"Gli Uomini Rossi" ("The Red Men") is his best-known romance. He has read and still reads Cervantes and Rabelais. Had he the gift of artistic presentation he might become a great novelist, but until now he has confounded embellishment with natural beauty.

Among the fiction that has appeared in Italy during the past year a few books call for mention, not because of their intrinsic merit but because it is indicative of the change that is going on in the minds of the common people which reflects particularly the thought now being given to social and psychological questions.

The American reader of Italian fiction cannot fail to be impressed with the poverty of subject-matter which it displays. This is explained partly by the fact that it is sometimes biographical and very often autobiographical—moreover, the family and social and religious customs of Italy do not make for novelty or variety in individual life. The zone in which all the details of existence is predetermined by convention extends much farther with them both up and down the social scale than with us. If man is independent of it to some extent woman is not, and since there is no object in chronicling the obvious, popular Italian fiction is apt to deal with excursions of man beyond his own circle and class. Another thing that has to be kept in mind is the position of women. The important woman in the life of the majority of Italians is the mother, not the wife. She is on terms of equality with her son and she retains much of the authority of the Roman matron in her children's married life. This it need scarcely be said is changing with the eternal flux of things.

Italy of to-day is a very new country. Whenever we as a nation do something which the Italians consider gauche or raw, and they are obliged to dislocate an inherent politeness by mention of it, they excuse us because we are so young. So one excuses an infant for some verbal or conductual infraction. In reality we are about a century older than Italy of to-day, and we have spent that time developing a "manner" that reflects our protracted habituation to freedom. That it is sometimes masked by arrogance and self-satisfaction is to be regretted. Hence our indifference to convention which is often painful to the foreigner. It is a mistake to think that it is only the upper classes of Italy who are beholden to unwritten convention and customs. In truth, subscription to them is more mandatory amongst the Borghesia and Il Popolo. With the gradual dissemination and acceptation of the doctrines of socialism, the equal rights of women, and the widening sphere of culture through universal education, many of the shackling conventions of to-day will disappear. The younger workers are blazing the way. Of those who herald this change Mario Mariani must be heeded. In "La Casa dell' Uomo" ("The House of Man"), he makes a satiric onslaught against the amorous, avid of money and of pleasure, who are ready to sacrifice every basic virtue in order to obtain them. After presenting a picture of the present-day cages of human beings he tells his story through the mouth and diary of the janitress of a modern apartment-house, who being deprived by time of her pulchritude and sensuous appeal, has been obliged to forego her chosen profession, that of Mrs. Warren, and to gain her livelihood in the sweat of her brow. She has visions of a day when she can no longer even do that, and yet must needs have food, raiment, and shelter; so she keeps a diary which sets forth the flagrancies of the tenants, men, women, and children. She does not admit that the entries are the wythes of blackmail. She salves such conscience as has survived her life of sin by assuring herself that the entries in the book are to assuage literary growing pains. When Signor Mariani obtained the documents by fabrication or by stealth he found himself in possession of the "characters" of many individuals, young and old, who present a strange similarity to those we encounter in daily life. He has seen fit to publish them without saying whether it was art or bread that was the incentive, and they constitute a serious charge against society. The wonder is that if such things exist the social fabric conserves the appearance of well-being. In truth, life is not a mask behind which the wearer laughs, if this diary is to be believed. It is in reality a tragedy made up of a tissue of hypocrisies, banalities, sordid commonplaces, inimical to joy, subversive of pleasure, and destructive of happiness.

It is obvious that de Maupassant is the author's model. Despite a certain vivacity of form, his tales are in substance very old-fashioned and his characters are so sordid and sensual that their actions and their fate from an artistic point of view fail to interest.

In "Smorfia dell' anima" ("Grimaces of the Soul"), the central theme is that all people who defy accepted morals are much more honest and happy than those who hypocritically accept convention but do not conform to the moral laws which underlie them. There is a certain amount of truth in this view, but it will not stand too much insistence.

Though Signor Mariani's books are not entitled to laudation, they, with his commentual writing, encourage us to await the advent of his full powers with a sincere belief that he will arrive in Italian letters.

Gino Rocca is a young Milanese writer who has returned from the war with ideas and capacity to express them. His novel "L'Uragano" is what is popularly called powerful. It is the same old theme, love and adultery, but it introduces what may be called new reactions. It is a story of a young man who, "temperamentally unfit" to live in the refined and shut-in atmosphere of his parental home, goes to Milan and does successfully newspaper work while giving himself copiously to what is called a life of sin. The picture of this life is one with which readers of modern French fiction are familiar. Through the mediation of a sympathetic aunt he encounters a lady burdened with an unworthy husband, who makes such appeal to him that he abandons the gaming-table and the underworld, but in such a way as to leave the impression that it would have been only temporary had not the call to arms put them beyond his reach. In the army and in the hospital, while idealizing his innamorata he has experiences which show him the perfidy of the feminine human heart. When he returns to Milan he realizes that even with his enriched experience he is not yet the man who understands women, for he has yet to learn of the inconstancy of her to whom he attributed all the virtues. This discovery gives the writer an opportunity to depict a profound emotional storm from which the novel gets its name and from which the hero emerges a better man.

There is nothing noteworthy in the book except its character delineation. It is a novel in so far as it is an exact and complete reproduction of social surroundings or environment, but photographs are often spoiled by being colored. It shows the writer to have a mastery of literary technic and an unusual capacity for expression.

Another writer who has shown himself a master of verbal structure and adept in the delineation of character, a student of psychological reactions and facile artist of the environment in which they are displayed, is Raffaele Calzini. His first short stories, "La Vedova Scaltra" ("The Wary Widow"), published seven or eight years ago, were hailed by some critics as the work of a writer of potential distinction. They are coloristic or impressionistic stories. Although he has not yet given proof that he will earn enduring fame, he is nevertheless one of the most promising of the younger writers, and, although he is not prolific, each succeeding publication has added to his fame. His last contribution is a comedy entitled "Le Fedeltà" ("Fidelity").

