Among the youngest of the Italian litterateurs who are giving great promise is Alberto Savinio, who is not only an interesting writer but an accomplished musician, composer, and performer. Of Sicilian origin, he was born in Tuscany and has lived in various parts of central Europe. He first came to conspicuous notice through his articles in Les Soirées de Paris. To the average reader he is known as a traveller and a narrator of his observations and experiences in the form of comments and short stories. Latterly, however, he has published a queer book entitled "Hermaphrodito," which is difficult briefly to characterize without doing it injustice. It is a book that a clever man might write in the early stages of delirium tremens, providing he returned to it after recovery and added the chapters "Isabella Hasson" and "La Partenza dell' Argonauti." In the latter especially he shows himself capable of writing temperate, vivacious, robust prose, of making inviting descriptions of places, and of revealing man's conduct and his motives.
When the war broke out he returned to Italy and his contributions soon began to appear in different journals, more particularly in the Voce of Florence and the Brigati of Bologna. Since then he has received even greater praise than was meted out to him in Paris, and he gives promise, should his development continue, of getting a place amongst the modern writers.
Another young writer of the same kidney, though by no means of such promise, is Mario Venditti. He is a type of juvenile writer in Italy who excites a curiosity to know how he succeeds in getting some of his writings published. He appears to have a writing formula: take of substantives whose meaning is known to few save dictionary experts, archaic or uncommon adjectives, adverbs, or adverbial phrases taken from other languages, excerpts from scientific writings, especially philosophy and medicine, and string them together so that when they are read aloud there will be a certain sonorous, musical effect, and at the same time suggest a color accompaniment. He reminds of a properly brought-up and well-educated boy who, when he reaches the age of puberty, insists upon wearing what are called "outlandish" clothes, a combination of the apparel of the clown and that of the fashion-plate, to which he attaches ornate trimmings and incongruous decoration. In such costume he struts about with a nonchalance and swagger of self-appreciation which is more irritating even than his sartorial affectations. Many modern literary youths seem to have to go through a period of this kind, just as the children of "First Families," unfortunately, must have mumps and measles. Like the victims of those diseases the majority of them go through unscathed, but every now and then one of them is intellectually enfeebled and genetically sterilized.
Signor Venditti has not assured us by the publication of "Il Burattino e la Pialla" that he is not a victim.
When is a Futurist not a Futurist? A very difficult question that, for readers answer it one way and writers another. Some writers are Futuristic on alternate days, or every seventh day. One of these is Enrico Cavacchioli, a Sicilian living in Milan, the dramatic critic of the Secolo and the director of Il Mondo and of the publishing-house of Vitagliano. His reputation as a man of letters stands in no relation to his futurist poems. It does, however, to his compositions for the theatre, and especially to his great success, "Uccello del Paradiso" ("Bird of Paradise"). His last contribution, "Quella che t'assomiglia" ("That Which Resembles You"), which he calls a vision in three acts, is a satire on the present-day interest in the occult and supernatural.
When the promising and brilliant young writer of the Florentine group, Renato Serra, was killed in the war, Italy lost one of its most gifted critics since De Sanctis. Despite his youth he had, when he was called to the colors, already won a conspicuous position as a man of letters. Alfredo Panzini dedicated his "Madonna di Mamà" to him, and made touching allusions to his qualities of soul and potential greatness. In 1914 he published a survey of contemporary Italian literature ("Le Lettere"), and the five years which have elapsed since then have shown that his estimates and judgments were unusually sound. His was neither the academic idealistic criticism of the old school nor the historic philosophic criticism of Croce. He attempted to interpret writers, plans, and performances and to contrast them with ideals he had himself conceived or worked out from study of the masters. His last work, "Scritti Critici" ("Critical Writings"), was published in 1919. They show a subtle and profound analysis, an original point of view, and equilibrium in expression and in form. His style is simple, his statements clear, his presentations convincing.
Another young writer of this group, a man of great promise, was Scipio Slattaper. He gave his life for his country in the early days of the war.
Corrado Govoni has, for the past decade, been considered by some to be Italy's most promising poet. There is definite infantilism in his work, a distractibility, a discursiveness, that has stood in the way of meriting such estimate. Although still a young man (thirty-five), he has eight volumes of poetry that bear his name. Papini was his impresario but he no longer treats him as one of his favored family. His first volume was called "Le fiale" ("The Honeycomb"), the next "Armonia in Grigio ed in Silenzio" ("Harmony in Gray and in Silence"). They were truly juvenile. The third volume, "Fuochi d'Artifizio" ("Fireworks"), showed the influence of Rodenbach, of James, and of the modern French school.
In 1907 he published "Aborti," which showed his mental growth and which is one of his best even to the present time.
In 1911 he issued a volume entitled "Electric Poetry" ("Poesie elettriche"), whose futurist cover was the only futuristic feature it had. There is no humming, puffing, whirring to convey that steam-and-gasoline-engine modernity which it should have in order to justify the name. Its lines are too refined, too pussy-foot, too pathetic, too tender-minded for that. Were it not for the perfect equality of the sexes to-day we would be tempted to say they had a feminine quality. Daintiness does not express it; neither does unvirile.
There is none of this quality in his next production—the "Hymn on the Death of Sergio." "Neve" ("The Snow") appeared in 1914; "Rarefazione" ("Rarefactions") in 1915. The latter is a weird collection of childish figures designed by the poet and commented upon by him to such effect as to demonstrate a state of latent infantilism. In the same year he published a volume entitled "The Inauguration of the Spring" ("L'Inaugurazione della Primavera"), which contains most of Govoni's best work in poems. His last book, a series of short stories, "La Santa Verde" ("The Ardent Saint"), adds nothing to his fame. Most of them are insignificant, colorless, reliefless, purposeless.
An attempt has been made by champions of Corrado Govoni to show that "Base rivals, who true wit and merit hate" are forming a cabal to prevent his getting his deserts. Fiumi, his last champion, does not materially advance his claim.
Such, in all their diversity, are the Futurists. There is no common formula which describes them. They have a programme which, like that of the Socialists, must from its very nature lack specificity. They are not very definitely organized and many who enrolled under their banner in the enthusiasm of youth soon deserted the cause. But meanwhile they got sufficient inspiration and impetus to throw off the shackles of tradition and to taste the pleasure of exploration. More often they get purged of a kind of literary preciosity which makes for their well-being and usefulness. The programme of the Futurist is of little importance in itself, but it is of great importance as a symptom of tendencies now agitating the minds of the younger generation in Italy. It may be that their efforts will constitute the small end of the wedge by which Romanticism and Verism shall be burst asunder like the Dragon of Bel's Temple.
In one of his "Appreciations"—depreciations would be the more fitting word—Signor Papini says he seems to have read or to have said that in every man there are at least four men: the real man, the man he would like to be, the man he thinks he is, and the man others think he is. He is sure to have read it, for he has read widely. Undoubtedly he has also said it, for he has made a specialty of saying things that have been said before—even that he has said before.
As for the man he thinks he is, he has written a long autobiography with plentiful data, from which it may be deduced that he is a man with great possibilities and a great mission, to wit, to precipitate in Italy a spiritual revolution, to bring to his countrymen the gospel that it is time to be up and doing and that intoxication with past successes will not condone present inertness. He has been chosen to teach men that the best of life is to be found in purposeful action regardless of inconsistencies, contradictions, and imperfections; that the ego should be guided peripherally not centrically; that introspection is the stepping-stone to mental involution. In reality, he is but one of many who are proclaiming those tidings in Italy.
