IDLING IN ITALY

STUDIES OF
LITERATURE AND OF LIFE

BY
JOSEPH COLLINS

AUTHOR OF "MY ITALIAN YEAR"

I loaf and invite my soul

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1920

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published September, 1920

TO M. K. C.

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

[PREFACE]

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

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

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

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

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

[CONTENTS]

chapter page

[IDLING IN ITALY]

[CHAPTER I
LITERARY ITALY]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ed io che intesi quel che non dicevi
M'innamorai di te perchè tacevi."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[CHAPTER II
LITERARY ITALY
(CONTINUED)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Italian poet neglected and almost unknown during his lifetime (1872-1919), whose literary output was very small, is slowly coming to his estate and it is not unlikely that the coming generation will hail Ceccardo Roccatagliata-Ceccardi as one of Italy's greatest modern poets. "Sonetti e Poemi" contains practically all of his verse save a small collection published when he was twenty.

[CHAPTER III
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO—POET, PILOT, AND PIRATE]

The most conspicuous name in the annals of Italian literature of the generation now passing is that assumed by a child or a youth when the voice first whispered to him that he had been chosen to announce the coming of a new era, to blaze the way for a new social and national life: Gabriele D'Annunzio. He was born at Pescara in the Regno, March 13, 1863, the son of Francescopaolo D'Annunzio and of his wife, Luisa de Benedictis of Ortona. A studied effort has been made to envelop his birth and parentage in a mantle of mystery, but it has been thwarted.

One day of his infancy, in Ferravilla-on-the-Sea, suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind. From that moment the little Annunciator was filled with the gift of verbal expression. He enhanced the endowment by diligent study in the high school at Prato, in Tuscany, where he spent his boyhood. Thus did he acquire an unparalleled mastery of the Italian language. The gods of mythology, the Hellenic heroes and philosophers, the emperors and courtesans of Pagan Rome were the loves of his infancy. After Carducci's "Odi Barbari" exploded his poetic magazine he looked about to find a god and a Greek upon whom to model his conduct. He recalled Dionysus going through the world with Priapus ostentatiously displaying the Phallus, and the die was cast.

But he must have a philosophy as well. He who taught that eternal flux and change is the only actuality; that all phenomena are in a state of continuous transition from non-existence to existence and vice versa; that everything is and is not; all things are and nothing remains; that all things must be reduced by way of quasi-condensation to the primary matter from which they originated, in brief—Heraclitus, whose name signified "he who rails at the people," was the one that he selected. The process of quasi-reduction was to be preceded by purification through pleasure, and pleasure was to be obtained by stimulation of the senses. The more they were stimulated the greater became their potency for purification. When he looked about the world he found others had been seduced by Heraclitus. Nietzsche, whose activity preceded D'Annunzio's by a few years, was the most conspicuous exponent of the Eternal Recurrence. He too taught a master morality, a morality which says yea to life and nay to morals, rules, and conventions. Christianity is the moral code of slaves. Instinct is the true wisdom. The genesic instinct is the basis of all other instincts. Therefore cultivate it, for in that way one becomes a superman and begets a race of supermen. If we must have a statue of Apollo, as Socrates and Christ taught, let us make it a feminine figure and place it beside Dionysus, first erected by animal men, and around them let us dance a frenzied tarantella while we intoxicate ourselves with foaming wine, the product of sensuous fermentation.

No attempt will be made here to put an estimate upon D'Annunzio's conduct or his accomplishments of the past five years, save to say that they have been in keeping with his previous life.

Literary criticism is concerned with the genius of the writer and the way in which he makes that genius manifest. It is not concerned with the morals or immorality of his writing, and yet it has to take some cognizance of them, especially if they are at variance with that which is considered moral or approximately moral. No one who is a public figure or whose activities are concerned with the welfare of the public, whether it be with their diversion, instruction, or protection, can comport himself in a way that is flagrantly offensive to the public without showing the effect of it in his writings. For instance, a writer produces a masterpiece of literature, one that has qualities of conception and construction that evoke universal admiration. It has been written for one of three reasons, or all of them. First, because the artist has it in him and he must externalize it, a creative craving that must be satisfied; second, he has a purpose in doing it—he wants to amuse, amaze, or instruct people; third, he wants to gain fame or money.