I could not have better illustrations of the rôle played by autobiography in modern fiction than two recent novels—one by Michele Sapanaro, "Peccato" or "Six Months of Rustic Life"; the other by Frederigo Tozzi, "Con gli Occhi Chiusi" ("With Closed Eyes"). The first is a fresh, ingenuous book with a vein of romanticism which does not run into great effusion or great amativeness, in which is depicted the atmosphere, environment, and inhabitants of a small community in southern Italy, whither the writer has gone to visit his peasant brother and to recover from some of the wounds inflicted upon him in transformation from peasant to "gentleman." It is undoubtedly an elaborated, embellished chapter of the author's life.

That "With Closed Eyes," a novel of provincial and peasant life in Tuscany, is wholly autobiographical, we have the testimony of a fellow Tuscan who says of Signor Tozzi that he first met him when he was a waiter in his father's tavern. Lazy, slothful, unkempt, and of coarse appearance, he had a passion for reading Angiolieri and Verlaine. He was radical, socially and politically. After a colorless, misspent youth beyond authority, parental or communal, he began newspaper work, the stepping-stones of so many Italian writers of to-day. The discipline of military life and the environment of Rome effected a change in his outward appearance, and the composition of his book, "Bestie" ("Beasts"), which the church put on the Index, helped him spiritually. "With Closed Eyes" is a narrative of his life, sordid, ugly, commonplace, revealing, however, a gradual spiritual uplift and refinement. It was not until the publication of "Tre Croci" that he was much discussed. Competent critics such as Signor Borghese think that Italy's most promising literary light was extinguished when Frederigo Tozzi died in Rome, in March, 1920. His literary output was not great for a man who had lived thirty-eight years, but it can truthfully be said that each succeeding volume from his pen showed that he was likely one day to be Verga's successor in the literary primacy of Italy. His last romance, "Il Podere," ("The Farm,") has not yet appeared in book form.

One cannot always judge from first performances the potentialities of a writer. A few years ago Rosso di San Secondo, a young Sicilian, published "Io Commemoro Loletta" ("I Commemorate Loletta"), a series of short stories which in substance and in workmanship showed not only no talent but no promise of talent. In reality they seemed to show an absence of artistic capacity, architectural ability, and literary taste. A year later "La Bella Addormentata" ("The Sleeping Beauty"), a coloristic, mystic drama, a strange mixture of Plotinus and Dionysius, revealed real talent.

The Sleeping Beauty, of infantile mind and facial pulchritude, formerly a servant, yielded to the advances of a notary, the nephew of a senile, implacable shrew, whose miserly savings he and his sister hoped to inherit. After a few secure trips on the sliding-board of sensual indulgence, the Sleeping Beauty shot to the bottom of the pit and became the travelling harlot of a caravan which went from one country fair to another. The more frequently she yielded the body the greater became her spiritual detachment, until finally she lived in a world of unreality. Becoming pregnant, the spiritual flame gradually lighted up in her, and finally blazed under the ardent fanning of a new type of Lothario, Nero of the Sulphur Mines, half knight, half jail-bird, but withal a romantic and seductive figure. His flair for her was wholly spiritual. Not only did he encourage her to renounce her life, but he insisted that she return to the house of the notary. They go there and she charges him with her interesting condition, even though three years have elapsed. Water doesn't flow in the brook of the valley if there is no spring higher up. The aunt who has sought in vain the opportunity to crush the cringing hypocrite whose outward life had seemingly been one of virtue and rigorous conventionalism, sees it now. She compels him to marry the Sleeping Beauty. He becomes the butt of the taunts and derisions of the community, juvenile and adult, especially after the child is born. The strain is too much for him and he hangs himself when he realizes that the dying aunt has left her money to the child of another and to the church.

From the moment the Sleeping Beauty felt a new life within her a spiritual torch was lit in her soul, which illuminated the abyss into which she had fallen to such purpose that she found her way out, with the helping hand which Nero held out to her. Continuing to burn during her gestation and delivery, it conditioned her spiritual resurrection and the moral rehabilitation of Nero. The impression left in the mind of the reader is that they live together happily forever after, the summum bonum of earthly existence, because of the happiness that flows from it and because it insures eternal repose in Paradise. Although the play was received with groans and howls and shrieks of depreciation when it was first given in Rome, nevertheless some of the eternal verities are accentuated and carried home by Nero of the Mines and by the Sleeping Beauty.

I find greater difficulty in writing of recent Italian poetry than of fiction. In the first place, I have not read it so extensively, and, in the second, nearly every writer of fiction writes poetry as well. Some of the young poets are discussed in the chapter on Futurists in literature. Here I shall mention one or two others. Guido Gozzano, who recently died, in his twenty-eighth year, was a prolific writer of verse. It is confidently claimed by some critics that he earned the distinction of being called Italy's most representative poet, the only one since Pascoli and D'Annunzio who made a new vibration to the poetic lyre and stamped verse with an individual conception which poetasters have more or less accepted. But he suffered from hyperfecundity, and many of his intellectual children are anæmic and rachitic. Even though they are endowed with some feature of beauty their vitality is so slight that no one wants to adopt them, and their parent being busy with the creation of others, neglects them after having given them one passably decent suit of clothes in the shape of book-form publications, so they die.

Guido Gozzano was a melancholy figure. From life he appeared to have got only sadness. At twenty-five years it had deluged his soul. His true infelicity was then of not being able even to be sad. Scarcely had he entered youth before he felt old. He had no companions, he was often ill; nothing appealed to him, not even poetry. Literary life resembled death. He forsook the city for the country, and the novelty of it for a while diverted him. But it was not for long. He vacillated between doing nothing and dreaming, between contemplating the emptiness of a grotesque reality and the nostalgia of an unreal life, felt but not seen. He was never emotional, never exalted, never blasphemous. Nevertheless, he would seem to have written incessantly.