The distinction between what he would like to be and what he thinks he is, is not so marked as in more timid and less articulate souls. Substantially, it is this same calling of prophecy which is his aim. As for the man he is, time and his own accomplishments alone will show. Now, at the zenith of his creative power, he is still a man of promise, a carrier-pigeon freighted with an important message who, instead of delivering it, exhausts himself beating his wings in a luminous void.
In Giovanni Papini these four aspects stand out very distinctly. Let us take them up in inverse order, since what others think of a man is soon stated and what he really is is a vague goal, to be approached only distantly, even at the end of this paper. Mr. Reginald Turner says: "Papini is by far the most interesting and most important living writer of Italy. 'L'Uomo Finito' has become a classic in Italy; it is written in the most distinguished Italian; it can be read again and again with increasing profit and interest ... its Italian is impeccable and clear. Mr. J. S. Barnes calls him the most notable personality on the stage of Italian letters to-day," and Signor G. Prezzolini writes: "His mind is so vast, so human, that it will win its way into the intellectual patrimony of Europe." I cannot go all the way with these adherents of Signor Papini. I have talked with scores of cultured Italians about his writings and I have heard it said, "He has acquired an enviable mastery of the Italian language," but I have never once heard praise of his "impeccable and clear Italian"; nor do I hold with Mr. Barnes that he is unquestionably the most notable personality save D'Annunzio on the stage of Italian letters to-day. We would scarcely call Mr. Shaw the most notable personality on the stage of English letters to-day. Surely it would be an injustice to Mr. Kipling, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Conrad. It might be unjust to Mr. Swinnerton.
Signor Papini is an interesting literary figure, particularly as a sign of the times. During the past generation there has been in Italy a profound revolt against what may be called satisfaction with and reverence for past performances and against slavish subscription to French, German, and Russian realism. It is to a group of writers who call themselves Futurists and who see in the designation praise rather than opprobrium that this salutary, beneficial, and praiseworthy movement is due.
Signor Papini has publicly read himself out of the party, but apostasy of one kind or another is almost as necessary to him as food, and most people still regard him as a Futurist, though he refuses to subscribe to the clause in the constitution of the literary Futurists of Italy bearing on love, published by their monarch Signor Marinetti in that classic of Futuristic literature "Zang Tumb Tumb" and in "Democrazia Futurista."
It is now twenty years since there appeared unheralded in Florence a literary journal called the Leonardo, whose purpose in the main seemed to be to overthrow certain philosophic and socialistic doctrines, Positivism and Tolstoian ethics. The particularly noteworthy articles were signed Gian Falco. It soon became known that the writer was one Giovanni Papini, a contentious, self-confident youth of peculiarly inquisitive turn of mind, and of sensitiveness bordering on the pathological, an omnivorous reader, an aggressive debater. He was hailed by a group of youthful literary enthusiastics as a man of promise.
In the twenty years that have elapsed since then he has written more than a score of books, short stories, essays, criticisms, poetry, polemics, some of which, such as "L'Uomo Finito" ("The Played-Out Man"), "Venti Quattro Cervelli" ("Twenty-four Minds"), and "Cento Pagine di Poesia" ("One Hundred Pages of Poetry"), have been widely read in Italy and have known several editions. Save for a few short stories, he has not appeared in English, though there seems to be propaganda in his behalf directed by himself and by his friends of his publishing-house in Florence to make him known to foreigners. Like other Italian propaganda it has not been very successful and this is to be regretted. It is due in part to the fact his advocates have claimed too much for him.
Signor Papini is like Mr. Arnold Bennett in that they both know the reading public are personally interested in authors. From the beginning he and his friends have capitalized his poverty of pulchritude and his pulchritudinous poverty. Signor Giuseppe Prezzolini, in a book entitled "Discorso su Giovanni Papini" has devoted several pages to his person, which, he writes, "is like those pears, coarse to the touch but sweet to the palate," yet I am moved to say that the eye long habituated to resting lovingly upon somatic beauty does not blink nor is it pained when it rests upon Giovanni Papini.
In one of his latest books—it is never safe to say which is really his last, unless you stand outside the door of the bindery of La Voce—in one of his latest books, entitled "Testimonials," the third series of "Twenty-four Brains," he reverts to this, and says that his person is "so repugnant that Mirabeau, world-famed for his ugliness, was compared with him an Apollo."
He does not get the same exquisite pleasure from deriding his qualities of soul, but, as the face is the mirror of the soul, no one is astonished to learn that "this same Papini is the gangster of literature, the tough of journalism, the Barabbas of art, the dwarf of philosophy, the straddler of politics, and the Apache of culture and learning." Nevertheless, no prudent, sensitive man should permit himself to say this or anything approximating it in Papini's hearing, for not only has he a card index of substantives that convey derogation, but he has perhaps the fullest arsenal of adjectives in Italy, and has habituated himself to the use of them, both with and without provocation.
I have been told by his schoolmates and by those whom he later essayed to teach that as a youth he was inquisitive about the nature of things and objects susceptible to physical and chemical explanation. His writings indicate that his real seduction was conditioned by philosophic questions. Early in life he displayed a symptom which is common to many psychopaths—an uncontrollable desire to read philosophical writers beyond their comprehension. In the twenty years that he has been publishing books he has constantly returned to this practice, as shown by his "Twilight of the Philosophers," "The Other Half," and "Pragmatism."
His first articles in the Leonardo, which now make up the volume known as "Il Tragico Quotidiano e il Pilota Cieco" ("The Tragedy of Every Day and the Blind Pilot"), are sketches and fantasies of a personal kind, some of them fanciful and charming, some with a touch of inspired extravagance that recall Baudelaire and Poe, and faintly echo Oscar Wilde's "Bells and Pomegranates," Dostoievsky's "Poor People," and Leonida Andreieff's "Little Angel." Some of the stories have a weird touch. Others are founded in obsession that form the ancillæ of psychopathy. Take, for instance, the man with a feeling of unreality who did not really exist in flesh and blood but was only a figure in the dream of some one else, and who felt that he would be vivified if only he could find the sleeper and arouse him. This idea is not of infrequent occurrence in that strange disorder, dementia precox; take again the man who found his life dull and who covenanted with a novelist to do his bidding in exchange for being made an interesting character; and the two men who changed souls; and the talks with the devil interpreting scripture. All these awaken an echo in the reader's mind of either having been heard before or they bring the hope that they never will be heard again.
Although his early writings had an arresting quality, it was not until he undertook to edit some Italian classics published under the title of "I Nostri Scrittori" ("Our Writers") that they began to take on the features that have since become characteristic and which have been described by his admirers as "rugged, vigorous, virile, rich, neologistic," and everything else the antithesis of pussy-foot. This feature, if feature it can be called, showed itself first in "L'Uomo Finito," a book which is admitted to be an autobiography. It introduces us to an ugly, sensitive, introspective, mentally prehensile child of shut-in personality who is not only egocentric at seven but who loves and exalts himself and despises and disparages others.
This unlovable child with an insatiate appetite for information found his way to a public library and determined to write an encyclopædia of all knowledge. His juvenile frenzy came its first cropper when he reached the letter "B," and he was submerged with the Bible and with God. The task was too big, he had to admit, but his ambition to accomplish some great and thorough piece of work was undaunted. He began a compendium of religions, then of literature, and last of the Romance languages.
These successive attempts at completeness are typical of Papini's far-reaching ambitions. "The Played-Out Man" is a record of his plunge into one absorption after another. He discovered evil, and planned not only individual suicide but suicide of the people en masse. Next came the desire for love. His instincts were of a sort not to be satisfied by the conventional sweetness of "I Promessi Sposi," but from Poe, Walt Whitman, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dostoievsky, and Anatole France he got a vicarious appeasement of the sentiment he craved. Then he encountered "dear Julian." "We never kissed each other and we never cried together," but he could not forgive Julian for allowing his friend to learn of his matrimony only through the Corriere della Sera.