If he is utterly oblivious to the two last, his writings may be as immoral or unrighteous as he wishes to make them. If the public does not wish to read them it need not, and if it considers them injurious to others whose mental capacity does not enable them to judge whether they are proper or injurious they can be suppressed. If, however, the writer is animated to production by either of the latter two motives, he must be reconciled to having an estimate made of his work not only from the point of view of literary criticism, but also from the point of view of the fitness of his works for literary consumption. That is, he must be reconciled to attempts at estimating whether or not the world would not have been better off without his writings.

There are few writers to whom these remarks apply with greater force than Gabriele D'Annunzio. It is generally admitted that he is the most consummate master of Italian verse now living. Though his prose writings show that he is not a literary craftsman of the first order, he has understood that art rises out of our primal nature and that it is instinctive. He has sung the praises of sensualism as they never have been sung in modern times, and he has panoplied the preliminaries to love's embrace with garlands made of flowers of forced blooming, artificially perfumed and colored so that the average human being does not recognize them as products of nature. He has preached and practised a moral code the antithesis of Christianity, and yet no one has sought seriously to save his soul.

In truth, D'Annunzio had tired the world of him. The people of it were tired of him as they might have been of a radiantly beautiful woman who had become a gorgeously decorated strumpet constantly walking up and down in the world seeking praise and admiration. When he went to Paris the world seemed to be satisfied that he should disappear in that maelstrom, as it was willing that a contemporary sensuous egocentrist should disappear when he left Reading Gaol, but D'Annunzio must enter upon the final stage of his mission from the gods, and the Great War gave him the opportunity.

Although so long a conspicuous figure in the public eye, he has managed to wrap certain layers of the mantle of mystery about him so closely that little is known of his origin or of the forces that contributed to the making and development of his extraordinary career. It is confidently stated by those who pretend to know him that he is a Jew, but he is not claimed by Hebrew writers, who are proud of enrolling Bergson and Brandes, Spinoza and Strauss in their list. Vainly offering his life for Italy, he is not somatically, mentally, or emotionally an Italian. Knowing her history, her traditions, and her reactions as few of her sons have known them, until the war he had not sung her virtues or mirrored her wondrous accomplishments of nation-building. His face has steadily been turned not toward the east, where the sun of her glory is arising, but toward the west, where he has revelled in the resurrected glows of sunsets of pagan and Renaissance days. He has treated his friends disdainfully when it suited his whim; he has meted out contumely to his adulators when it pleased his fancy; he has disdained those who have accused him; he has passed unnoticed those who have sought to belittle him; and he has gone among his superiors as if he were their king. He has been called everything save Philistine and fool. He has been called the greatest literary figure of modern Italy and it is likely that he merits it.

He is a poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist, politician, critic, propagandist, prophet, aviator, hero, dictator, and self-constituted arbiter of Italy's destinies.

Neither his peer nor his superior has ever denied him a rare imagination, an artistic intelligence of extraordinary range, depth and exquisiteness, a stupendous versatility and productiveness, a tireless energy, a fearless daring and a supreme contempt for the feelings, beliefs, and accomplishments of others.

There are two ways of approaching an estimate of D'Annunzio. One is to analyze him—to set him up as a god or a monster and to dissect him and study the elements of his complex mechanism, then put them together patiently and laboriously as one puts together a jigsaw picture-puzzle. It is the tempting way, but it risks injuring the sensibilities of his admirers and the judicially minded who are so constituted that they cannot pass judgment unless they are in possession of all the facts concerning him and his career: what he did and the circumstances attending the doing of them, that is, the environment in which they were done—both that which he created and that which was thrust upon him. Finally they want to view him in rest and in action. Then they are ready to render a verdict in much the same way as a jury renders a verdict with or without the analysis and summing up of the testimony and evidence by proponent or opponent advocate. The way of synthesis would be the way to approach an interpretation of D'Annunzio if the man were under discussion, but here only an estimate of his literary career is attempted.

