lucidity of statement, sequential narrative, and finished literary technic. It was highly partisan and not based on critical study of documentary evidence. He saw in all Italian writers, beginning with Dante, enemies of the church and of God. All had something false in their art which it pleased him to reveal. Italian writers were all anti-Catholic, and classic literature was all pagan; he excepted Manzoni, however, and himself.

Two noteworthy historic writers were V. Gioberti (1801-1852) and Pasquale Galluppi (1770-1846), though the latter confined himself chiefly to philosophy. No review of the literature of this period should fail to mention Francesco de Sanctis (1817-1883), one of the most versatile and soundest literary critics, who was assiduous in calling the attention of his countrymen to the writings of foreigners and in keenly analyzing and evaluating home productions, and Pasquale Villari, the historian of Savonarola and Macchiavelli.

There were two great literary figures in the romantic triumph of Italy of the nineteenth century, Manzoni and Leopardi, and after their death no figure of any importance came upon the stage for upward of a generation.

During this period—from 1830 to 1860, let us say—the rocks from which were to gush forth the waters of liberalism were being drilled. The times were too tense to facilitate imaginative literature, and mere record of events was more startling and absorbing than fiction.

It was not until Giosuè Carducci (1836-1907) entered the arena and dealt romanticism a blow, and at the same time restored classicism, that Leopardi had a worthy successor.

To-day there is a Carducci cult in Italy. There are individuals and groups who have the same kind of reverence for him that they or others have for Leonardo. There is no praise for him that is too fulsome, no adulation too great. Admirers like Panzini, Panzacchi, and Papini ransack dictionaries and archives to find words that will convey their devotion to him. He was a man who incited the admiration and affection of those who came personally in contact with him. His was a sturdy personality, which inspired confidence, generated respect, and mediated an easy belief in his inspiration. The son of a country doctor, he was born in a little village in Tuscany in 1836. Thus his childhood and early youth coincided with those years in which king, pope, and emperor seemed to vie with one another in crushing independent thought in Italy; those years in which men dared not write, fearing their words might be misconstrued, or, writing, were obliged to publish clandestinely. During these years Carducci's thirst for liberty and freedom, political, social, and religious, developed, and for a third of a century after he had reached the age of man he externalized it in moving, majestic, musical verse, which made known Italy's rights and aspirations, and encouraged her loyal sons to continue their struggles.

After teaching a few years in the high schools of San Miniato and Pistoia, during which time he published a selection of religious, moral, and patriotic juvenile poems entitled "Juvenilia," he went to Bologna. In 1860 he was called to the chair of Italian literature in the University of Bologna and soon published "Giambi ed Epodi" ("Iambs and Epodes"). In this he preached republican doctrines so openly that he gave offense to the crown and was suspended from his position, which, however, he soon regained.

Soon after this he published, under the pseudonym of "Enotrio Romano," an irreligious or materialistic poem entitled "Inno a Satana" ("A Hymn to Satan"), which gave him great popularity. It is an invective against the church, which through its mysticism and asceticism seeks to suppress natural impulses and which through its intellectual censorship aims to stifle scientific investigation. It breathed a spirit of revolt against tyranny and privilege, especially clerical privilege, which had made such profound growth in Italy. It inveighed against the efforts of suppression of human rights and bespoke the culture of human reason. It is quite impossible to read understandingly the "Hymn to Satan" without a knowledge of mythology and Greek history. Indeed, one of the most characteristic features of his poem is the wealth of classic allusion. Agramiania, Adonis, Astarte, Venus, Anadyomene, Cyprus, Heloise, Maro, Flaccus, Lycoris, Glycera are some of the names that are encountered. It was not until the publication of his "Odi barbare" ("Barbaric Odes") that his stride as an original poet began to be recognized. They called forth the most vicious criticism and at first sight it would seem that they must sink beneath the avalanche of disapproval, but in reality Italy was ready to listen to a message couched in new form. Conventional rhymes, easily read, easily remembered, were now to give way to rough, sonorous lines in which rhythm took the place of rhyme and straight-from-the-shoulder blows took the place of feints and passes.

Carducci met his critics with the "Ça ira." It is the apology of the French Revolution and especially of the Convention. The title of the sonnets comes from the famous revolutionary song of the reign of terror. Within a brief time, namely, from 1883 to 1887, when his books entitled "New Barbaric Odes" and "New Rhymes" were published, there were few competent to express an opinion who did not realize that he was Italy's most learned poet, potent in the art of appreciation, felicitous in conveying noble sentiments and inspiring thoughts, human in his sympathies with the simple and the oppressed, a tower of strength, a pillar of fire. From that period until to-day Carducci's fame as a poet has steadily gained ground in Italy, so that it is no exaggeration to say that many accord him the crown worn by Petrarch and Tasso. Those who fulsomely praise his memory see in him not only a poet but a learned man who was able to strain classic erudition through his understanding mind to such effect that the average individual could avail himself of it to satisfaction and to advantage. They also see in him the noblest work of God, an honest man.

His students idolized him. When they left the university and returned to their various spheres of activity they carried his image in their hearts and sounded his praises with tongue or pen. They made propaganda con amore. No one is ever approved of universally in any country, probably least of any in Italy. When Carducci published his "Alla Regina d'Italia" ("Ode to the Queen of Italy"), one of his best—simple, musical, redolent of reverence and affection—he aroused the fury of the republicans, who called him traitor, and the scorn of the envious, who called him snob.