"Verso la Cuna del Mondo" ("Toward the Cradle of the World") consists of the impressions of a voyage in India made in 1912 and 1913. "I Colloqui" is a book of fables for children. In the "L'Altare del Passato" ("The Altars of the Past") Gozzano takes as a rhythm the cry for the things that were; the past arises anew in the intimacy of his feelings to tempt him and to inspire him. It is the generous wine that he hopes will intoxicate him and fill him with joy. Its effects are transitory.

His last book, "L'Ultima Traccia" ("The Last Traces"), did not materially enhance his reputation as a story-teller. The story called "The Eyes of the Soul" is undoubtedly the best. A beautiful girl has to live her betrothed days alone; her fiancé goes to the war. She contracts smallpox, which disfigures her. When she is called to his bedside in the hospital where he is lying wounded, perhaps dying, she is concerned what his feelings will be when he sees her face. When she gets there he is not mortally injured, he is blind.

Francesco Chiesa has already differentiated himself from the writing herd and his "Viali d'Oro" has had great popularity with the younger generation of his country. His style, imagery, and masterful synthesis is best seen in the volume entitled "Istorie e Favole," a collection of short stories.

Another young Italian writer who is likely to come to the fore is Piero Jahier. He wrote the best war story, "Con mi e con gli Alpini." "Ragazzo," a recent publication, shows him in an entirely different light.

Alfredo Bacceli was a young man of great promise in letters. His "Verso la Morte" ("Toward Death"), showed clear vision, deep feeling, and mastery of form.

Some of the most conspicuous of the present-day poets of Italy are Marradi, Pastonchi, Rapisardi, Siciliani, and Sindici. The first two are lyric poets, the last two masters of form in addition.

Luigi Siciliani, who became a member of Parliament in the last elections, is the one of this group who is most likely to be remembered. His "Canti perfetti," translations from the Greek, Latin, Portuguese, and English, published in 1910, showed him to be not only a student but a writer possessed of exquisite literary craftsmanship. He has written novels, criticisms, anthologies, but the volume by which he is best known is "Poesie per ridere," published in 1909.

Francesco Meriano, one of the group of young literary Italians that are known through the Brigata of Bologna, and who published some years ago a volume of Futuristic poetry entitled "Equatore Notturno," is the author of a volume containing his lyric compositions of the past four years, entitled "Croci di legno" ("Wooden Crosses"), which has been very well received by the critics.

In Marino Moretti's "Poesie" we encounter things which make us think of the great poets—little perfections that much recent poetry almost no longer knows, lucidity, subtle vision and modesty. If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity some of these verses are real poetry.

Alfredo de Bosis, translator of Shelley's Cenci and advocate of Walt Whitman, is the author of many lyrical poems, some of which have been highly praised.

The three most prolific writers for the stage of yesterday in Italy are Roberto Bracco, Sem Benelli, and Dario Niccodemi. They have all had much success outside of their own country, and their names are well known to readers and theatre-goers of our own country. They are now in the fulness of their mature years, but with the exception of the latter none has given evidence in recent productions of having sensed the change that has taken place in the likings of the theatre-going public in Italy.

Signor Bracco, a Neapolitan approaching sixty years of age, has for the past twenty years worn gracefully the mantle of Giacosa. His works have been published in ten fat volumes averaging three plays to a volume, mostly comedies. Of these the most important are "L'Infedele" ("The Unfaithful Woman"), and "Il Trionfo" ("The Triumph"), both published in 1895. The best of his dramas are "Tragedie dell' Anima" ("The Tragedies of the Soul") and "La Piccola Fonte" ("The Little Spring"), which becomes the fount of life in inspiration for those with whom the heroine comes in contact. The best of his tragedies is "Sperduti nel Buio" ("Lost in the Darkness"). This brief enumeration gives no idea of the versatility of Signor Bracco, who in reality has depicted in his twoscore plays the ravages of carnal love in peasant and prince, in maid and in mistress, in priest and professor, in the underworld and in the overworld, in the cradle and in the grave.

Had the display of love and the passions that flow from it any confines, they would encompass Signor Bracco's imagination. Although denied what is called a scholastic education, he has studied science and philosophy, literature and art, but always with one object in view: to learn what human beings think and do when swayed by sexual passion. Not that anything that he has written can be construed as exalting it or as licensing it. On the contrary, the moral of the majority of his plays is that continence, like virtue, is its own reward. Although Signor Bracco would be the last to admit that he has not had an uplift motive in his writings, it is difficult to discover it. Nor does he point the way that will lead to avoidance of the suffering that flows, apparently with so much directness, from social convention, from privilege, and from the almost mediæval position of women in certain parts of Italy to-day. He is a realist of realists in fiction, but he is like a physician who is content to diagnose disease and leave to others its prevention and its cure.

A writer who dyes his products in Bracco's vat, then for contrast colors them with Sardou and Dumas, which, exposed for sale in the market-place, find avid purchasers and bring high prices, is Dario Niccodemi, whose comedies, especially "Scampolo" ("The Remnant") and "L'Ombra" ("The Shadow"), have had great success. In his last two books, "Il Titano" ("The Titan") and "Prete Pero" ("Priest Pero"), he gives evidence that he is keenly discerning of the new social consciousness that has developed in Italy apparently as the result of the war. "Prete Pero," while depicting the subterfuges of the church to accomplish its ends and the arguments that it uses to convince that the ends justify the means, portrays one of those simple, faithful, honest, transparent souls, in the shape of Father Bragio, who have been the pillars of the Roman church which no Samson has ever been able to tear down. "I wrote 'Prete Pero,'" he says, "as a journalist writes a series of articles or as a speaker makes a series of conferences—for a general idea; but I have had two, the first æsthetic, to sustain the principle that in Italy, as in France and in England, and, indeed, in every country agonized by this terrible war, one might make and make acceptably war comedies; second, moral, to prove that it is permitted to say from the stage in verse or in prose that which in the past four years has been said in journals, in speeches, in conferences, in parliament and in committees, which is: in the disorder of the social organization produced by the phenomena of war there have been sublime heroes and brazen-faced cheats and swindlers." "Prete Pero" showed that Signor Niccodemi has a nose for the favorite perfume of the modern reader, just as his "L'Ombra" showed it when he afflicted his heroine with hysterical paralysis and then cured her by the method which Freud originally called the cathartic method. Dario Niccodemi has not added materially to the dignity of Italian letters, but he has amused and diverted his countrymen and ourselves, and for that we are grateful.