The brief emotional episode past, Papini's life interest swung back to philosophy. He discovered Monism, and believed it like a religion. Then Kant became his ideal, then Berkeley, Mill, Plato, Locke, culminating in the glorified egotism of Max Stirner. After Stirner philosophy has no more to say. Down with it all! It is necessary to liberate the world from the yoke of these mumblers, just as Papini has liberated himself. But how to do it! Ah, yes! Found a journal that will purge the world of its sins, as the Great Revolution purged France of royalty.
Thus Papini's literary work had its beginning. It takes several tempestuous chapters of the autobiography to describe the launching of the Leonardo by himself and a few congenial souls. Nine numbers marked the limit of its really vigorous life, but it ran, with Papini as its chief source of material, for five years. Ultimately, with the dissipation of the author's youthful energy, this child of his bosom had to be interred. But Papini still goes to its grave.
The tumultuous, introspective life of the author continued. He went through a period of self-pity and neurasthenia, then one of intense hero-worship directed toward all radicals, including William James, whom he had once seen washing his neck. Then came an immense desire for action, hindered, however, by the fact that the author could not decide whether to found a school of philosophy, become the prophet of a religion, or go into politics. His only inherent conviction concerns the stupidity of the world and his own calling to rise above it. This long, internal history ends with a period of sweeping depression, out of which the author at last emerges with the intense conviction that he is not, after all, played out, that there is still matter in him to give the world. He feels welling up within him a stream of arrogance and self-confidence that is not to be dammed. He has not yet delivered his message; people have not yet understood him.
So he goes back to the market-place of Florence, shouting: "I have not finished. I am not played out. You shall see." And it is at this stage that Signor Papini's work now stands. We wait to see.
The "L'Uomo Finito" is Signor Papini's G. P. No. 2. It is not fiction in the ordinary use of the term; any more than "Undying Fire" of Mr. Wells is. In a measure it is fiction like "The Way with All Flesh" of Samuel Butler. But in point of interest and workmanship it is far inferior to the former and in purposefulness, character delineation, orientation, resurrection, and reform it is not to be compared with the latter.
Although it is the book by which Signor Papini is best known, it is not his love-child. "The Twilight of the Philosophers" is. He is proud to call it his intellectual biography, but it would be much truer to call it an index of his emotional equation. "This is not a book of good faith. It is a book of passion, therefore of injustice, an unequal book, partisan, without scruples, violent, contradictory, unsolid, like all books of those who love and hate and are not ashamed of their love or their hatred." This is the introductory paragraph of the original preface.
In reality it is a cross between a philosophic treatise and a popular polemic, with the technical abstruseness of the one and the passion of the other, and its purpose is to show that all philosophy is vain and should make way for action. Although it indicates wide and attentive reading and a certain erudition, the only indication of constructive thought that it reveals is a rudimentary attempt to adjust the philosophic system of each man to the temperamental bias of the author. Others, Santayana for instance, have done this so much better that there is scarcely justification for his pride. He could have carried his point quite as successfully by stating it as by laboring it through a whole volume devoted largely to railing both at philosophers and at their philosophy.
From the point of view of the philosopher this book is "popular." From the standpoint of the people it is "philosophical." It is really a testimonial to the author's breathless state of emotional unrest. He is like a bird in a cage and he feels that he must beat down the barriers in order to accomplish freedom, but when they are fractured and he is apparently free there is no sense of liberation. He is in a far more secure prison than he was before, and to make matters worse he cannot now distinguish the barriers that obstacle his freedom. The wonder is not that a man of the temperament and intellectual endowment of Signor Papini has this feeling, but that he can convince himself that any one else should be interested in his discovery.
He that hath knowledge spareth his words, and the mistake is to consider words linked up as subject, predicate, and object, especially if the substantives are qualified by lurid adjectives, the equivalent of knowledge. He knows the "ars scrivendi" as Aspasia knew the "ars amandi"; Papini knows the value of symbolic, eye-arresting, suggestive titles. He realizes the importance of overstatement and of exaggerated emphasis; he is cognizant of the insatiateness of the average human being for gossip and particularly gossip about the great; he recognizes that there is no more successful way of flattering the mediocre than by pointing out to him the shortcomings of the gods, for thus does he identify their possessions with his own and convince himself that he also is a god. Papini's sensitive soul whispers to him that the majority of people will think him brave, courageous, valorous, resolute, virtuous, and firm if he will adopt a certain pose, a certain manner, a certain swagger that will convey his grim determination to carry his mission to the world though it takes his last breath, the last glow of his mortal soul.
"They wished me to be a poet; here, therefore, is a little poetry," is the opening line of his book called "Cento Pagine di Poesia," and this, though not in verse, is characterized by such imaginative beauty, more in language, however, than in thought, that it is worthy to be called a poem. More than any other of his books it reveals the real Papini. Here he is less truculent, less Nietzschian, less self-conscious of understudying and attempting to act the parts of Jove. He is more like the Papini that he is by nature, and therefore more human, more kind and gentle—would I could add modest—more potent and convincing, than in any of his other books. It is especially in the third part, under the general title of "Precipitations," that the author gives the freest rein to his fantasy and is not always endeavoring to explain or tell the reason why, but abandons himself to the production of words which will present rhythmically the emotions that are springing up within him. It is difficult to believe that the same hand penned these poems and the open letter to Anatole France beginning: "In these days Anatole France is in Rome, and perhaps returning he will stop in Florence, but I beg him fervently not to seek me out. I could not receive him." That quality of delusion of grandeur I have seen heretofore only in victims of a terrible disease.
Signor Papini is never so transparent as he is in his "Stroncatura" and in his excursions into the realm of philosophy. His attack on Nietzsche is most illuminating. In fact, Giovanni Papini is Frederick Nietzsche viewed through an inverted telescope. "Nietzsche's volubility (indication of easy fatigue) makes him prefer the fragmentary and aphoristic style of expression; his incapacity to select from all that which he has thought and written leads him to publish a quantity of useless and repeated thought; his reluctance to synthetize, to construct, to organize, which gives to his books an air of oriental stuff, a mixture of old rags and of precious drapery, jumbled up without order, are the best arguments for imputing to him a deficiency of imperial mentality, a reflex of the general weakness of philosophy. But the most unexpected proof of this weakness consists in his incapacity to be truly and authentically original. The highest and most difficult forms of originality are certainly these two: to find new interpretation and solution of old problems, to pose new problems and to open streets absolutely unknown."
No one can examine closely the writings of Signor Papini without recognizing that he has shown himself incapable of selecting from that which he has written and thought and of setting it forth as a statement of his philosophy or as an Apologia pro Sua Vita. Constant republication of the same statements and the same ideas dressed up with different synonyms is a charge that can be brought with justice. It can be substantiated not only by his books but by La Vraie Italie, an organ of intellectual liaison between Italy and other countries directed by Signor Papini, which had a brief existence in 1919, a considerable portion of which was taken up with republication of the old writings of the director.
Even the most intemperate of his admirers would scarcely contend that he merits being called original, judged by his own standards. At one time in his life Nietzsche was undoubtedly his idol, and I can think of the juvenile Papini No. 3 suggesting that he model himself after the Teutonic descendant of Pasiphae and the bull of Poseidon. Thus did he appease his morbid sensitiveness and soothe his pathological erethism by enveloping himself in an armor made up of rude and uncouth words, of sentiment and of disparagement; of raillery against piety, reverence, and faith; of contempt for tradition. In fact, he seemed equipped with a special apparatus for pulling roots founded in the tender emotions. He would pretend that he is superior to the ordinary mortal to whom love in its various display, sentiment in its manifold presentations, dependence upon others in its countless aspects are as essential to happiness as the breath of the nostrils is essential to life. In secret, however, he is not only dependent upon it, he is beholden to it.