In 1891, when he accepted a senatorship of the realm, the students of the University of Bologna howled and jeered at him, and many of the former students plucked or tore his image from their hearts. They had apotheosized the Great Commoner, and they saw in this truckling to royalty and honors weakness and vanity which they could not believe that he possessed. Yet in 1896, when he completed thirty-five years of service at the university, the event was celebrated for three successive days, and the outpouring of expressions of admiration and gratitude from colleagues and students, and from heads crowned with laurel and gold, has scarcely ever been paralleled.

In an autobiographical sketch in the volume of "Poesie," of 1871, he relates with great detail the way in which he broke from his early parental teachings and acquired his new literary, political, and religious feelings. Following his Hellenic instincts, the religious trend in him was toward the paganism of the ancient Latin forefathers rather than toward the spirituality that had come in with the infusion of foreign blood. He rebelled against the passive dependence on the fame of her great writers, in which Italy had lived in the apathy of a long-abandoned hope of political independence and achievement. The livery of the slave and the mask of the courtesan disgusted him. His was the hope and joy of a nation waking to a new life. He was the poet of the national mood.

Carducci is little known as a poet in this country. There are many reasons why his fame has not made headway in Anglo-Saxon countries. In the first place, he has not been extensively translated, and in the second place, although the subject of his song was so often liberty, his lines are so replete with erudite classic illusions that even though he could be translated he would be found to be hard reading. But more than all there is probably no poet whose matter loses so much of its music and its fire by translation as Carducci. Such exquisite verses as the "Idylls of the Lowlands," "The Ox," "The Hymn to the Seasons," "To the Fountains of Clitumnus" are translatable. It would require a Longfellow to do it so that they should not be emasculated.

In 1906 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature and the entire literary world approved of the reward. Two years previously he had resigned his professorship, and parliament voted him a pension of twelve thousand lire a year for life, but it was of short duration, for he died in 1907.

Mario Rapisardi, to whom a monument has been erected in his native town of Catania, and who is known best for his tragedy "Manfredi" and his philosophic poem, "La Palingenesi," and "Poesie religiose," was a ferocious critic of Carducci. In his poem entitled "Lucifer" there are many disparaging allusions to him. Rapisardi was a teacher and a poet, but a spiritual chameleon: a devout believer, he became a radicalist; a monarchist, he became a socialist; a romanticist, he became a classicist. He is one of the best specimens of the old order of poets. His "Falling Stars" and "The Impenitent" have a genuine lyric quality, and such poems as "To a Fire-fly" have movement, rhythm, and luminosity that are impressive.

The only poet that approximated Carducci's stature was Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912). Though he was a few years younger, the period of his literary activity was contemporaneous. When Carducci died, Pascoli succeeded him for a few years in the University of Bologna. His personal story appealed tremendously to Italians, and he was of the masses in appearance and sentiment. After the assassination of his father by an unknown hand the family suffered great poverty, and as a boy the support of two younger sisters fell upon him, and like so many of the talented young men of Italy he accomplished it by teaching school. He was teaching in the high school of Leghorn in 1892 when he published "Myricae," upon which to-day his fame rests most securely. His verses gave him an immediate celebrity, and he was soon made professor of Latin and Greek in the University of Messina. From there he went to Pisa and soon afterward to Bologna.

Pascoli has been called the greatest Latin poet after Virgil. Some of the titles of his volumes are "Poemetti" ("Little Poems"), "Poemi Conviviali" ("Convivial Poems"), "Odi e Inni" ("Odes and Hymns"), "Canti di Castelvecchio" ("Songs of Castelvecchio"), "Nuovi Poemetti" ("New Little Poems"), "Poemetti Italici" ("Little Poems of Italy"), "Le Canzoni di Re Enzio" ("The Songs of King Enzio"), and an interpretative volume of Dante entitled "Sotto il Velame" ("Beneath the Veil").

Despite the fact that he was an advanced political thinker, he taught his students to respect the law. He was the poetical evangelist of the humble, of the unfortunate, and of the physically venturesome. He sang of the cravings of the soul, of the problems of existence, of Christian acceptation, of the glory of Italy and the accomplishments of her sons.

Posterity, however, is whispering that the name most worthy to be bracketed with Carducci is Gabriele D'Annunzio. I shall consider him in another chapter.

There is a name in the literary annals of this period that is steadily gaining claim to immortality. It is Giovanni Verga, the chief exponent of the Veristic school, who was born at Catania in 1840 and is still living. Although it is the opinion of those who are competent to judge that his fame as a novelist is greater than that of Fogazzaro, it may truthfully be said that he is scarcely known beyond the confines of Italy, and even there his romances have not had the reception that they deserve. A few years ago when I asked for a copy of "Mastro-don Gesualdo" in the leading bookshop of Palermo and was not successful in obtaining it, the young man with whom I talked assured me that Zuccoli would prove to be a satisfactory substitute for Verga. If he is known at all in this country, it is as the author of the play entitled "Cavalleria Rusticana," upon which was composed the popular opera. He has not been a very prolific writer—eight romances, half a dozen volumes of short stories, and a few plays. He got the material for many of his short stories in central and northern Italy, but most of his romances are of his native Sicily, and the pictures of life in the little villages and towns in the houses of the passionate peasants, in the huts of the poverty-stricken shepherds, in the hovels of the adventurous fishermen, and the crumbling palaces of the decayed nobles are so realistic, so true to life, so almost photographically depicted, that the reader feels that they are mediated by his own senses. Verga has the supreme faculty of creating men and women that the reader has met or would like to meet.