There is no dearth of evidence to show that he was a precocious child and a youth of prodigious intellectual acumen and prehensility, of boundless self-confidence and fathomless egocentrism. His first collection of verse, "Primo Vere" ("First Beginnings"), was published when he was fifteen years old, and two years later he published a second edition "corrected with pen and fire and augmented." From the beginning it was pointed out by critic and commentator that he plagiarized line and verse from poets of Italy, such as Giambattista Marino, Niccolo Tommaseo, and Giosuè Carducci, and of other countries; but if the accusations made any impression upon him it was not evident in his future conduct, for later he took from Verga and Capuana, from Nietzsche and Tolstoy, from Maeterlinck and Flaubert, from Ibsen and Dostoievsky, and from countless others that which it pleased him to take.

His fame in Italy as a poet was heralded by the poet Giuseppe Chiarini, who published an article which did for him what Octave Mirabeau's article in the Figaro of August 24, 1890, did for Maeterlinck. Before he had reached his maturity he was hailed as the coming poet, whose originality was admirable, whose sensuality was shocking but acceptable, whose versatility was marvellous. There is nothing morbid, decadent, or blatant in his early poems. In the "Canto Novo," published in 1882, he displayed the torridity of his temperament, the splendor of his imagination, the ardency of his loves, and the implacability of his hatreds. It swept like a fire over Italy. It was a lyric of the joy of life, "the immense joy of living, of being strong, of being young, of biting with eager teeth the fruits of the earth, of looking with flaming eyes upon the divine face of the world, as a lover looks upon his mistress." It was followed in quick succession by "Terra Vergine," "Intermezzo di Rime," and "Il libro delle Vergini" ("The Book of the Virgins"), which enhanced his reputation and caused the Italians to hail him intemperately.

He then went to Rome and began work as a journalist, but this did not interfere with his output of poetry, and by 1892, when he began publishing romances, he had established, by the publication of "Isaotta Guttadauro," the "Elegie romane" and the "Odi navali," a reputation with the reading public of being the most appealing, most satisfying poet in Italy, and the critics were not at all sure he would not surpass Carducci, who was then considered Italy's greatest poet and whose fame has steadily increased.

His fame as a poet being established to his own satisfaction he turned to the field of romance, and in the next five years (1893-1898) there flowed from the printing-presses a series of romances that veritably flooded literary Italy: "L'Innocente," "Il Piacere," "Giovanni Episcopo," "Trionfo della Morte," "Le Vergini delle Rocce," "Forse che si forse che no," and the "Novelle della Pescara." They had a quality that is not easily characterized by word or brief description. They were "sensuous," "decadent," "daring," "shocking," "brilliant." They were modelled on Flaubert, Prevost, Huysmans; they were saturated with the philosophy of Nietzsche, the psychology of Ibsen, the mysticism of Maeterlinck, the morality of Petronius; they reek of the bestialities of Wilde and Verlaine; they are the glorification of pagan ethics; they are the apotheosis of lust. But they were read, discussed, admired, praised, not only in Italy but the world over. I doubt that praise was ever given so lavishly, so widely, and so unjustifiably as was given to this series of romances, which to-day, a generation after their publication, are as constant a reminder of a wayward step which Italian literature took at the end of the nineteenth century as the linea alba on the torso of a woman whose reputation for virtue is established and admitted reminds her of a faux pas of her youth.

In these volumes the author showed that he had a marvellous capacity to depict states of exalted sensibility; that he had an extraordinary, almost superhuman sensitiveness to beauty as it is revealed in nature and in art; that he had a clairvoyant knowledge of the activity of the unconscious mind of human beings and how it conditions their behavior under circumstances and environments fortuitous or chosen—in other words, until it is revealed to them behavioristically; that he had a comprehensive familiarity with plastic and pictorial art; an intimacy with ancient history and modern literature that was stupendous, and withal a capacity to externalize his visions, his emotional elaboration, and his mental content in words so linked together that the very juxtaposition of them is a pleasure to the eye and a satisfaction to the soul.

But that which he knew best of all was the history of eroticism. Not only was he familiar with its ancestry to the remotest time, but he had guarded its infant days with such solicitude that he knew every impression that worldly contact made upon its plastic consciousness, and when it got its growth he set to work to ornament it so that contact with it would be the apogee of all beauty, intimacy with it the purpose of all ambition, union with it the object of all strife.