When he assumes his most callous and indifferent air, when he is least cognizant of the sensitiveness of others, when in brief he is speaking of his fellow countrymen, Signore D'Annunzio, Mazzoni, Bertacchi, Croce, and up until recently when he speaks of God or religion, he reminds me of that extraordinary and inexplicable type of individual whom we have had "in our midst" since time immemorial, but who had greater vogue in the time of Petronius than he has to-day.
Although the majority of these persons are au fond proud of their endowment, the world at large scoffs at them; and in primitive countries such as our own it kicks at them; therefore they are quick to see the advantage of assuming an air of crass indifference and, with the swagger of the social corsair, to express a brutal insensitiveness to the æsthetic and the hedonistic to which in reality they vibrate. They never deceive themselves, and Signor Papini does not deceive himself. He knows his limitations, and the greatest of them are that he is timid, lacking in imagination, in sense of humor, and in originality. He is as dependent upon love as a baby is upon its bottle.
When writing about himself he hopes the reader will identify him only with the characters whose thoughts and actions are flattering, but the real man is to be identified with some of the characters whom he desires his public to think fictitious. In one of his short stories he narrates a visit to a world-famed literary man. He describes his trip to the remote city that he may lay the modest wreath plated from the pride of his mind and his heart at the feet of his idol. He finds him a commonplace, almost undifferentiated lump of clay with a more commonplace, slatternly wife and even more hopelessly commonplace children. His repute is dependent wholly upon the skill with which he manipulates a card index and pigeon-holes. Papini fled to escape contemplation of himself and the fragments of the sacred vessel.
Signor Papini has been an omnivorous reader along certain lines; he has been a tireless writer, and he is notorious for his neologistic logorrhea, but the possession which stands in closest relation to his literary reputation is his indexed collection of words, phrases, and sentences. This, plus knowing by heart the poetry of Carducci, and his envy of Benedetto Croce for having obtained the repute of being one of the most fertile philosophic minds of his age, and his advocacy of the gospel of strenuousness, is the framework upon which he has ensheathed his house of letters.
No study of the man or of his work can neglect one aspect of his career—his constant change of position. He knocks with breathless anxiety at the door of some new world, and no sooner does he secure entrance and see the pleasant valley of Hinnom than he feels the lure of black Gehenna and is seized with an uncontrollable desire to explore it. When he returns he hastens to the public forum and announces his discoveries, preferring to tell of the gewgaws which he discovered than to expatiate on the few jewels which he gathered.
His last production augurs well for him, because it indicates that finally he will bathe in the pool of the five porches at Jerusalem, the World War having troubled its water instead of an angel. November 30, 1919, he published in the most widely circulated and influential newspaper of Central Italy, the Resto del Carlino, an article entitled "Amore e Morte" ("Love and Death"), which sets forth that he has had that experience which the Christian calls "seeing a great light, knowing a spiritual reincarnation," and which those whom Papini has been supposed to represent call a pitiable defalcation, a spiritual bankruptcy.
On February 21, 1913, he proclaimed in the Costanzi Theatre of Rome that "in order to reach his power man must throw off religious faith, not only Christianity or Catholicism, but all mystic, spiritualistic, theosophic faiths and beliefs." Now he has discovered Jesus. In his literary ruminations he has come upon the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which set forth the purpose and teachings of our Lord and which have convinced countless living and dead of His divinity. We must forswear egocentrism; we must stop making obeisance to materialism; we must cease striving for success, comfort, or power. Such efforts led to the massacre of yesterday, to the agony of to-day, and are conditioning our eternal perdition. Salvation is within ourselves, the Kingdom of Heaven is within our hearts, he who seeks it without is a blind man led by a blind guide. The road over which we must travel is bordered on either side by seductive pastures from which gush life-giving springs, topped with luxurious trees of soul-satisfying color that protect from the blazing sun or the congealing wind, and on either side are pathways so softly cushioned that even the most tender feet may tread them without fear of wound or blister. The sign-posts to this road are the four little volumes written two thousand years ago.
No one unfamiliar with that strange disorder of the mind called the manic depressive psychosis can fully understand Signor Papini. There is no one more sane and businesslike than the former Futurist, yet the reactions of his supersensitive nature have some similarity with this mental condition present, in embryo, in many people. In that mysterious malady there is a period of emotional, physical, and intellectual activity that surmounts every obstacle, brushes aside every barrier, leaps over every hurdle. During its dominancy the victim respects neither law not convention; the goal is his only object. He doesn't always know where he is going and he isn't concerned with it; he is concerned only with going. When the spectator sees the road over which he has travelled on his winged horse he finds it littered with the débris that Pegasus has trampled upon and crushed.
This period of hyperactivity is invariably followed by a time of depression, of inadequacy, of emotional barrenness, of intellectual sterility, of physical impotency, of spiritual frigidity. The sun from which the body and the soul have had their warmth and their glow falls below the horizon of the unfortunate's existence and he senses the terrors of the dark and the rigidity of beginning congelation. Then, when hope and warmth have all but gone and only life, mere life without color or emotion remains, and the necessity of living forever in a world perpetually enshrouded in darkness with no differentiation in the débris remaining after the tornado, then the sun gradually peeps up, illuminates, warms, revives, fructifies the earth, and the sufferer becomes normal—normal save in the moments or hours of fear when he contemplates having again to brave the hurricane or to breast the deluge. But once the wind begins to blow with a velocity that bespeaks the readvent of the tornado, he throws off inhibition and goes out in the open, holds up the torch that shall light the whole world, and with his megaphone from the top of Helicon shouts: "This way to the revolution."
In a relative sense, this is the mode of Signor Papini. He is fascinated by the beauty and perfections of an individual or of a school and he will enroll himself a member, but before he gets thoroughly initiated he gets word of another individual or another school which must be investigated. In the intoxication he defames and often slays his previous mistress. Thus his whole life has been given to the task of discovering a new philosophy, a new poetry, a new romance, a new prophecy, and their makers. In the ecstasy of discovery he cannot resist smashing the idol of yesterday that his pedestal may be free for the more worthy one of to-day, and he cannot inhibit the impulse to rush off to the composing-rooms of La Voce to register his emotions in print.
In his desire to be famous he reminds one of those individuals who would be liked by every one, and who will do anything save cease making the effort. Pretending that he loves to have people hate him, he does not, but he would rather have hate and disparagement than indifference or neglect. He desires power, that unattainable he will be satisfied with notoriety. He does not agree with a fellow poet that
Were he a genius and at the same time had the industry that he has displayed, he would be the equal of H. G. Wells, possibly the peer of Bernard Shaw, but he is neither. He is simply a clever, industrious, versatile, sensitive, emotional man of forty, whose mental juvenility tends to cling to him. He has so long habituated himself to overestimation and his admiring friends have been so injudicious in praising his productions for qualities which they do not possess and neglecting praiseworthy qualities which they do possess, that he is like an object under a magnifying-glass out of focus.
But, as Papini himself says, he has not finished. He is still comparatively a young man and the world awaits his accomplishment. If the function he has chosen is that of agitation rather than construction, of preparation rather than of building, he cannot be totally condemned for that. His environment is in a condition where much destruction is necessary before anything real can be evolved. And as the apostle of this destruction Papini must be accepted. He stands as a prophet, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness, 'Prepare ye the way—'"; and the generations will show whether it is indeed a highway he has opened.