If realism consists in depicting people as they are and particularly people who are battling with the stern realities of life—poverty, illness, passions—then Verga is a great realist. The best of his romances, though not the most popular, are "I Malavoglia" and "Mastro-don Gesualdo." "Tigre Reale" had the greatest popularity, and the "Storia di una Capinera" ("The Story of a Black-hood Novice"), the most ardently romantic of all romantic stories, and "Il Marito di Elena" ("The Husband of Helen") were widely read.

"I Malavoglia" and "Mastro-don Gesualdo" were to have been succeeded by a third volume which would complete the story of the characters unfolded in them, but it never appeared. When we recall that only eight thousand copies of the former have been sold in forty years, we readily understand the artist's discouragement. Posterity is likely to link Verga's name with Leopardi and Manzoni.

The great romance-writer of Italy during the days of her resurrection was Manzoni. During the first and second generations of Italy's unity the mantle of his greatness was worn gracefully and becomingly by Antonio Fogazzaro (1842-1911). Born at Vicenza, he had the bringing-up and education of a gentleman. His best-known books are "Daniele Cortis," "Piccolo Moderno Mondo" ("The Little Modern World"), "Piccolo Mondo Antico" ("The Little Antique World"), and "Il Santo" ("The Saint"). "Daniele Cortis" is generally believed to reveal Fogazzaro's moral, religious, and political convictions. It is a series of interesting pictures of intimate life in the upper circles and reveals the mental development of a man of high principles, the skeleton in whose closet is a mother who, having side-stepped the paths of morality in her youth, and who was lost to her son for several years, thrusts herself upon him the very day when he has his feet securely set on the ladder whose apex is a brilliant political career. His struggles between duty to his mother and obligations to his country, his desire not to offend convention or outrage morality, his love for his cousin Eleana, tame for him but consuming to her, unhappily married to a Sicilian roué brute and baron, are narrated in a way that seduces even the casual reader. Indeed it is wonderfully done, and attention is sustained to the end, virtue being finally rewarded.

"The Saint" is a psychological study of abnormal religious development. It presented forcibly the necessity for reform of the Vatican and ecclesiastical customs and beliefs. When it was put on the Index it caused its illustrious author, a fervent believer and an exemplary communicant, much pain and remorse. "Leila" continued the history of the leading character of "The Saint." It is said that the author hoped it would make amends for the offense that the latter had given, but it was also put on the Index.

He wrote a volume of poetry, and many of his verses are redolent of music and charm, such as "Ultima Rosa" ("The Last Rose") and "Amorum." He has been more widely read in this country than any Italian writer of fiction save D'Annunzio. He raised one slab to his memory which will resist more than granite—"Piccolo Mondo Antico." It will be preserved by time, and cherished for the same reason that one keeps and lauds a marvellous picture of wife or mother, brother or sweetheart, because it is a bit of perfection and because the owner loves it.

An extraordinary figure in Italian literature of yesterday and of the period under discussion, was Olindo Guerrini (1845-1916), for many years director of the University Library at Bologna. In 1878 he published a volume entitled "Postuma" which purported to be the work of one Lorenzo Stecchetti which caused prudish Italy to shiver, prurient Italy to shake, and literary Italy to be enormously diverted. The "Postuma" went through thirty-two editions in forty years, but one should not inquire too closely the reason for this. When critics discovered that the author was alive they assailed his immodest verses, and his responses "Nova Polemica" added to his literary reputation. But it was not until he published his prose writings that he displayed his real literary stature.

"Postuma" is still read, that the reader may find something recent to compare with the conduct of Messalina rather than for its literary qualities. "Rime," which has no panoplied display of the author's libido but many charming idyls, reminiscences, and vignettes is much read to-day. Such poems as "Il Guado" ("The Ford") and "Nell' Aria" are as redolent of sentiment and ingenuous experiences that lead to thrills as a rose is redolent of perfume. Every schoolgirl can quote the last two lines of the latter:

Other poems such as "Congedo" ("Leave-taking") and "Wienerblut," after the waltz of Johann Strauss, had great popularity at the time and were praised by his contemporaries, but to-day it is difficult to find great merit in them. Were one called upon to make specific comment upon his poetry, he would have to point out the very obvious influence of Byron, De Musset, and Heine, and to say that Guerrini in no way is comparable with any of them. Much has been written about him as the index of the revolt against the corrupt romanticism of the third romantic period in Italy. He was the uncompromising foe of cant and hypocrisy in literature and the stanch defender of realism.

Giuseppe Lipparini, an eminently fair critic, gives him a higher rating as a writer of prose than of poetry. These include "Vita di Giulio Cesare Croce" ("Life of Julius Cæsar Croce"), a monograph on Francesco Patuzio, and "Bibliografia per ridere" ("The Laugher's Library").

Although there were countless poets of this period, two or three should be mentioned, more because of the effect they had upon the public taste, perhaps one might say public education, than for the intrinsic merit of their writings; and of these may be mentioned Vittorio Betteloni (1840-1910), the son of a romantic poet. His writings may be said to have popularized the public protest against the romanticism of the third romantic period. He also made known to many of his countrymen the poetry of Byron and of Goethe in faithful poetic translations.

Brief mention is here made of two literary men of affairs in Italy, the purpose being more to call attention to a type of individual who is more often found in Italy than in any other country—the versatile, many-sided, cultivated man of affairs who has also distinctive literary talent.