There are features of his romances that cannot be adequately praised; there are features that cannot be sufficiently condemned. A poem that contains no particular thought may excite our profoundest admiration, just as does a papier-mâché triumphal arch or monument; but a romance or novel depicts some phase or aspect of life, reveals man's aspirations or accomplishments, his behaviors and reactions under certain conditions, reflects his nobilities, depicts his frailties, and extols his ambitions and what he would like to do, experience, or accomplish. In a general way, it is expected that it shall be tuned to an ethical pitch that will not give offense to the man of average Christian or pagan morality, or outrage universally accepted and acceptable convention. The most successful horticulturist in the world would find no market for his roses, even though they were more exquisite than those of all other florists, should he impregnate them with a scent obtained from the Mustelidæ. This is what D'Annunzio did.

It would be very difficult to find a religion, a form of government, a code of ethics, a type of beauty, a map of life, a canon of morals, a custom, habit, or a convention that something could not be said in praise of it. Bolshevism has its attractive facet, even though the present-day proponents of it have got it so deeply submerged in the mire of ambition and power, and so defaced with lust for revenge that it cannot be recognized. There is scarcely any form of those various indulgences and commissions which are labelled "vice" that have not some commendable and praiseworthy feature, but there is one aberration of human conduct that has never had a champion in the open. It is incest, and Gabriele D'Annunzio is its champion. Concealed or openly, it goes through his writings with the same constancy that streams flow through plains that go out from glacier mountains. In the English translations of his romances elaborate descriptions of other forms of perversion of the genesic instinct have been largely expurgated, but it is impossible to purge them entirely of the incest theme, for in many of his writings it is beyond the verbal description. It is the atmosphere of the book. Take, for instance, the novel "L'Innocente." On the face of it, it is the narration of the conduct of a man who, having wedded a superior woman of great intellectual charm and bodily attractions, yields to the temptations of the life of dissipation in which he had distinguished himself previous to an ideal matrimony and a contented paternity. He realizes that his digressions are scandalous, and that their frequent deliberate repetitions justify his wife in living apart from him, though her love, being beyond control, still continues. They agree to live with each other as brother and sister. The moment he succeeds in placing her in his soul as his sister an irresistible impulse seizes him to have carnal possession of her, and the burden of the book is a description of his seduction of his own wife, who in the new covenant is his sister. Meanwhile with consummate art he has described in the first chapter as the only true love that which exists between brother and sister, his apostrophe of it having been called forth by recalling the sister whom death had fortunately removed.

Before he has accomplished the seduction of his wife-sister he has precipitated her into a vulgar adventure with his own brother, a pattern of all the virtues. It is a part of his consummate art to create circumstantial evidence that will tend to put the paternity of her child upon a fellow author who in other days had been civil and courteous to his wife, and had sent her a copy of his latest book with an enigmatical inscription on the fly-leaf, but in reality he succeeds in creating an atmosphere from which one senses with readiness that the real father is his brother. The book, in so far as it is concerned with the nobility of Giuliana, the sweetness of life in the country, the lovability of her mother and her children, the way in which Giuliana's emotions and thought after the advent of the child are shaped that she may grow to hate it as he hates it, as well as the mental elaborations that justify him in seeking to destroy it, and the accomplishment of it, are done in a way that shows the author to be not only intimately familiar with the workings of the normal human mind but with the depraved human mind.

From the beginning of his literary career D'Annunzio was at no pains to conceal that he was the model from which he painted his heroes. The reader who identifies him with Tullio Hermil is the perspicacious reader, in the eyes of the author; the reader who considers the conduct of Tullio, infracting as it does the canons of law, of morality, and of decency, as the conduct of a superman, is, in the judgment of the author, the sapient reader. He who sees in Tullio and his conduct a beast abnormally freighted with lubricity, lacking in inhibitory qualities of a man unguided and uninfluenced by any obligation to God or man, and knowing no other obligation than the pursuit of his own pleasures and desires, is a fool, a weakling, an inanimate mass of protoplasm moulded in the form of a human being unworthy of consideration. D'Annunzio conceived himself a superman long before he began to write romances, and I am not one of those who believe that he got his conception from Nietzsche. He got it from the same indescribable source that that unbalanced monster of materialism got his. Its roots if they could be traced back to the days of the Hebrew prophets would be found to have their germinal sprouts in some descendant of Samuel or David.