The most diverting and conspicuous figures in the literary world of Italy to-day are two old school-teachers, Alfredo Panzini, humanist, and Luigi Pirandello, satirist. Both of them have earned a permanent fame and their fecundity seems to be increasing with age.
Alfredo Panzini, a pedagogue by profession, is a writer by dint of long training. Born in Senigaglia, a small town in the Province of Ancona, in 1863, he called Carducci master. After serving a long literary apprenticeship compiling grammars, readers, dictionaries, anthologies, his name began to appear in journals and magazines, and gradually he has forged his way to the front rank as an episodist, an interpreter of the feelings and sentiments of the average man and woman and their spokesman, and as a master of prose.
In appearance he is a typical lower middle-class Italian, short, stout, and ruddy, a kindly, benevolent face, with contented eyes that look at you uninquiringly from behind gold-rimmed spectacles. One might gather from looking at him that he had asked but little from the world and got more than he asked.
His writings display an intimate familiarity with a few classic writers, especially of Greece and Italy, which he reveals by frequent and appropriate quotations and references, contrasting the sayings and doings of the venerated ancients with those of the not always deprecated modern. He knows the emotional desires and reactions of the average man; he senses his aspirations and his appeasements; he has keen understanding of his virtues and his infirmities. He knows his potential and actual pleasures, and he reveals this understanding of his fellows to us in a diverting and instructive way and at the same time shows us idealistic vistas of life and conduct that are most refreshing. It is to be regretted that he is not equally enlightened about women. If he knows their aspirations he denies the legitimacy of them; if he discerns their future he refuses to forecast it; if he knows feminine psychology his writings do not reveal it. He is the traveller ascending from the plains whose pleasure is in looking backward to survey the paths over which he has travelled, to describe the beauty of the country and its associations, and to moralize about them. Elevations in front of him from which one may legitimately anticipate more comprehensive vistas he refuses to consider, or, if constrained to do so, denies that what shall be seen from them will compare with what he sees and has seen.
His two most successful and commendable books are "La Lanterna di Diogene" ("Diogenes' Lantern") and "Xantippe." The first is a narrative of sentimental wandering in which he describes the commonplace world and the homely conflict of those whom he encounters, and in which he displays not only tolerance, but love of his fellow men. He is sometimes playful, more often ironical, but never disparaging or vituperative, and his prose is clear, limpid—sometimes, indeed, sparkling.
His "Xantippe" does not deal particularly with the virtues or infirmities of that renowned shrew. It recounts many incidents in the life, trial, and incarceration of Socrates which, while still redounding to his fame, are made to show by contrasting them with man's conduct and customs to-day the weaknesses, inconsistencies, and fallacies of many conventions of the twentieth century.
"Il Viaggio di un Povero Letterato" ("The Wanderings of a Poor Writer") shows the same simple-minded, charming vagabondage as "Diogenes' Lantern." It was published in 1912, when many readers did not share his distrust of Germany or hold with him in his forecasts. Many of his statements are to-day prophecies fulfilled.
It is not an imaginary man of letters who starts on a trip in obedience to a doctor's orders. It is Alfredo Panzini, exhausted from many labors. He goes wherever his fancy takes him, to Vicenza, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, and it is with the literary memories of these places that he is chiefly concerned. At Pisa it is Leopardi, Shelley, and Byron; at Vicenza, Fogazzaro; but at Bologna the memories become more personal. Here he sat at the feet of Carducci and learned to love and respect him; here his budding fancies first showed indications of blooming; here he first essayed amatory flights. He chances upon an old flame of his student days leading the old life in the old home, except that she had taken to writing poems and insists on having his opinion of them. His account of how he succeeded in meeting her wishes and still maintained his self-respect is a masterpiece of ingenuousness. The least thing suffices to start a train of thought and reflection or to decide his next tarrying-place. The volume ends with an interesting account of a visit to the birthplace of Pascoli, the socialist and idealist poet of the Romagna.
In his "Piccole Storie del Mondo Grande" he describes a pilgrimage to the country of Leopardi, and to Umbria. It is filled with little anecdotes of literary immortals who wandered there, and of references that are more significant to Italians than to foreigners, and through it all there is a strange, melancholy humor which is quite characteristic of Panzini.
The two novels which he has written show that he has the art of the story-teller in narration, sequence, and constructiveness, but they lack what the dramatists call action. "Io Cerco Moglie" ("I Seek a Wife") is his best work. Ginetto Sconer, who oozes prosperity and self-satisfaction, proceeds in a businesslike way to select a wife. He consults a pastry-cook and a doctor, to the great glee of the reader. He sees women in three categories: those who presume to disturb the dreams of anchorites and are still men's pleasure and despair; the aristocratic blue-stocking; and the domestic paragon. He had not contemplated marrying a blue-stocking or even aspiring to blue blood, but when he meets Countess Ghiselda he realizes that ambition expands with amatory awakement. Her freedom is handicapped by the attentions of a Futuristic poet whose intellectual productions and antics are amusing to every one save Cavaliere Sconer. He has peeps into spiritual and emotional vistas, but he yields finally to the flesh-box and woos the daughter of the woman who places a caramel in the mouth of her husband every morning before he goes to his office.
Signor Panzini knows the present-day Borghese, their thoughts, their virtues, their absurdities, and their charm, and he has depicted them in this book in the most interesting way.
Signor Panzini is not what is called a feminist fan, and he utilizes Ginetto Sconer, who is seeking the ideal mate, as a mouthpiece for his own convictions and sentiments concerning women. Italy is likely to be one of the last countries that will yield woman the freedom for emotional and intellectual development to which she is entitled, and when it comes, as it is bound to do, it will be despite the kindly and sentimental protests and ironies of such oppositionists as Signor Panzini.
"La Madonna di Mamà" ("The Madonna of Mamma") is, in addition to a splendid character study, a revelation of the disturbance caused in a gentle and meditative soul, his own, by the war. For, in reality, like so many Italian writers, Panzini is autobiographical in everything that he writes. In this book he has shown more insight of feminine psychology than in any of his other writings, though he is more successful with Donna Barberina, who represents modern Italian emotional repressions, than with the English governess, Miss Edith, who forecasts in a timid way what her countrywomen have obtained. Nevertheless, the strength of the story is the evolution of the moral and intellectual nature of Aquilino, to whom the reader is partial from the first page, and Count Hypolyte, who is "too good to be true." Aquilino is what Alfredo Panzini would have been had he encountered Conte Ippolito in his early youth. The reader who makes his acquaintance identifies him with the future glory of Italy, the type of youth who has no facilitation to success save ideals and integrity.
Many of his short stories—such as "Novelle d'Ambo i Sessi" ("Stories of Both Sexes"), "Le Chicche di Noretta" ("The Gewgaws of Little Nora")—have elicited great praise. To-day Panzini has the reputation of being one of the most gifted writers of Italy. He has come to his patrimony very slowly. Without being in the smallest way like George Meredith or Henry James, his writings have experienced a reception similar to theirs in so far as it has been said of them that they are hard to understand. It is difficult for a foreigner to give weight to this accusation. The reader who once gets a familiarity with them becomes an enthusiast. To him Panzini is one of the most readable of all Italian writers. To be sure, if one reads "Xantippe" it is to be expected that more or less will be said about Socrates and about the customs and habits of Athens of that day. The same is true of Diogenes and his lantern. It is also likely that when a man of literary training and taste wanders about the country, writing of his encounters, he will be likely to write of people and things, which, when others read them, will presuppose a certain culture, but the reader who has the misfortune to lack it need not hesitate to read the books of Signor Panzini. He will have a certain degree of it after he has read them and he will get possessed of it without effort. It is not at all unlikely that Signor Panzini writes his stories and novels in much the same way as he writes his dictionaries, namely, laboriously. His later writings have some indication of having been thrown off in a white heat of creative passion without preparation or conscious premeditation, but most of his books bear the hallmarks of careful planning, methodical execution, painstaking revision, and careful survey after completion that the writer may be sure that his creation exposed to the gaze and criticism of his fellow beings shall be as perfect as he can make it both from his own knowledge and from the knowledge of others assimilated and integrated by him.