Enrico Panzacchi (1841-1904) published a volume of lyrics, fluid, harmonious, transparent, treating of homely, every-day subjects which appealed very much to the public. He first became known as a writer of seductive romances, then as an accomplished musician, afterward as a lyric poet, then as a critic of literature, æsthetics, and philosophy. He taught the philosophy and history of art; he was the secretary of the Academy of Belle Arti at Bologna, for many years a deputy in Parliament, and at one time undersecretary of state and an orator of great renown. His reputation as a poet depends largely upon "Cor Sincerum," published in 1902. In his versatility he reminds of Remy de Gourmont, although his literary productions were incomparably less numerous, but in temper of mind, literary equipment, æsthetic appetite, and general virtuosity they are brothers.

The other is Ferdinando Martini, a governor of one of Italy's colonies, a minister of public instruction, a deputy of long service, a poet, an essayist, a biographer, and a traveller, the Italian Admirable Crichton. He was born in Monsummano in 1841, and for forty-five years was without interruption in the Chamber of Deputies. He went under in the last election. He has published many books and articles, amongst which may be mentioned "Nell' Africa Italiana" ("In African Italy"), but the casual reader will get most pleasurable contact with him from "Pagine Raccolte." He is an excellent example of the cultured man in public life in Italy. His prose integrates the aroma of the classics, while at the same time his sympathies and interests bring his subjects up to the minute. His writings have a pragmatic as well as an æsthetic quality. None of them has the air of preachings. He knows how to be profound without being heavy and learned without being pedantic. For him literature has not been an æsthetic exercise or a statement of human rights and human needs. Prospective admirers should not study too closely his political career.

Death has claimed nearly all of the conspicuous figures of literature in the period of the risorgimento. One who had a strange tenacity of life, which he but recently yielded, was Salvatore Farina, whose first romances, "Un Segreto" ("A Secret") and "Due Amori" ("Two Loves"), were published more than fifty years ago. He was, perhaps, the truly representative writer of the Piccolo Borghese in the generation that followed Italy's unity. In the fifty or more volumes that he published (the last of which appeared in 1912 and was called the "Second Book of the Lovers") he portrayed a variety of romanticism which was the outgrowth of the struggle between the drab and commonplace realities of life and the fantastic dreams of simple-minded persons who thought that life would be ideal if it could be fashioned after their own plans. He was the novelist of sickly sentiment, the most slavish disciple that Samuel Richardson ever had. Students of Italian literature will read his two reminiscent volumes called "La mia Giornata," the first published in 1910, the second in 1913, to get a picture of the literary doings of one of the grayest and most uncertain periods of modern Italian literature. He is mentioned here merely to note the tremendous popularity which his writings had, and to call attention to the fact that they left no impression upon the times and that the type of novel which they represent has practically now disappeared the world over.

CHAPTER II
LITERARY ITALY
(CONTINUED)

Among the interesting literary figures of the old school still living is Renato Fucini, whose pen-name is Neri Tanfucio. He is now nearly eighty years old, and for some years has been living in a small town not far from Florence, writing his recollections. In college he studied civil engineering, but he soon forsook it and secured employment in the office of the Municipal Art Direction in Florence. Later he taught Italian in the technical school at Pistoia and after that was several years an inspector of rural schools. It was during these years of wandering through Tuscany that he got the intimate knowledge of its simple, industrial, pleasure-loving people, peasant and poacher, landlord and inspector, teacher and pupil, that he has embodied in his stories and in his burlesque, tragic, and sentimental verses.

His fame rests on his dialect poetry ("Poesie"), chiefly in sonnet form, in which he depicts the virtues and vices, the licenses and inhibitions, the hopes and the despairs, of his fellow Tuscans, at the same time embodying delightful descriptions of their charming, romantic land; and a few small volumes of prose, all little masterpieces—"Napoli a occhio nudo" ("Naples to the Naked Eye," letters written to a friend about that enchanting city two generations ago when it was still plunged in the misery of its protracted predatory misrule and the majority of its inhabitants were reduced to a deplorable state); "All' Aria Aperta" ("In the Open Air"), scenes and incidents of life among the common people of Tuscany; and "Le Veglie di Neri" ("Fireside Evenings of Neri"), which showed him a man of heart and of mind supremely capable of transforming the messages of the former by the latter in such a way as to make great appeal to his fellow beings. His books can be read to-day with the same pleasure that they were read half a century ago, and the pictures which are painted, particularly in the former, are as vivid as the day they were first put on the canvas.

Fucini is a type that is indigenous to central Italy, by nature a lover of the fields, the forest, the brooks, he was compelled from earliest infancy to earn his living, and he seemed to be content with a bare sustenance, getting pleasure from his wanderings and from books. He did on foot and more intimately what Signore Panzini has done on a bicycle or on way trains. As an inspector of country schools he was obliged to visit countless villages and hamlets, and there he found in the habits, customs, and conduct of their inhabitants material for comment and reflections such as most people find in new countries and large cities. His descriptions of them found sympathetic response in the hearts of many who see in the lives of these simple yet sophisticated people the romance of bygone days.

Fucini has not cut a great figure in Italian letters, but any one who would get a familiarity with the literature of the early days of Italian unity, or who is in search of diversion and delight should not neglect him. He is a sympathetic figure, whether wandering through Tuscany, bending over a table in the Riccardi Library, or awaiting his cue at Empoli.