D'Annunzio's romances are a mixture of materialism, sensualism, and pessimism reduced in a pagan mortar to a homogeneous consistency, and then skilfully admixed with honey so that it is acceptable to the Christian palate, but, once it has got beyond the taste-buds of the tongue, once it is taken into the system, its poisonous, corroding, and destructive qualities become operative. I doubt if D'Annunzio ever wrote a word or line in his plays or romances that any one was the better for having read or heard, and by better I mean that he added to his spiritual possessions, to his inherent nobility, or to his aspirations for a moral perfection, one iota. I doubt if any normal human being, normal physically, mentally, and spiritually, can read "Il Piacere" without feeling ill and humiliated, not because of the picture that the author draws of himself in the guise of Andrea Sperelli, this finished expert in the employments of love, nor of Donna Maria, nor of the woman more infernally expert in those matters, nor the score of other characters which he paints with a master-hand, but because of the way in which he draws his bow across the overtaut strings of sensuousness until they scream and wail in frenzied fashion and then finally burst asunder. The way in which he makes an appeal to his perverted sensuality through vicarious overstimulation of the senses with which he was endowed for self-conservation and self-preservation, the senses of smell and sight and touch and hearing, is in itself a perversion. He stimulates them until they shriek for mercy or for immersion in some benumbing balm. The true pervert is he who puts out of proportion and out of perspective the sources of æsthetic emanation, and who concentrates them upon the percipient apparatus of one or other of the senses so that it may be excited to a frenzied activity. The description of Andrea's room, in which he awaits Donna Maria, with its perfumes, lights, and colors, and the description of his toilet articles and his bedroom is one of the most nauseating things in all literature. Like Nietzsche, D'Annunzio looks upon women as creatures of an inferior race, instruments of pleasure and procreation who were created to serve. When they no longer are amusing, useful, or serviceable they are to be brushed aside and with the same sang froid as one would put aside an automobile that had broken down, worn out, or because it's "corpo non è più giovane," as he kept saying of Foscarina in "Il Fuoco," who belonged to him, "like the thing one holds in his fist, like the ring on one's finger, like a glove, like a garment, like a word that may be spoken or not, like a draft that may be drunk or poured on the ground."

In "Vergini delle Rocce" he expounds the theory that inequality is the essence of the state, and in this book as well as in "Il Trionfo della Morte" we find all the passion of language and of sentiment that one finds in Nietzsche. It is no longer to be doubted that he had kept his word "noi tendiamo l'orecchio alla voce del magnanimo Zarathustra e prepariamo nell' arte con sicura fede l'avvento del Uebermensch del superuomo"—we listen to the voicing of the magnanimous Zarathustra and we prepare with unfaltering faith for the coming of the superman to the arts.

In his life of Cola di Rienzo D'Annunzio again took occasion to lampoon and traduce the common people, describing them as the great beast which must be crushed and annihilated. "Il Trionfo della Morte" is the very essence of Heraclitan philosophy and Dionysan ethics. The hero, who is a paragon of knowledge which he displays for the reader's edification, meets the young and pretty wife of a business man who bores her. He is successful finally in permitting her to pass a few weeks with him in his villa by the sea. During these weeks they run the gamut of every conceivable sensation and the reader gets a description of them and of the gradual hatred that develops in him for his subjection of her. "Every human soul carries in it for love a definite quality of sensitive force. This quality is used up with time and when it is used up no effort can prevent love from ceasing." But, unlike the animal when his concupiscence is satiated and he is still urged to greater display, the hero is not content with driving her from him; he must needs mete out the same fate to her that he did to the infant in "Il Piacere," so he lures her to the edge of a sea cliff and hurls her into space. "She would in death become for me matter of thought, pure ideality; from a precarious and imperfect existence she would enter into an existence complete and definite, forsaking forever the infirmities of her weak, luxurious flesh. Destroy to possess. There is no other way for him who seeks the absolute in love."