The position which Panzini holds in the Italian world of letters to-day is the index of the protest against the writings of D'Annunzio. Panzini is sane, normal, human, gentle, kindly. He sees the facts of life as they are; he fears the ascendancy of materialism; his hopes are that man's evolutionary progress shall be spiritual, and he does not anticipate the advent of a few supermen who shall administer the affairs of the planet.
Alfredo Panzini may finally get a place in Italian letters comparable to that of Pascoli, and should his call to permanent happiness be delayed until he has achieved the days allotted by the psalmist he is likely to have the position in Italian letters which Joseph Conrad has in English letters to-day. This statement is not tantamount to an admission that it is to writers like Panzini that we are to look for new developments in imaginative literature. They will be found rather amongst a group of writers who are the very antithesis of him—the Futurists.
The successor to the literary fame of Giacosa is Luigi Pirandello, another schoolmaster. His earlier writings were cast as romances, but latterly he has confined himself largely to stage-pieces which reflect our moralities, satirize our conventions, and lampoon our hypocrisies. His diction is idiomatic and telling. It reminds of de Maupassant and of Bernard Shaw. Either he inherited an unusual capacity for verbal expression or he has cultivated it assiduously.
He is Panzini's junior by three years, having been born in Girgenti, June 28, 1867. His father was an exporter of sulphur, and his early life was spent amongst the simple, passionate, emotional, tradition-loving people of southern Sicily. Unlike his fellow Sicilians, Verga and Capuana, he has not utilized them to any considerable degree as the mouthpiece of his satiric comments and reflections on social life. He has taken the more sophisticated if less appealing people of northern and central Italy, and puts them in situations from which they extricate themselves or get themselves more hopelessly entangled for the reader's amusement or edification. In his last comedy, "L'uomo, la Bestia, e la Virtu" ("Man, Beast, and Virtue"), the scene is laid "in a city on the sea, it doesn't matter where," yet the characters are typically Sicilian.
After graduating from the University of Rome, Pirandello studied at Bonn and made some translations of Goethe's "Roman Elegies." Soon after he returned to Rome he published a book of verse and a book of short stories which made no particular stir. It was not until he published "Il fu Mattia Pascal" ("The Late Mattias Pascal") that he obtained any real success. Critics consider it still his best effort in the field of romance. From the standpoint of construction it deserves the commendation that it has received, but both the luck and the plans of the hero are too successful to be veristic, and the eventuations of his daily existence so far transcend ordinary experience that the reader feels the profound improbability of it all and loses interest. One pursues a novel that he may see the revelations of his own experiences or what he might wish his experiences to be under certain circumstances. When these circumstances get out of hand or when the events that transpire are so improbable, or so antipathic, that the reader cannot from his experience or imagination consider them likely or probable, then the novel does not interest him. Moreover, the Anglo-Saxon reader, unless he has lived in Italy, finds the flavor of many passages "too high"—certain experiences are related in unnecessary detail. Like a Cubist picture the charm and the beauty disappear in proportion with the nearness with which it is viewed and the closeness with which it is examined.
In reality, Pirandello did not get his stride until he began to concern himself with social and domestic problems, such as those depicted under the title of "Maschere Nude" ("Naked Masks"). In the play "Il Piacere dell' Onestà" ("The Pleasure of Honesty"), he pictures a new type of ménage à trois: the "unhappy" husband in love with the mature daughter of an aristocratic Philistine mother, who, when she must needs have a husband for conventional satisfaction, appeals to a facile male cousin who finds in a ne'er-do-well disciple of Descartes one who is willing to act the part vicariously, the apparent quid pro quo being the payment of his gambling debts. The hypocritical, bombastic lover; the sentimental mother with a "family complex"; the anguishing, passionate daughter; the suave, aristocratic male procurer, and finally he who was to be the victim of the machinations of these experienced persons, but who proves to be the victor because he plays the game in a way new to them—that is, straight—each in turn delivers herself or himself of sentiments and convictions that reveal the social hypocrisies and conventional lies which form the scaffolding and supports of what is called "every-day life," and give Pirandello an opportunity to display his irony, his sarcasm, and his humor. The art of Pirandello is a subtle play of paradoxes and analyses of motives which are second nature to persons called complex, the result of inherited and acquired artificialities. To get the full effect of these paradoxes and analyses the closest attention of the reader and of the auditor is required, and as a matter of fact Pirandello's comedies read much better than they play. Those who know maintain that he has little capacity for stage technic, that he knows nothing of the art of the stage. Hence his comedies have not had the success of Giacosa and of Bracco.
As human documents they depend upon their humor and veiled irony more than upon any other qualities. The humor, which seems to be obtained by simple means, is nearly always the result of an analysis so fine, so subtle, that sometimes one loses track of the premises on which it is founded. He compels the attention of his reader and he makes him think. Without such attention and thought the subtleties of Pirandello often escape the reader. Sometimes he labors a point almost to a tiresome degree, for instance, in the play "Così è se vi pare" ("It's so if You Think It's so"). The central point is the identity of a woman, which would seem, to the average individual, could be established readily beyond peradventure, but the point is—is there anything that can be established beyond peradventure? Is there any such thing as literal truth? Is not truth in reality synonymous with belief, individual or collective, or both? Discussion of questions of this sort may become very tiresome, but Pirandello has the art of mixing them up with human weaknesses and human virtues which makes the mixture not only palatable but appetizing. In his last comedies—"Il Giuoco delle Parti" ("Each One Plays His Own Rôle") and "Ma non è una Cosa Seria" ("But It isn't a Serious Matter")—he reverts to matrimonial tangles and attempts at disentanglement, depicting in the former the "temperamental" woman who gets what she wants, but who finds when she gets it she does not want it, and the long-suffering husband who is discerning enough to know how to handle her by conceding what she demands that he may get what he should have.
The man who usurps the conjugal privileges of the husband must also discharge his obligations. So it transpires when his temperamental wife has been insulted by some intoxicated gilded youths who by their conduct in her house provoke a scandal in the neighborhood, it is necessary for the de facto husband to challenge the most aggressive of them to a duel. During the excitement of the preparation the happy thought comes to him to have the vicarious husband fight the duel. He does so and is killed. The cause of all the trouble, the lady, is quite ignorant of this arrangement and thinks the de facto husband is battling with the most invincible sword of the city and that he will get killed, which is her desire. On returning to her house she finds her husband lunching as if nothing unusual had happened. The dramatic climax soon comes when she scornfully taunts him with having some one fight a duel for him and he replies: "Not for me but for you."
The play gives Pirandello the opportunity to display his knowledge of the sentiments and passions of the modern "high life" individual. Although they talk and act and express familiar sentiment in a way that makes one think they are real people, in reality they are unreal. They are taken from the author's imagination rather than from real life.