A writer of this period to whom posterity is likely to give a high rating is Alfredo Oriani, who died in 1907. His fame will finally rest on his fiction rather than on his historical contributions. Though "La lotta politica in Italia" ("The Political Struggle in Italy"), from 486 to 1877 in three volumes, is a creditable performance, it is not based on personal research. Malignant-minded critics have occupied themselves with proving him a pilferer, but the work is done with such consummate literary skill that he has put the reading world under obligations to him.

His first books, "Memorie inutili" ("Useless Memories"), "Sullo Scoglio" ("On the Reefs"), and "Al di la, no" ("The Next World, No"), revealed such unbridled license of morbid tendencies that even Italians could not stomach them. He appeared to them a romanticist after the manner of Guerrazzi, addicted to the Macabre, subject to satanic inspiration, bombastic, and rhetorical.

When Oriani took up a second phase of his writing in the period from 1880 to 1890 the reading public still continued to mistrust him. Although he brought his spirit to a more stable equilibrium, he carried upon himself the stigma that clung to him in consequence of his previous books, and such productions as "Il Nemico" ("The Enemy"), "Incenso e Mirra" ("Incense and Myrrh"), "Fino a Dogali" ("Up to Dogal"), "Matrimonio e divorzio" ("Marriage and Divorce"), did not absolve him from previous sins.

His turgid style was more objected to than his taints and his themes, and his aggressiveness and political arrogances found greater opposition than his early decadent manner and his late negations in religious matters. He was accused of being a plagiarist. His greatest work "Lotta Politica" was characterized by a critic, L. Ambrosina, to be wholly devoid of originality. His "Momo" was called an imitation of Turgénieff's "A Neighbor's Bread." His "L'Invincibile" was derived from "Andrea Cornelis" of Paul Bourget, and the "Ultimi Barbari" ("The Last Barbarians") from Verga's "Pagliacci" and the "Cavalleria Rusticana."

Thus beset, Oriani, despairing of recognition, gathered his strength for a final flight and strove to reach heights never reached before, and he wrote "The Political Struggle," "Holocaust," and "Ideal Revolts."

"The Holocaust" is a study of mother and daughter. The mother has, from leading a wayward life, been able to keep body and soul together until middle age has effaced her charms. Reduced to hunger and rags, she decides to sacrifice her fifteen-year-old daughter and offers her to the first stranger whom she encounters walking beside the Arno one evening; she takes him to her contemptible rooms where the emaciated and ragged child awaits, in ignorance of her mission, the mother.

The young man of the self-made and aggressive type primed with animal spirits hesitates to be the instrument of the mother's monstrous designs, and hurls himself from the house when he realizes the situation, leaving the contents of his purse with the crushed little flower. The inhuman mother and a friend even more saturated in iniquity spend the money in an improvised banquet and plan how they shall take the child to the home of a well-known procuress. Their object is realized when this is accomplished and the mother receives a small sum of money, but the child, not having been cut out for the life, soon escapes. A narrative of her experiences, a picture of her suffering, the conflict between filial love and justifiable resentment, is set forth in page after page of psychological analysis. From the violence of the encounter flow simultaneously mortal disease and pregnancy. The former gives the author an opportunity to depict the child mind in rebellion against both bodily and spiritual salvation. The ministrations of the church are done with great finesse, kindliness, and skill, and give much satisfaction to believers. This may be the author's votive offering to the church, or it may reflect a new illumination of his soul. When the heroine dies the mother realizes her sin in having borne the child and in having betrayed her.

It would be difficult to imagine anything more disagreeable than the story. The only thing that can be said is that it is well told, but what does it advantage one to read it? As Henry James said, no one is compelled to admire any particular sort of writing, but surely there must be compulsion to make one write them. And as Flaubert, whom Oriani probably called master, wrote: "Such books are false; nature is not like that."

Oriani lived a singularly isolated life, having little contact with his fellow workers and little recognition. But he was a thinker and idealist, and it is unfortunate that he did not choose more attractive media to present his thought and project his aspirations. Only after his death did he begin to get any measure of appreciation. The four wars against Austria, the final charge against the Alps, foreseen and invoked by Oriani, were the conditions of his recognition by the Italian people.

The most widely read of all Italian writers of this period was Edmondo de Amicis (1846-1908). His books, "Bozzetti Militari" ("Military Life"), which appeared shortly after his period of service in the army, and the book for boys entitled "Cuore" ("Heart"), had a tremendous sale and still have. They were also widely read outside of Italy. He wrote many books of travel, some poetry, literary portraits, and short stories. However, he made no particular impression upon the literary period of his time.

Guido Mazzoni, born in 1859, was, and perhaps still is, professor at the University of Florence. He has been for many years secretary of the Crusca and senator of the realm. His critical work is "L'Ottocento." His poetry is of the familiar variety. "Sewing-machine" is one of them. He is an excellent example of the culture of the Italians, but he has made no lasting impression upon Italian letters. He is best known in this country from Papini's gibes at him and at the Crusca. His recent contributions, "The Lament of Achilles" and "Con Gli Alpini" ("With the Alpini"), are of the eminently respectable, commendable, poet-laureate variety, called forth by valorous deeds of Italy's soldier sons.

Nothing shows the flight from romanticism to realism that took place at the end of the nineteenth century so clearly as its stage literature. The dominating figure of that period was Giuseppe Giacosa. He was not alone the most prolific contributor to the literature of the theatre, but a man who early excited and kept the admiration and affection of fellow artists. He can truthfully be called the literary mirror of that period in Italy.