Sem Benelli, who has recently had political life thrust upon him is, in common with many literary Jews in Italy, inclined to give himself a certain mystery of origin by concealing his antecedents. In reality he was born in 1877. Not only is he well known in Italy but in this country, where one of his early plays, "La Cena delle Beffe" ("The Supper of the Jests"), has had great success. He began his literary career as a journalist on a Florentine review, Marzocco. His first play was published when he was twenty-five years old. Although "La Tignola" ("The Moth") showed unusual quality of construction and contrasted with great force the artistic temperament with the world of the big business, it was not until "La Cena delle Beffe" that he arrived.

His great forte is to be able to put melodrama of the most lurid kind into verse, while depicting the lives and customs of the aristocracy of the Renaissance, whose standard of morals and canons of conduct were so unlike those of to-day. His heroes are always in search of revenge, his women of adventure. In his "Le Nozze dei Centauri" ("The Marriage of the Centaurs") he widens the field of his activity to display the conflict of christian and barbarian, but again it is the same thing, adventure and revenge. He does not trouble to be historically exact. It does not matter to him whether his characters are true to life so long as they are true to his conception of revengefulness. To accomplish his purpose he often strikes a note that reminds of his ancestors of the Old Testament.

The leader of all the younger Italian writers in drama and tragedy is Luigi Ercole Morselli, born at Pesaro in 1883. The commission nominated by the Ministry of Instruction to decide the most meritorious dramatic production of 1918 awarded the prize of six thousand lire to him. As a youth he studied medicine and later letters in Florence, but he soon deserted them and wandered in America and Africa. His first success, a pagan theme entitled "Orione," was recognized by competent critics to have originality and unusual dramatic qualities, but he was by way of being forgotten when nearly ten years later, 1919, a mystic drama based upon mythology, entitled "Glauco," appeared. It was produced in Rome and was greeted with every manifestation of approval. In reality it had an astonishing but merited success. Glauco, the amorous fisherman, in order to obtain his Scilla, braves the sea and seeks renown and riches. But, alas for human frailties, he falls under the enchantment of Calypso. When he returns to his native shore to claim his best-beloved he learns of the heart-breaking events that have transpired during his absence. Neither he nor Scilla can tolerate constant reminder of them and they disappear in the deep waves after one of the most remarkable farewells in modern literature.

Morselli does not follow either the mythological stories or their recent reconstruction very closely. On the contrary he makes the events of the legends harmonize with or conform to the laws that govern modern amatoriousness. His heroes react in their love and hate, ambition, realizations, in the same way as the people of to-day. His world is a mythological world, but it is scenery in which we live or visit, and it is peopled by men and women who love, hate, envy, portray, succor, and defend, quite like the modern world.

He has recently published two new dramas entitled "Belfagor" and "Dafni e Cloe." His fiction is a volume of fanciful tales called "Favole per i Re d'Oggi" ("Fables for the Kings of To-day"), and short stories which have appeared in magazines and journals.

Another young writer for the stage is Nino Berrini. The success of "Il Beffardo" ("The Jester") was so great that one may confidently look forward to his career without fear of disappointment.

Other successes in the theatrical world of 1919 in Italy were "La Vena d'Oro" ("The Vein of Gold"), of Zorzi, and in much lesser degree "La nostra Ricchezza" of Gotta.

The author of the latter is a man of thirty-three years who returned from the war with new ideas regarding the rights of the people, liberty, or whatever one calls that which underlies the present social unrest. He has written many short stories, several romances, of which "Ragnatele" ("Cobwebs"), "Il Figlio Inquieto" ("The Restless Son") and "La più Bella Donna del Mondo" ("The Most Beautiful Woman in the World") are the most important.

Not only is he a man of ideas, but he has disciplined himself to a chaste and virile way of expressing them. In "Our Riches" he has given an admirable picture of the honest, high-principled aristocrat-farmer of his native territory Ivrea, who has the same feeling for his acres that the ideal patriot has for his country: reverence and love, and a paternal interest in the welfare of those who gain their livelihood in serving him. In contrast with him is his grandson, who has the same reverence and affection for the ancestral home and acres but who sees life, its entailments and its privileges, in an entirely different light, who is a socialist in the correct sense of the term. Then he draws with great distinctness the daughter of the former and the mother of the latter, who is confronted with the conflict of choosing between her son, father, and husband, the latter a profiteering shark in the world of affairs. The weakness of the play is the author's failure or unwillingness to define his own state of mind concerning property rights and property distribution, or to define the relationship that should exist between product and producer, capital and labor.

Were I obliged to characterize the fictional output of Italy during the past few years, I should say that it was imaginatively sterile and emotionally fecund. Whereas much of it displays technical efficiency in form, construction, and finish, it lacks originality and does not reveal comprehensive imaginativeness, which the renowned fiction of every country has always had and must continue to have. It must be said, however, that it portrays human nature: that is, thoughts and emotional reactions incited and elicited by new conditions and new aspirations in such a way as to pique the reader's curiosity and sustain his interest.

The Italian novelists of to-day are not story-tellers; they are incident-relaters, narrators of personal experiences, observers armed with cameras.