The second comedy in this volume is much more meritorious than the first. The author portrays characters who well might have existed in the flesh. Gasparina, who has put twenty-seven years of continency behind her and had achieved the direction of a second-class boarding-house, is derided and maltreated by her "guests." The most swagger of her boarders, who has been miraculously saved in a duel which followed a broken engagement, has an original idea. He will make a mock marriage with her and thus establish freedom from further love, annoyance, and duels. She sees in the proposal escape from the boarding-house. In the little villa of the country to which he sends her, under promise that she is not to make herself evident and where he is not to visit her, she blooms like a flower. In due course of time he falls in love again, and in order that he may accomplish matrimony he must free himself from Gasparina. This could be accomplished, as it never was consummated, but the messenger, an old aspirant to her favor, is on the point of having his aspirations realized when the husband in name only sees in Gasparina the woman he really loves. The curtain falls at an opportune moment before any hearts are broken or any blood is shed.
It is one of the plays of Pirandello that has had considerable success on the stage.
He is in reality a finished workman, an accomplished stylist, a happy colorist, and fecund withal. His most important of the stories are "Erma bifronte" ("Deceitful Hermes"), "La Vita Nuda" ("Naked Life"), "La Trappola" ("The Snare"), "E Domani ... lunedi" ("And To-morrow—Monday"), "Un Cavallo Nella Luna" ("A Horse in the Moon"), "Quand ero matto" ("When I was Crazy"), "Bianche e Nere" ("Blacks and Whites"); his romances, in addition to the ones already mentioned, are "I Vecchi e I Giovani" ("The Old and the Young"), and "Si Gira" ("One Turns"), the most recent and poorest of them.
It would be a mistake to convey the impression that Pirandello is universally admired in Italy. His stories and romances have an adventuresome quality that transcend ordinary experience, and his plays attempt to dispense with theatricalness and to substitute for it a subtle analysis of life with corrosive comment, both of which are very much resented.
It is strange that the Freudians have never explained the popularity of plays and novels concerned wholly or largely with sexual relations that infract convention and law as dominancy of the unconscious mind, a "wish fulfilment" of the waking state. It may be assumed that three-fourths of those who see and read them never have, and never contemplate (with their conscious minds) having, similar experiences. They would be scandalized were any one to assume that they approved such conduct. Perhaps the explanation of the hold such literature has upon the public is the same as the interest we have in the accounts of criminals seeking to evade apprehension. It is not that we sympathize in any way with the malefactor. We are lawmaking, law-abiding, law-upholding citizens, and we know he ought not to escape, and, naturally, we hope he will be caught. However, we cannot help thinking what we would do confronted with his predicament. We feel that in his place we could circumvent the sleuths and overcome what would be to the ordinary person insuperable obstacles. Thus we divert ourselves imagining what we would do if we were adulterous husbands, lecherous wives, lubricitous wooers, vicarious spouses, while assuring ourselves we are not and could never be, and plume ourselves that we could conduct ourselves even in nefariousness in such a way as to escape detection or, if detected, to disarm criticism. Meanwhile we enjoy being virtue-rewarded and vice-punished, for it is only upon the stage or in books that it happens, save in exceptional instances.
I never fully appreciated how hazardous it is to speak of the literature of a foreign country until I read an article in the Tribuna of Rome, signed Mario Vinciguerra, on Michaud's "Mystiques et Realistes Anglo-Saxons," which seeks to disparage the originality of some of our Transcendentalists, particularly Emerson, and to trace tendencies in our literature. I hope that I may be more successful in reviewing some of Italy's recent literature and in making an estimate of the merit of those who are responsible for it than Signor Vinciguerra, who says the two most potent romancers of living American writers are Jack London and Upton Sinclair. At least I shall not say that Guido da Verona and Salvator Gotta are the most potent romancers of Italy, and even I shall not go so far as to say that Luciano Zuccoli is. Any writer who would maintain that "Before the breaking out of the war the books that made the greatest stir in the United States were Upton Sinclair's 'A Captain of Industry,' 'The Jungle,' 'The Metropolis,' and Jack London's 'The Iron Heel,'" would not write himself so hopelessly ignorant of American literature as he would were he to claim that Harold Bell Wright and Rex Beach were our leading novelists. Such contention would show either unfamiliarity with our literature or dearth of understanding.
Previous to the war there was no such pouring out of literature in Italy as there was in England, and there were few writers of fiction whose output or content could be compared with that of Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Hugh Walpole, Mr. Gilbert Cannan, Mr. Compton Mackenzie, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, and others. D'Annunzio had long since ceased to write romances. Matilda Serao was in the twilight of her years and literary career. Grazia Deledda was displaying stereotypy and Zuccoli reploughed the familiar acre. French fiction was the favorite pabulum of the Italian who would kill time, dispel ennui, and combat dearth. Since then, however, there has been a great change and there is every indication that Italians will provide literature for their countrymen which will at least obviate the necessity of importation.
That it has not yet been accomplished, however, must be admitted in the beginning. The young writers are like birds trying their wings, aerial pilots striving for altitude tests. From their performances one is justified in hoping, indeed believing, that they will go far and soar high, but up to date Verga dominates the field of Italian fiction just as Hardy dominates the field of English fiction.
No reference to the literature of to-day should fail to take note of the fact that much of the most important and suggestive fiction does not appear in book form, or at least not for a long time, but in periodicals such as the monthlies and quarterlies, and also in such publications as Novella and Comoedia. No one can gain a familiarity with the hundred or more active writers of fiction in Italy who does not see and read such publications. They lend themselves readily to brevity and to that speeding up which the Futurists urge, and they tend to do away with the long-drawn-out descriptions which are the despair of the average reader.
Another feature of the newer literature which augurs well for it is that its theme is not wholly portrayal of the genesic instinct and the multiform perversions to which it has been subject by culture and which Christianity has been unable materially to influence. We realize how large the subject has bulked in the literature of every nation, but it is probably not beyond the truth to say that it has bulked larger in the modern literature of Italy even than of France.
It is natural that recent literature has begun to occupy itself with the conditions of the people and to display awareness of the new significance that they are giving to the words liberty and equality, and an attempt is being made to reconcile preaching and practising in their bearings on life here and hereafter.
The acceptable fiction of to-day will reflect in some measure the world thought, or it will soothe man's cravings for assurance of future life and strengthen his belief in it. It is idle to deny that the pitch of man's thought to-day is materialistic, though his unconscious mind is steeped in the mystic. Could we but teach future generations the pleasure-potency of the imagination, we should give them an asset that would enhance the usefulness and efficiency of their lives comparable to health. But for some years at least there has been a mistaken notion that the chief sources of pleasure are responding to the call of the instincts, the fortuitous offerings of chance, and awaiting the day when the vital sap will return from the branches of that universal tree upon which we are the leaves to the trunk, that the spirit may be restored to the Infinite. "Poor vaunt of life, indeed, were man but formed to feed on joy, to solely seek and find and feast."
Pedagogy has never concerned itself with our imaginative life. That is left to endowment and to chance, which sometimes shows itself in the shape of a literary critic. Fortunate, indeed, is the people or nation that breeds competent critics, it matters not what field of activity they cultivate, letters, science, or theology. Italy has had many such, but there is a greater dearth of them now than ever before. With the exception of Benedetto Croce there is perhaps no one of more than national reputation.