The lamp of enthusiasm was flickering when he first put secure steps upon the literary road, but it lighted him to a great success in "Una Partita a Scacchi" ("A Game of Chess"). Then the car of realism came along with a rush, as if it would carry everything in its wake, and he threw a great bouquet into the tonneau in the shape of "Surrender at Discretion." But his ear was always to the ground, and, when he sensed the advent of a new literary period and learned of the existence of readers that did not know just what they wanted but thought they would like to have the truth, the naked truth of life as depicted in fiction, he wrote "Sad Loves." But the Veristic period did not last long, and Giacosa took leave of it without a tear. Pascoli and D'Annunzio had not only entered idealistic realism in the literary race, but they were shouting in the most vociferous way for the latter especially to win. When Giacosa became fully cognizant of the favorite colors he was quick to make his entry with "As the Leaves" and "Il Più Forte" ("The Stronger").

The play to which he owed his first success, "A Game of Chess," had a remarkable career in Italy, and it still makes leading appeal to extravagant youth and romantic maturity, who see, in the lovely Iolande or in the dashing Fernando, prototypes who solve perplexing problems of life with an ease and readiness that is soul-satisfying. They also see in their experiences the smouldering or dying embers of their own passions, whose articulate breathings cause them to glow consumingly and pleasantly.

Its success turned the author from law, which he despised, to literature, which he adored.

His next play, "Il Trionfe d'Amore" ("The Triumph of Love"), was along the same lines: life without sorrow or strife save such as make pleasure—which bulks large in life—sweeter. Within a few years Giacosa began to depict life as it really was, is, or should be, and the first indication of it was "Il Conte rosso" ("The Red Count"), and for a decade he gave himself to the production of historical plays none of which can be used to-day as a wreath on the monument to his memory. It was not until he wrote "Resa a Discrezione" ("Surrender at Discretion"), that he came into the field which he finally tilled so profitably, holding up to the contemptuous, scornful gaze of the people the useless, iniquitous, pernicious existences of a certain class, the noble. In this he did the same thing that he had done in his masterpiece, "As the Leaves." But here he portrayed flesh and blood confronted with problems conditioned by life, called chance. Instead of desperation and whetted appetite for sensuous appeasement, we see latent character budding and flowering under the stimulus of adversity; virtue which does not lose its aroma from enforced tarry in putrid milieu; the deadly sins, rooted in ancestral emotions and nurtured by environment displayed in the conduct of human beings of our acquaintance and our intimacy; we see the exaltation and the deprecation of viciousness just as we see it and accomplish it in real life. The literary features of the lines, the crispness and naturalness of the dialogue, the fidelity with which he reflected the handling of problems likely to confront any one show the finished artist.

Giacosa was a conspicuous literary figure of yesterday's Italy, friend of poets and philosopher, journalist, essayist, lecturer, man of the world, mirror of one side of its mental and emotional activity.

Next to Verga the Verists found their chief exponent in Luigi Capuana, a Sicilian born in 1839 and still living. He wrote romances, short stories, plays, and criticisms, none of which save the latter had great vogue, though one of his plays, "Malia" ("Enchantment"), gave such offense to Mrs. Grundy that it had great popularity. Like Verga he knows his countrymen and women, particularly their emotional reactions and the conduct conditioned by it, by their inheritancy, and by their environment. Many of his short stories are gems of construction and of narrative. For instance, "Passa l'Amore," in "Il buon Pastore" ("The Good Pastor"), is a masterly delineation of the struggle between what is usually called good and evil in the person of a saintly old priest. Love had been an abstract conception for the good pastor until he essayed to reclaim a lamb who had been driven from the fold by the efforts of a cruel father intensively to prepare her for sacrifice at the hands of Cavalier Ferro. Perhaps if Capuana had not been content with merely interesting and diverting the public, as he counselled Bracco to be, and had tried to teach them and lead them he would have greater renown. As it is he is one of the best short-story writers of Italy, a discerning, trustworthy critic, who has written an interesting volume of studies in contemporary literature, and several plays, the last of which, "Il Paraninfo" ("The Best-man"), has recently been published. Nevertheless he must be considered a writer whose potentialities were but partially realized.

Two realistic writers of the end of the nineteenth century must be mentioned, though their work scarcely merits discussion and to do so may be unjust to others. They are Gerolamo Rovetta and Marco Praga. Although the former wrote criticisms, interpretations, and romances, some of which had much success, the contributions by which he is best known are his plays. Rovetta studied contemporary life and depicted it for the stage. His first success, the one upon which his reputation as a man of letters most solidly rests, "La Trilogia di Dorina" ("Dorina's Trilogy"), presents the public pie, upper and lower crust and middle, quite as Zola might have made it. His favorite theme was that man is but a reaction to his environment, expounded particularly in "I Disonesti" ("Dishonest Men"), though his greatest popular success was "Romanticismo" ("Romanticism"), which was a contribution to "idealistic reaction" which would turn us from ugly verities of life. It has been said by competent authorities to be a faithful presentation of public and private sentiment existing in northern Italy previous to her deliverance from tyrannical Austria.

Marco Praga is the son of Emilio Praga, who was the best-known Bohemian poet of Italy in his day (1839-1875), but who abandoned writing to teach dramatic literature in the Conservatory of Music in Milan. He professes to be the dramatic mirror held up to life and to tell the truth as he sees it, that he cannot be persuaded to camouflage it, and that when it is depicted on the stage it shall amuse rather than distress. That is what makes his most successful plays, such as "Le Vergini" ("The Virgins") and "La Moglie Ideale" ("The Ideal Wife"), depressing reading. Such conduct as they depict and such exchange of thought and sentiment as they report undoubtedly exist, but the less one knows of it and comes in contact with it the happier he or she is likely to be. If adultery could only be made a virtue for a few years, it would lose its attractiveness and many writers would have to earn their living.