The reader yields to the enchantment of his style, to the seductiveness of his lyrism, to the intoxications of his descriptions of beauty; and the critic and fellow writer to his mastery of technic and consummate mastery of behavioristic psychology. From the critics' point of view "The Triumph of Death" and "The Fire" are the high-water marks of D'Annunzio as a stylist, and they mark his completest moral dissolution.

In "Il Fuoco" we get the same ethics, philosophy, æsthetics, and glorification of sensuousness that we get in all his other books. Here the two leading characters are exact replicas of himself and of the world's greatest actress of her day portrayed in an environment, Venice, that is redolent of beauty in decay, like a cracked Grecian vase overfilled with withered rose leaves which fall from it at every puff of wind. This environment makes an ideal palette upon which he blends the colors whose pigments he has been selecting and experimenting with for a quarter of a century. The publication of it promoted his voluntary exile from Italy. His fellow countrymen could not condone the monstrous offense of depicting therein as the pliant mediator of his perverted sensuousness their beloved actress. And they have not yet forgiven him, nor are they likely to forgive him.

After D'Annunzio had established a reputation as a neoromanticist with a classical tendency he turned to drama, and the year 1897 marked his advent into that field. His first efforts, three one-act parables—"The Foolish Virgins and the Wise Virgins," "The Rich Man and Poor Lazarus," and "The Prodigal Son"—were published in the Mattino of Naples, a newspaper controlled by the husband of his friend and fellow writer, Matilde Serao. They are noteworthy merely to show the way in which a sensuous pagan can transform simple characters into decadent, perverted proselyters of pleasure. It was not until he wrote "The Dream of a Spring Morning" and "The Dream of an Autumn Sunset" that he displayed the same measure of lascivious imagery and capacity for description of the perverse manifestations of eroticism that he revealed in his romances. These were revealed in lines that truly may be said to be masterpieces of lyric beauty, and when the Mad Woman of the first and the Messalina of the second were interpreted by Eleanora Duse the musical sound of the words and the emotional force of the sentiment gained a quality of importance and grandeur which enhanced their inherent qualities.

In "La Città Morta," his most successful drama, he returned to his favorite topic, incest. Though his purpose in writing it, the most successful of all his dramas, was to revive in form, structure, and unity the Greek drama, it gave him an opportunity to display his knowledge of the classics and archæology. The philosophy and mysticism of the play he got from Maeterlinck. Its theme is lust and crime. Lust is portrayed in almost every conceivable form of perversion, in poetic thoughts and graceful diction, especially in the delineation of Leonardo, the explorer, who lusts for his sister. The dreamy, meditative languor of the dramatis personæ, their insensitiveness to every form of ethical conformation, their perversion of every form of moral relationship, constitute an atmosphere that the northerner does not breath pleasurably. It was thoroughly purged before it was put on the boards in this country.

His next play, "La Gioconda," is an exposition of the exemption which D'Annunzio thinks the artist of his own superman caliber should have from conforming to the laws of estate or custom. The contention is a simple one. He should do anything that he pleases—which means give himself over to the pleasure of the senses and the appetites until the indulgence is followed by satiety and thus his progress toward perfection through gratification of desires will be accomplished. After satiety comes disgust, and then a period of dementia, but this is merely the prelude to another fling of erotic fury in his conformation to the doctrine of purification through pleasure.

The hero is a psychopathic individual, sensitive, aboulic, distractible, impressionable, impulsive, vacillating, and suicidal. He is married to a woman who apparently has every beauty of soul and body that a woman can have. But, alas, she is virtuous! She has not the key to the jewel-casket of his genius. That is possessed by his model Gioconda Dianti, the source of all his inspirations. One quiver of her eyelid causes his soul to dissolve like sugar in water, while two make him feel that he is lord of the universe.

The tragedy of the play is the permanent mutilation of the wife's hands, the only somatic feature that has "appealed" to the artist. She attempts to save his masterpiece which the model pushes over in temper on being told falsely that she is to be banished. Her mutilated hands serve to remind her the rest of her life that virtue is its own reward.