CHAPTER VIII
FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Often I find myself thinking of the justification of autobiographical writing in fiction. The modern Italian writer is devoted to it. D'Annunzio set the example a generation ago and carried it to such a point that he outraged all sense of decency. So long as he confined himself to revelation of his own alleged amatory potency and mastery of the arts of love, even though he trampled upon sacred ideals, the public tolerated it. When he strained the sensualities of well-known and beloved notabilities through the percolators of his perverse imagination they sickened of him and denounced him. It is an exquisite form of self-appreciation—the belief that the commonplace events, deliberate thoughts, and vagrant fancies of an individual who has in no way distinguished himself will divert and instruct others, and that they are worthy of record. The fact that such writings are bought is the justification they allege. But the public is like the editor of a magazine. He has to read reams of trash to find one worthy and acceptable contribution. The purpose of fiction may be manifold, but it is read chiefly for distraction and diversion. The critic and interpreter read it to get the temper of the public mind and the trend of its projection, but the purchaser of it reads it to get surcease of the woes of life, whether they be the ruts worn by operating the daily treadmill or the despondencies thrust upon him by circumstances more inexorable than the tigers of Hyrcania. It is not likely that the occurrences in the life of another commonplace individual even though they are pieced with fiction will suffice to provide this. Therefore those who turn to the narration of the lives of others in which there have been stirring events, picturesque phases, and romantic incidents are likely to have greater success. Whether it is a legitimate procedure is another question. It is a matter of taste. It was as justifiable for Mr. Somerset Maugham to portray Paul Gauguin in "The Moon and Sixpence" as it was for Mr. Morley Roberts to describe George Gissing in "The Private Life of Henry Maitland," and even more so, for the latter had revealed himself adequately in his books. Nothing was to be gained by raking up a past that led through prison any more than the prison days of O. Henry is an asset of immortality. Sometimes such writings have a meritoriousness apart from their literary qualities. The "Green Carnation" did much to inform Britishers how prevalent and pernicious was the vice which its prototype was afterward locked in Reading Gaol for practising and apotheosizing. To take a man whose fame has mounted steadily since his death and make a monster of him is a hazardous and, many will think, an iniquitous thing to do, even though the individual during his lifetime was unmoral and immoral. This is what Mr. Somerset Maugham has done for Paul Gauguin, master of the Pont Aven school of painting; dislocater of impressionism and neo-impressionism; liberator of art from stereotyped, slavish copyists of nature; apostle of intellectualism and emotionalism versus æstheticism, and from it he has created Charles Strickland, victim of a strange disease resulting in dissociation of personality. The critics tell us "The Moon and Sixpence" is a "great" book. From the standpoint of literary construction it may be entitled to such designation. From the standpoint of one who desires in fiction some verisimilitude of life as it is, or as it should be if it were ideal, it is disgusting and nauseous, atavistic in implication, primitive in delineation, bestial in its suggestion, and it tends to undermine faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature. It is radicalism in realism carried to the nth degree.

A middle-class Englishman of unknown antecedents, of commonplace somatic and intellectual possessions, of emotional barrenness and shut-in personality, marries, procreates, and serves—on the London Stock Exchange, after the manner of his kind, until he is forty. If artistic impulses had peeped from his unconscious mind to his conscious he had not betrayed them. Then, when constructive incubal activity had passed its height, he becomes big with the idea that his unsightly hulk harbors the soul of an artist. He forsakes his family without warning and without making the smallest provision for their maintenance or welfare, goes to Paris to study art, to scorn convention and decency, and to treat mankind with contumely. He knows no French, and gradually his English vocabulary shrinks to "You are a damn fool" when a man makes proffer of service or supper, and "Tell her to go to hell" if the offer of self or succor comes from a woman. When he writes, however, his mental elaborations encompass the degree that permits him to pen this chaste message: "God damn my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she was in hell."

Like all victims of dementia præcox, when the disorder conditions bizarre conduct for the first time in mid-maturity, he becomes profoundly egocentric, neglectful of his appearance and of his person, and callously insensitive to the feelings and rights of others. As the components of personality dissociate the god disappears, the beast remains, puissant and uncontrollable when under the dominion of primeval appetites or instincts. He has no pride to swallow when he feeds from the hand that still stings from slapping him, no more than does the lion who devours the meat thrust into his cage on the prong that a moment before prodded and wounded him.

"Haven't you been in love since you came to Paris?" is Mr. Maugham's euphemistic question, in his effort to find out for Mrs. Strickland if her husband has been faithful to his marriage vows. After noting Strickland's "slow smile starting and sometimes ending in the eyes, which was very sensual, neither cruel nor kindly, but suggested rather the inhuman glee of the Satyr," he got this answer: "I haven't got time for that sort of nonsense. Life isn't long enough for love and art." This is not what Michaelangelo said to Vittoria Colonna. It is what Tom Cat says when not in the throes of concupiscency. Then Mr. Maugham gives a new verbal dress to the devil, who was sure when ill he would like to be a monk, but who in good health didn't fancy monastic life. "You know that all the time your feet have been walking in the mud. And you want to roll yourself in it, and you find some woman, coarse and low and vulgar, some beastly creature in whom all the horror of sex is blatant, and you fall upon her like a wild animal. You drink till you're blind with rage."

Poor Strickland, in the throes of mental dissolution, obsessed, enmeshed in stereotypy, is still capable of sufficient mental reaction to realize that "You are a damn fool" or "Go to hell" was not an appropriate rejoinder or comment to such a speech, so "He stared at me without the slightest movement. I held his eyes with mine. I spoke very closely." "When it's over you feel so extraordinarily pure; you feel like a disembodied spirit, immaterial, and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing; and you feel an intimate communion with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the iridescence of the river. You feel like God." The antivivisectionists should get after Doctor Maugham. It is cruelty to humans to hold unfortunate Strickland with hypnotic eye, and then thrust a record of experience so obviously personal upon him—or was it only a recollection of some published experiences of George Sand and Alfred de Musset—garnered from those days when he "idled on the quays, fingering a second-hand book that I never meant to buy," after he settled down in Paris and began to write a play?