At the end of the nineteenth century Italy had three women poets of much distinction, one of whom, Ada Negri, had and still has great popularity. Her last book of poems, "Il libro Di Mara" ("The Book of Mara"), has shown that she still has the capacity to put into verse dramatically and lyrically the most delicate and the most dominant notes of love as she or as those she has loved has experienced it. She was born in a little village of Lombardy in 1870. Her mother worked in a factory, and she herself was for some years a teacher in the elementary schools; so she had first-hand knowledge of the shut-in life of those whose repressions and aspirations she sung and published in L'Illustrazione Popolare of Milan. In these she set forth with great sincerity and with stirring lyric quality the sordid sufferings and sorrows of the toiling masses. These poems and others were published under the titles of "Fatality" and "The Tempest" in 1892 and 1894. Two years later a radical change in her social and spiritual environment was brought about by her marriage to Signor Garlanda, and soon she sang of it in a volume called "Maternity," which does for that state what her previous volumes had done for human pain and human poverty. "Dal Profondo" ("From the Depths") was but a continuation of these sentiments, tinctured with philosophical and socialistic knowledge that had been displayed for other purpose in "The Tempest." After this came a volume entitled "Esilio" ("Exile"), which reflected the same thoughts and sentiments in Swiss light. She has written two prose works, a series of short stories entitled "Le Solitarie" and "Orazioni" ("Orisons"). She glorifies purity, idealizes it, and sings its adoration.

In the closing years of the century there was published in Milan a volume of lyrics by one Annie Vivanti, which was praised intemperately by Carducci and by the Nuova Antologia. She had some fiction to her credit which dealt chiefly with the life of the stage, but her advent into the world of letters was like a shooting star; nothing was known of her origin save that she was said to have been born in London, and there was some mystery about her career. In her poetry there was a true lyric wail, especially in "Destino" ("Destiny"), "Non Sarà mai" ("It Can Never Be"), that appealed tremendously to the public mind. Had she been productive she might have been compared to Ella Wheeler Wilcox. After her marriage to Mr. Chartres, a London journalist, she became better known as the mother of a child-wonder violinist. Amongst her romances the one which had greatest popularity was entitled "I Divoratori" ("The Devourers"). It is obviously the story of her life and of her daughter's career, the record of filial shortcomings steeped in wormwood.

The third of these interesting writers, half Armenian, half Italian, was Vittoria Aganoor, who was born in Padua in 1855. In 1900 she published a volume called "Leggenda Eterna" ("Eternal Legend"), which showed her to be a sincere, impassioned artist with a pronounced leaning toward the sentimental. She died in London in the spring of 1910, after a surgical operation, and a few hours later her husband, Guido Pompili, killed himself. Her best-known poems are "Il Canto dell' Ironia" ("The Song of Irony"), "La vecchia Anima sogna ... " ("The Old Soul Dreams"), "Mamà, sei tu?" ("Mother, Is It Thou?"). A complete volume of her poetry was published in 1912.

Italians are astonished when women make a great stir in the world. They have had no Jeanne d'Arc or Florence Nightingale. Their historic women have been mostly mystics who would punish the flesh that they might become spiritually pure, but the generation that is now passing has had five women, four at least of whom will have to be discussed by any historian of the intellectual movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They are Matilde Serao, Grazia Deledda, Maria Montessori, Eusapia Palladino, and Eleanora Duse, and most space will be given to Duse.

Matilde Serao is the Marie Corelli of Italy with one important qualification. She has not been obliged to subscribe to the rigors of convention. She has spoken with great frankness about whole sides of life which Miss Corelli knows, but about which she has been compelled to be silent. Not that the romances of Matilde Serao are in any sense pornographic, but she has painted her subjects so vividly and registered her sensations and impressions so sumptuously that they are considered very improper by Mrs. Grundy. She was in turn school-teacher, telegraphist, journalist, publisher, author, but throughout her writings she has kept the note of the journalist who has made a careful study of Zola and of Flaubert. Her thought is spontaneous, her expression facile, as she depicts the emotions and "feelings" of her Neapolitan characters, clad in rags or royal raiment, living in hovel or in palace.

Her most successful books were "La Storia di un Monaco," "Il Ventre di Napoli" ("The Belly of Naples"), "Il Paese della Cuccagna" ("The Land of the Cockaigne"), and "Terno secco" in which the social, economic, and political world of Naples is revealed. With the third of those enumerated she tried to do for lottery-gambling in Naples what Charles Dickens did for the private schools of England. Regrettably her efforts did not have a similar result.

In her Neapolitan stories the local color is not a mere background, but the very marrow of their being, with the result that it is almost impossible to reproduce it adequately in translation. Her later books were always pictures of the professional lover in different environments. He loves with fury and usually for a short time only. His amatory conduct has no ancillæ of Anglo-Saxon love-making. It is taurine and satyric. He does not always kill after the embrace, but one gathers from his conduct that he would like to do so. Time has tempered Matilde Serao's erotic literary coefficient and her last books are cool, more serene, and less interesting. One of her last books, "Ella non rispose," has recently been translated into English under the title of "Souls Divided."