It is, perhaps, unwise to select from the considerable number of present-day literary critics the names of a few, but I hazard it. Emilio Cecchi, of the Rome Tribuna, is a versatile, scholarly writer, a thoughtful, judicious estimator of his fellow writers' works, and a critic who is not obsessed with the impulse that is supposed to dominate a certain type of Irishman, namely, to hit a head whenever he sees it. Giuseppe Prezzolini, who has been very intimate with the Florentine group headed by Papini and who has written a critical estimate of his writings and made a glowing statement of his personal charms, has a sympathy and admiration for the writers of what may be called the new school. That does not prevent him from being a keen observer, a logical thinker with a judicious capacity to weigh the evidence presented by his fellow writers in their claim for popularity and fame. He is a type of literary man new to Italy, a keen critic, a clear thinker, a master of literary expression who devotes much of his energy to his publishing-house and to La Voce. His writings are chiefly political and critical, "Il Sarto Spirituale" ("The Spiritual Tailor"), "L'Arte di Persuadere" ("The Art of Persuading"), "Cos' è il Modernismo?" ("What is Modernism?"). He has done more to introduce and bring forward the potent group of young writers than any one in Italy.
Lionello Fiumi, a young poet and critic, has published contributions that are noteworthy, but he has given no real capacity to analyze evidence, to sum it up, or to interpret it judiciously. His last effort to prove that Corrado Giovi is the poetic sun of Italy to-day was anæmic and feeble. The antithesis of him is Gherardo Marone, who thinks that Futurism and anarchism are synonymous, but the agnostic in religion sees no choice between Catholicism and Presbyterianism. He also maintains the extraordinary position that a great poet must needs be a great thinker. He is a very young man and his "Difesa di Dulcinea" ("Defense of Dulcinea") gives promise that when he gets in his stride he will go near the winning post.
Vincenzo Cardarelli is a literary critic whose writings are characterized by erudition, sympathy, understanding, and a sense of responsibility. He has published a volume of poems entitled "Prologhi" in line with the symbolist school of France, and especially Stephane Mallarmé.
Another critic who senses the trend of Italian literature and puts correct interpretation upon it is G. A. Borghese.
Two of the popular writers of fiction of to-day, Alfredo Panzini and Luigi Pirandello, I have discussed in a separate chapter.
Luciano Zuccoli is the most conspicuous and successful exponent in Italy of the type of fiction which was thrown upon the world for the first time now nearly two hundred years ago by Samuel Richardson, father of the novel of sentimental analysis. Though Zuccoli has a score of novels and romances to his credit, he would seem to be now at the height of his fecundity. The literary school in Italy which is the outgrowth of the Futuristic movement points the contemptuous finger at him and scoffs at his productions, but he has, nevertheless, a large following and is a writer of much skill. His success depends largely upon taking characters of the Borghesia and exposing them to the ordinary incidents of life, such as love, matrimony, war, politics, and then depicting what comes "naturally" to some of the victims: disillusionment tugging at the leash until it snaps the illicit splicing of it to another snapped leash (for there is no divorce in Italy); conflict between patriotism and pacifism, and between sentiment and idealism from a political, social, and personal point of view. He has got far away from the simpler delineations of his earlier books, such as "La Freccia nel Fianco" ("The Arrow in the Flank"), in which the love of a sentimental girl of eighteen for a boy of eight, the son of a most dissolute noble who tends to follow in his father's footsteps, is featured, and the meticulous discussion of the daily life of male and female sybarites, who have chosen the smooth and easy road to destruction as it travels through Italy's wickedest city, Milan, as in "Fortunato in Amore" and have come to keep what might be called better company, the company of those whose infraction of convention is conditioned more by environment than by determination.
"L'Amore non c'è più" ("There Is No More Love") and "Il Maleficio occulto" ("Witchcraft") are other popular romances.
Virgilio Brocchi is a similar writer, though his writings have never had similar popularity. His most meritorious books have been "Mite" and "Le Aquile." His later books, such as "Isola Sonante," show the author's progress in literary craftsmanship. His last book, "Secondo il Cuor mio" ("According to My Heart"), shows that he has had his ear to the ground and has noticed that the chariot labelled "Public Taste in Letters" is being driven on a new road. There is a note of idealism in the conduct of Gigi Leoni, the artist passionately devoted to his art, in love with Merine Dialli, proud and rich; he refuses to accept her suggestion that he relinquish his art and do something that will lead to material success. After she has made a failure in matrimony with an army officer and returns to the artist, Zuccoli succeeds in drawing with masterly strokes the portrait of a real hero, who, when he perishes later on the field of battle, excites unreservedly the admiration of his readers. In reality it is a book in which passion, of life or of the senses, as it sways an attractive man full of nobility and of dreams, is depicted in the traditional idealistic manner.
The Harold Bell Wright of Italian fiction is Guido Da Verona, and this does Mr. Wright an injustice, for he has never written pornographically and Signor Da Verona has rarely written otherwise. But he is Italy's best-seller. It is depressing to think that really great romances, like the "I Malavoglia" of Verga, stories such as Capuana's "Passa L'Amore," or Renato Fucini's, or even Panzini's "La Madonna di Mamà," should have a sale of only a few thousand copies, while books of the character of "Mimi Bluette," the flower of Signor Da Verona's garden, should go up toward the hundred-thousand mark. It is an index of the salaciousness of the average person, whoever he may be. Any review of Italy's recent literature must mention "The Woman Who Invented Love," "Life Begins To-morrow," if for no other purpose than to show that there is a kind of literature in every country which has a great popularity. In Belgium its clientele is found in the prurient of other countries; in France the "best people" do not read it or say they do not; in England the public censor prohibits it; and we have Mr. Comstock and his successors. "Madeline," which has recently cost its guiltless publisher a fine, is "soft stuff" compared with "Mimi Bluette," and I doubt if Mr. George Moore could revoke any memories of his dead life that could hold a candle to some of Signor Da Verona's actual life.
There is little to be said in favor of his books that could not be said for narcotic-taking, gambling-hells, and underworld tango palaces. They have a glamour about them and an aroma that appeals to the feeble-minded, the inherently decadent, and the ennuyed idle. It is a realism whose reality exists only in a mind made lubricitous by cupidity.
Marino Moretti is one of the young writers whose short stories and romances have found much favor. There is an atmosphere of triviality, of lightness, of inconsequentiality about his writings which is an important part of his art. In reality he is a finished technician and an artist with a wonderful mastery of perspective and of color, and a commendable capacity for expression. His particular charm is that he creates an atmosphere or a situation, but does not insist upon giving a chemical analysis or physical description of either. When he takes you to a drawing-room or to the bathing-beach at the fashionable hour he does not insist on presenting you to every one or giving you a detailed history of their lives and particularly of their amatory tidal waves. Although he seems to give his clientele soft food, he does not insist on spoon-feeding them. In the guise of pap he gives them often thought-making pabulum.
Some of his popular books are "Il Sole del Sabato" ("Saturday's Sun"), "Guenda," "La Voce di Dio" ("The Voice of God"), and "Adamo ed Eva."
Antonio Beltramelli is another writer who has studied literary form to great purpose and with it he combines imaginative gifts of an exceptional order. His earlier books, short stories entitled "Anna Perena" and "I Primogeniti" ("First-born Sons"), were well received. He has recently come back to similar presentations in "La Vigna Vendemmiata" ("The Harvested Vineyard"), which while not revealing the spiritual growth which his admirers expected from him, shows him, nevertheless, to be a man of parts. His chief defect is his ignorance of behavioristic psychology which is nowhere better shown than in this collection of short stories, "La Madre," for instance. Moreover, it is an ambitious writer who makes a story of these unromantic facts; a stupid man with some of the characteristics of the ox and the rat is married to a gross, slovenly creature who deceives him. A friendly neighbor opens his eyes and he finds her and her paramour in the brake and cane around the vineyard. On his way thence he encounters the parish priest and asks him if one would be justified in meting out personal punishment to such transgressors. "Perhaps yes, perhaps no" is the reply. When he comes upon the guilty couple he kills the man with the blow of a stick, then falls back upon the priest's words for justification.