Every Johnson has his Boswell, though he may be mute, unrecording, and sterile, and every sadist has his masochist. The young Dutchman, Vincent Van Gogh, a constitutional psychopath, whose mental aberrations took him into spiritual exhortation, social reformation, and finally "art," often tried to kill Gauguin. When the latter showed himself versed in mayhem Van Gogh made his bed, lit his pipe, wrapped himself in serenity and shot himself in the abdomen, as lunatics often do. Not so Dick Stroeve, Strickland's fidus Achates. He worshipped Strickland, who reviled him, kicked him, spat upon him; Stroeve, who naïvely asks, "Have I ever been mistaken?" in his estimate of artists, knew that Strickland was a great artist, greater than Manet or Corot, more puissant than El Greco or Cézanne, and that he had been sent to complete the cycle which Delacroix and Turner ushered in. Stroeve, a passive, asexual creature, had married a temperamental English governess in Rome, where he had earned the soubriquet of "le Maître de la Boîte à Chocolats" after she had had a disastrous experience with the son of an Italian prince whose children she had been hired to instruct.

When Strickland falls desperately ill from the combined effects of insufficient food, touting for prurient Anglicans, and translating the advertisements of French patent medicines that "restore" Doctor Maugham's countrymen to such a degree that they may go to Paris with pleasurable anticipation, Stroeve takes him to his house, despite the strenuous opposition and pathetic protests of Mrs. Stroeve, whose previous fleeting contacts with Strickland echoed the call of the wild in her and presaged disaster. From the moment he arrived the fat was in the fire. No affinities are so difficult to keep from blending as sex affinities, facetiously called soul affinities by the newspapers. Strickland's spark was fanned lovingly into glow by Stroeve, and when it flamed he threw Stroeve out of his house, possessed complaisant Mrs. Stroeve violently, and then put her on canvas, nude, "one arm beneath her head and the other along her body, one knee raised, the other leg stretched out." After nature's cataclysm had spent itself, Mrs. Stroeve committed suicide in approved feminine fashion by taking a corroding acid, without condoning her husband's offense—that of being virtuous. When she died Stroeve, a true masochist, looked up Strickland, forgave him, invited him to go with him to Holland, because "we both loved Blanche. There would have been room for him in my mother's house. The company of poor, simple people would have done his soul a great good." But Strickland, becoming for the moment verbally more expansive, replied: "I have other fish to fry." When Mr. Maugham spoke to him about Stroeve's visit he said: "I thought it damned silly and sentimental."

The author doesn't attempt a synopsis of the mental process that took Strickland to Tahiti, via Marseilles, though he depicts experiences that parallel those of Gauguin. Instead he animadverts on love and the sexual appetite to such purpose as to reveal that he is not expert in biology, psychology, or art. "For men love is an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid upon it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life." But what about the emphasis laid upon it by countless thousands who find in it a quality of that ennobling spiritual peace called faith, and which will be their reward when they repose in Abraham's bosom and live forever with God in paradise? "As lovers the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times." And the difference between male and female animals is that the female of the species permits contact at certain definite times, while the males are all Barkises. "Art is a manifestation of the sexual impulse. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the 'Entombment' of Titian." After the author delivered himself of a statement so pregnant of platitude he must have experienced a sense of lightening, and a conviction that he would not have to consult the Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie at least until he wrote his next book.

That art has a definite purpose to perpetuate the creative will and that God endowed his image with a genesic instinct that he might create and thus reproduce his kind every one knows, but to contend that one is a manifestation of the other is puerile, unenlightened, and harks back to barbarism. One might think that there is no such thing as the psychology of art or the science of æsthetics. Art has an intellectual significance as well as, or more than, an emotional significance, and the unfortunate, unhappy, disequilibrated man who is parodied in this book contributed his substantial mite in the twentieth century to make us see it.

Any one who reads the "Lettres de Paul Gauguin," which are prefaced by a brief survey of his life by Victor Segalen, or his life by Jean de Rotonchamps, which was published at Weimar at the expense of Count von Kessler, will see how closely Maugham described Gauguin's life in the Polynesian cannibal islands. Strickland marries the native girl Ata, who had a "beguin" for him, but Gauguin had Tioka in his maison de joie without benefit of clergy. Doctor Coutras, who gives Mr. Maugham so much valuable information (via Rotonchamps and Segalen) is M. Paul Vernié, who attended Gauguin and wrote an account of his last days.

Despite the fact that in July, 1914, the London Times lifted the veil of secrecy from the face of the most prevalent disease in the world, and thus announced that the name of the disease which Fracastorius, the poet-physician of Verona, borrowed from the shepherd Syphlus should be no longer taboo by "nice people," the prevalence of the disease and the efforts to combat it have been widely discussed, though they are not topics of conversation at dinner-parties or at "welfare meetings" in churches, as tuberculosis is. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the author prefers to kill his "hero" with leprosy. But Doctor Maugham has been devoting so much of his time in latter years to novels and dramas that he finds the differentiation between them difficult, and, too, Gauguin's disease has been diagnosticated leprosy, elephantiasis, syphilis. "La dernière de ces avaries est exacte, mais ne doit pas être imputées au pays: c'était une pure vérole parisienne."

"The Moon and Sixpence" is interesting. There is scarcely any diversion more engrossing than reading about others' infirmities unless it be relating one's own. Hence the continued popularity of Pepys, Amiel, Rousseau, Marie Bashkirsteff, and other garrulous sufferers. But it is a book that no one can be the better or happier for reading, and it does Gauguin's memory an injury because it parodies it. His life as it has been revealed to us was bizarre and irregular enough. We could wish that he had been less like Rimbaud and more like Rodin, but, distressing as his behavior was, seen in conventional light, we should like not to have seen it featured in fiction.