Grazia Deledda has done for her native island of Sardinia that which Signora Serao did for Naples, but to a great extent she kept lubricity out of her writings. In her "Il Vecchio della Montagna" ("The Old Man of the Mountain"), "La Via del Male" ("Road to Evil"), "Cenere" ("Ashes"), "Nostalgia," "L'Incendio nell' Uliveto" ("The Burning in the Olive Grove"), and many others, she depicted with wondrous accuracy the life, feelings, struggles, ambitions, infirmities of the Sardinians, and painted their sordid surroundings and glorious scenery. She did for that wonderful island, so strangely neglected by the mother country, what Mary Wilkins did for New England. Her imagination was never so vivid nor was her eye so penetrating as that of her Neapolitan sister, nor has she known the voluptuous side of life, seamy or embroidered, but she has known how to put down in a way that engrosses the reader's attention the pitiable and pathetic plights that circumstance and passion force upon the people with whom she lives. The display of their passions and sorrows are apparently as familiar to her as the landscapes. Unfortunately, however, she does for them that which she does for the latter. She idealizes them or, better said, she strains them through her imagination. In other words, instead of recording them as they are she records them as they should be. Her novels give the impression of being photographic until you read Verga. Not that the breath of insincerity which Croce said was the curse of Italy's modern writers comes from her. She is most sincere, but her characters are sandman manikins into whose nostrils she has breathed the breath of life. She makes her characters do what she might do if she were one of them.

Whether she is tugging at the end of her intellectual tether or not remains to be seen, but her recent work has not the spontaneity and imaginativeness of her earlier books and she is almost obsessed with describing landscapes, the advent and departure of the sun, and stage-settings generally. Her last story, "The Burning in the Olive Grove," is a conflict between the present and the past, and turns upon a marriage of convention. It gives the author the opportunity to depict the imperious eighty-three-year-old grandmother, her useless brother, the farm lassie whose worldly success in marrying into a family above her station she owes to her beauty, and a pillar of feminine virtue who would live her own life in her own way despite the schemings of the grandmother of feudalistic behavior. The scene is filled with character studies which she likes so well: the old soldier of Garibaldi's legion, his lame son whom the heroine loves, and virtuous heroic peasantry.

Several of Grazia Deledda's novels have been translated into English, but they have not had great success. She is one of the last of the realistic idealizers. The most her admirers can hope that the future will do for her is that it will suggest to those in search of Sardinian color that they should consult her writings. Neither the psychologist nor the literary craftsman will disturb her literary remains.

The most promising successor of these women novelists is Clarice Tartufari, whose "Rete d'Acciaio" ("Nets of Steel") is a powerful though painful study of the Sicilian brand of jealousy.

Arturo Graf (1848-1918), for many years a professor in the University of Turin, was a materialistic poet whose productions during his lifetime were received with some favor and are now being given high rating. Fifteen years ago a very flattering review of his dramatic poems, especially "Medusa," appeared in the Nuova Antologia, and recently Signor Vittorio Gian has published in Gazetta di Torino an analysis of his mental processes and an estimate of the merit and significance of his poetical productions which, should they find general acceptance, may give Graf the most important position in the poetic field since Pascoli. Neither his intellectual reactions nor his point of view, however, is Italian. They show both his Teutonic origin and inclinations. His last verses, "Nuove Rime della Selva" ("New Rhymes of the Forest"), are full of delightful imagery, delicate fantasy, and gentle sentiment and they do not display the materialism, pessimism, or the figurative symbolism of his early works. In 1900 he published a psychological romance entitled "Riscatto" ("Redemption"), admittedly a spiritual autobiography which heralded and prepared his after-faith, which was thus also a battle for a faith against materialistic pessimism, against arid positivism which had seduced him and against which he reacted. "He who seeks God laboriously may become more religious than he who coddles Him in the firm belief of having found Him." His book of poems published in 1895 is the poet's voicings of his struggle to this end. His fame is greater as a dramatist and litterateur than as a poet. Nevertheless some of his poetical writings show a rare imagery, a facile capacity for description and versification, though a pessimistic psychology. His best-known poems are entitled "Venezie" ("Venices"), "Le Rose sono sfiorite" ("Faded Roses"), "Silenzio" ("Silence"), "Anelito" ("Longings"). Gian says of him: "He did not attain in his career as teacher, writer, and poet that outward recognition that fame and fortune usually bestow on their favorites," but as a recompense "he was honored with such hatreds as are never the lot of mediocrities and which for this very reason are the sanction and almost the guaranty of true worth."

Much of the interesting literature of the past generation has appeared in dialect, especially the poetic literature.

Salvatore di Giacomo must be put at the head of all dialectical poets of Italy. He is very little known to English readers, because he has been so little translated, save into German. He is the librarian of the National Library of the Naples Museum. The subjects of his poems are drawn from Naples and its people, its beauty and their ardency; the realism of his verse is sober, its sentiments are healthy and true to human nature but to the human nature of a voluptuous, passionate people. He writes of love in all its aspects, and of death, physical, emotional, and mental. He knows the hopes, aspirations, sympathies, longings, customs of his fellow Neapolitans; he knows them when they are ill, when they are happy, and when they are depressed, when they are fortunate and when they are seeped in misfortune, and he puts them into lyrics that they understand and that poetasters praise.

His lyrics have been collected into one volume called "Poesie." He has been called the Robert Burns of Italy, and it is likely that he deserves it. It is to be regretted that no one has attempted to render him in English.