Mr. Maugham wrote a novel, "Out of Human Bondage," which is a far more meritorious piece of work than "The Moon and Sixpence," in which some of his professional colleagues—he is a physician—recognized portraitures. Perhaps it was his success with them that encouraged him to try a larger canvas.

The author's admitted cleverness was never more evident than in the depiction of Mrs. Strickland's character and characteristics—a smug Philistine, who runs the gamut of preciosity, jealousy, martyrdom, autorighteousness, and autosanctification. She is pleased and proud as she views the veneer of sanctimoniousness which her son, in holy orders, gives the dearly beloved husband of Mrs. Charles Strickland, who wrote his father's biography "to remove certain misconceptions which had gained currency," viz., that Doctor Maugham is masquerading as a psychiatrist and publishing his experiences with the insane, meanwhile throwing off "punk" about art and traducing normal, though admittedly "immoral," man.

"There is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a severe mortification. I have never failed to read the literary supplement of the Times." So says Mr. Somerset Maugham. The first part of the statement is difficult to believe after reading "The Moon and Sixpence." The latter part may be true, but it can't be truer than the statement that any one, possessed of ordinary decency and sensibility, and belief that love, sentiment, kindliness, generosity, altruism, forgiveness, and faith are the seven lamps that illumine our path on our way to immortality, will subject his flesh to severe mortification, while being interested and sometimes even amused by reading Mr. Maugham's new book.

CHAPTER IX
THE LITERARY MAUSOLEUM OF SAMUEL BUTLER

Samuel Butler's "Note-books" and "The Authoress of the Odyssey" added to the delights of the spring of 1915, which I spent in Sicily. The former, which is the quintessence of his wisdom and his impudence, gave revealing peeps into the mental and emotional make-up of the man who in "Erewhon" forecast the advent of the supremacy of machines and anticipated Mrs. Eddy in considering disease a sin and a crime, and the latter gave a quickened interest to Trapani, Segesta, and many other places, some of which have since become shrines in my memory.

From these "Note-Books" and from "The Way with All Flesh," which gave a remarkable vista of his own unconscious mind as well as those of his ancestors, I made a vivid picture of the author. It has been blurred, and in some respects quite erased by the two massive biographic volumes recently given to the world by Mr. Henry Festing Jones,[A] and which depicts him in all the nakedness of his virtues and his infirmities, revealing an unloving and unlovable character. Some day it will be explained to us why we cannot be left in possession of the cherished delusions that add to our happiness, increase our good-will toward our fellow men, and in no wise impair the reputations of those to whom they are directed.

One of the things that is most difficult to forgive a biographer is the wealth of sordid details they give us about our gods. Who can forgive Ranieri, for instance, for having told us with so much particularity that Leopardi hated to change his shirt or to take a bath, that he had a passion for cheap sweets, that he insisted upon keeping the servants of the household where he was a guest up until midnight in order that he might have his principal meal, that he was morbidly susceptible to adulation? It does not advantage any one to know such things, even if they are true, and if it serves any laudable purpose I am not aware that it has been set forth.

Mr. Jones's biography is painfully candid and distressingly frank and confidential.

Samuel Butler's life was one of rebellion and resignation, of contention and strife, of unhappiness and unyieldingness, of disappointment and suspicion, of wrongheartedness and rightmindedness, of rude energy and crude revery. He had a vanity of his intellectual capacity that transcends all understanding and a passion for what he called doing things thoroughly. He believed in the music of Handel, in the art of Giovanni Bellini, and his credo was the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, which apotheosizes charity and humility. Samuel Butler may have had charity and humility on his lips, but I fail to find from reading his biography that they ever got as far as his heart. He had an unhappy childhood, a perturbed adolescence, a lonely and isolated early manhood, an obsessed maturity, and an emotionally sterile old age. He hated his father, he pitied his mother, he barely tolerated his sisters, and he suspected the integrity and motives of his illustrious contemporaries who, though polite to him, personally ignored him controversially. Indeed, part of the time he must have felt himself a modern, though tame Ishmael, his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him.

Although he had a few forgiving, appreciative friends, a constant and ardent mistress, and a devoted servant who mothered and domineered him, engrossing interests and boundless energy, still he was chronically unhappy, the sweetness of his soul being embittered by contempt of his fellow men.

The offspring of a narrow-minded, obstinate, inflexible, selfish father and a gentle, reverential, yielding, and kindly mother, it was taken for granted that he would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a clergyman. He found when he began to take thought that he could not accept the Christian miracles or believe in a personal, anthropomorphic God. So he went to New Zealand and became a successful sheep-grazer, and within five years he had more than doubled the four thousand pounds which he had been able to screw from his father.

His life during these years is interesting in so much as it shows how a man of education and breeding lived in the bush while developing intellectually. The devil often tempted him there, but not always with success, though he became terribly fussed over the death and resurrection of Christ. He thought and wrote about it, but he was not successfully delivered from his dilemma until the idea of "Erewhon" took possession of him. This idea was that machines were about to supplant the human race and be developed into a higher kind of life. When the conception first seized him he wrote to Charles Darwin, whom he started by admiring and ended by despising, that he developed it "for mere fun and because it amused him and without a particle of serious meaning." He had Butler's "Analogy" in his head as the book at which it should be aimed, but when "Erewhon" appeared most readers thought he had "The Origin of Species" in mind.

From this time one begins to see how extraordinarily laborious were all of Butler's writings. "Erewhon" was not published until eight years later, during which time he had written and rewritten, corrected and re-corrected, pruned, elaborated, and incorporated sentences from letters, records of experiences which he had while prospecting for and developing his sheeprun, and innumerable notes from a commonplace book which he early acquired the art of keeping. Ten years after its publication he wrote to an indiscriminating, ardent admirer: "I don't like 'Erewhon'; still it is good for me."

The next book he wrote, "The Fair Haven," he liked very much, but few others did. When he was a very young man he had written a pamphlet on the Resurrection. He was disappointed that it made little or no impression. Finally he decided it had been written too seriously. It then occurred to him to treat the subject as he had treated the analogy of crime and disease in "Erewhon." The book purports to be written by the son of a clergyman, the antithesis of Butler's father, insane before the manuscript was completed, and of a mother, the replica of his own mother. A brother gives the book to the world, prefixing a memoir of the author modelled after Butler. The book fell flat. The few who resented it were the sensitive orthodox whose feelings were outraged. Butler could not understand why he was unable to induce people to reconsider the gospel accounts of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

The second distinctive characteristic of Butler's make-up was his spirit of God-I-thank-thee-that-I-am-not-as-other-men.

When Butler left New Zealand he had eight thousand pounds, partly in his pocket and partly invested in the country that had been so bountiful to him; he decided to return to England and devote himself to painting, which he felt convinced was the field of activity in which he gave real promise. It was then from the exceeding high mountain that he saw Charles Payne Pauli, of Winchester, and Pembroke College, Oxford, who had gone out to the colony and found employment on a newspaper. One evening Pauli called upon Butler and stayed talking until midnight. "I suddenly became aware that I had become intimate with a personality quite different from that of any one whom I had ever known." Within a few months there was established a strange intimacy, "one of those one-sided friendships when a diffident, poetical shy man becomes devoted to the confident, showy, real man as a dog to his master." He loaned Pauli one hundred pounds that he might return with him to England; he maintained him in London until Pauli was called to the bar; then he put him on an allowance which he continued for many years and which used up one-half of his savings and earnings.

When Pauli began to earn a comfortable income at the bar he treated Butler with scorn, though accepting money and food from him. When he died none of the nine thousand pounds which he had accumulated was left to Butler. Indeed, the latter did not know of his death until he saw a notice of it in the London Times. However, his love for Pauli, which surpassed understanding, surmounted all obstacles and he wrote a long, detailed account of the relation between himself and Pauli which, his biographer says, if ever printed in full, will be "very painful reading."

Some time before he broke with Pauli he started a friendship with another man which fortunately did not test his indulgence and his generosity to a similar extent, but it was no less remarkable. Indeed, it was more so, for Butler was now fifty-six, and he poured the depleted vessels of his affection upon Hans Rudolf Faesch in such a way as practically to submerge this young man. I doubt if there is anything in literature of men's friendships which for intensity of passion and affection surpasses the letters which Butler addressed to the young Swiss. The poem, "Out in the Night," addressed to Faesch on his departure for Singapore, is a genuine, impassioned expression of grief coming straight from the heart. And the letters to Faesch are truly remarkable documents. In fact, the letter written to Hans Faesch after he had started for Singapore, when Butler was fifty-nine years old, might well have been written by Pericles to Aspasia or by a sentimental youth to his dulcina. "I should be ashamed of myself for having felt so keenly and spoken with as little reserve as I have if it were any one but you; but I feel no shame at any length to which grief can take me when it is about you." And yet we speak of Anglo-Saxon frigidity and aloofness!

Butler would seem never to have been in love in the ordinary usual way. We are justified in concluding that he had only a tenderness for "Madame," who "during the twenty years of intimacy with Butler had no rivals." Certainly he never was in love with Elizabeth Mary Ann Savage, an extraordinary woman whose mentality is reflected in all of Butler's books. From 1871, when he was writing "Erewhon," until her death, in 1885, Butler submitted to Miss Savage everything he wrote, and remodelled in accordance with her criticisms and suggestions. Not only did he submit the drafts of his books to her, but the suggestions of many of them originated with her. If ever the soul and spirit of one person operated through another, the soul and spirit of this brilliant woman operated through the apparent mental elaborations of Samuel Butler. She understood him as no one else understood him; she loved him as no other woman loved him. Her devotion to him, her appreciation of his talent, her unrequited love, her unfailing humor and mirth, her incomparable courage when confronted with serious disease and with death, and her apparent willingness that her talent should shine through him is one of the most extraordinary things in literature. I am at a loss to understand why neither his biographers nor the critics of Butler's writings have given the subject adequate consideration.

Some years ago a youthful Austrian psychopath, Weininger, wrote a book, "Geschlecht und Charakter," which had great popularity. It was widely read in the original and in translations. Amongst other things that he discussed was the sex endowment of man. The hundred per cent male is very uncommon, and he is rarely encountered amongst creative artists. The feminine percentage in them is considerable, often more than fifty per cent. Samuel Butler had many feminine traits. He was vain, gossipy, vindictive, swayed by his emotions, and he allowed himself to be wooed by a woman. He took from Elizabeth Mary Ann Savage without giving a quid pro quo or even acknowledgment. He did not have the courage to say to her in the flesh what he said of her in the grave. He sold to the public as of his own manufacture the warp and woof of her intellectual weavings. Her letters, which form such a large part of the first volume of these memoirs and which Butler wrote to her father "the like of which I have never elsewhere seen," testify the public debt to her contracted in the name of Samuel Butler.

The wit, humor, irony, and sarcasm of these letters all combine to reveal a remarkable soul and rare personality. For twenty years she was a true, steadfast, resourceful, sympathetic helpmate to Samuel Butler. He accepted her amatory homage and her literary co-operation, and she might legitimately have inferred from his letters that she was somatically as well as spiritually sympathetic. Many women have convinced themselves that their passion was reciprocated by men who gave less tangible evidence of it than Samuel Butler gave Miss Savage. That she loved him there can be no doubt, but her unæsthetic appearance appalled him, her halting stride annoyed him, and her loving attentions bored him. Some years after her death he composed two sonnets to her memory, the first exquisitely vulgar, the second painfully pathetic.