The two dramas of D'Annunzio which are best known to the English-speaking public are "La Figlia d'Jorio" and "Francesca di Rimini." "The Daughter of Jorio" is a tragedy laid in the mountains of Abruzzi. D'Annunzio knows the customs, habits, and traditions of the shepherds and mountaineers, their superstitions and emotions, as he knows art, archæology, and eroticism. The first act is a description of the betrothal of the son of a brutal shepherd to a simple girl with whom he is not particularly in love. At the ceremony of betrothal the daughter of Jorio, who is suspected to have evil powers, claims protection from certain shepherds who had designs upon her. The first impulse of the joyous party was to cast her out, but when the betrothed young man was about to do so he saw behind her his lustful desire presented to his eyes in the guise of an angel, which made him hesitate, and the daughter of Jorio was allowed to remain. In the next act he is seen as her lover. He quarrels about her with his father and kills him. The parricide's punishment is to be sewed into a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and a monkey and cast into the sea. The daughter of Jorio comes to the rescue and convinces the people that she is the real criminal. Eros is unconquerable.

In "Francesca di Rimini," a historical play filled with erudite archæological details, he displays a knowledge of the thirteenth century and of the customs of the time which has never been excelled save by historical writers. It is a picture of war and bloodshed, of treachery and accusation. The central theme is the love of Francesca and Paolo. They may be taken as the typical human beings of the thirteenth-century Italy, fond of luxury and beautiful things but savage in their reactions. Perhaps Francesca is one of the best feminine figures that D'Annunzio has ever drawn.

In 1904 there appeared two volumes entitled "Praises of the Sky, the Sea, the Earth and of Heroes." After that period his tragedies, "The Light under the Bushel," "The Ship," "Fedra," and "The Mystery of San Sebastian" appeared in French, and soon he adopted France as his home, having previously published a spiritual autobiography of eight thousand four hundred lines entitled "Laus Vitæ," in which he summarizes the motives of his past and lays the basis of his new inspiration.

D'Annunzio's war poems have all been inspired with the belief that Italy's future lies on the sea. It is much to be regretted that they have not yet been collected into a single volume. When it is done he will not unlikely be recognized as the most legitimate of Pindar's descendants. Undoubtedly he will want them to be the conspicuous, permanent wreath on his tomb. The Libyan War inspired him to the production of his noblest war poetry, "Canzoni della Gesta d'Oltremare" ("Songs of Achievements across the Sea").

In the "Canzoni di Mario Bianco" he foresaw the beginning of a new era for Italy, and he forecast the aspirations and promises of the third Italy. His "Canzone del Quarnaro" describes the raid of the three Italian torpedo-boats on the Buccari, a few miles to the southeast of Fiume. It is short and forceful. The introductory "beffa" describes the raid in detail. D'Annunzio is inordinately fond of using Christian imagery, and he reverts to it here in the distribution of his little tricolor flags, which has a mystic import. "It is a true eucharistic sacrament, the closest and most complete communion of the spirit with beautiful Italy. There is no need of consecrating words; the tricolor wafer was converted through our faith into the living beauty of our country. We are purified, we are sundered from the shore and from our daily habits, separated from the land and all vulgar cares, from our homes and from all useless idleness, from profane love and all base desires; we are immune from the thought of return."

The "Cantico per l'ottava della Vittoria" is a wish fulfilment for him. As the boat enters the Quarnaro and runs up the coast of Istria it is, for D'Annunzio, the guarantor of the treaty of London, and he sees all the cities and islands of this coast restored to Italy, and these cities and all the places hallowed by the war join in the pæan of triumph.

In "Songs of Achievements across the Sea" D'Annunzio established an incontestable claim to be the great inspiring poet, even the prophet, of his generation in Italy, and he produced work which has not been surpassed, but he was still the poet only, singer of the deeds of others, in which he had no share himself. The contrast between his pretensions and his achievements made the affectations of his early years appear ridiculous to many people, and tended to obscure the true value of his work. He was still seeking and the years that followed in Paris showed that he had discovered no new world to explore, but when Italy joined the Allies he suddenly found himself. All the brooding sense of incomplete achievement of other days vanished in a moment. The speeches and addresses that he delivered between May 4 and 25, 1915, showed that he had been preparing for what he knew would be "The Day" for him.

It was widely believed in Italy in 1917 and 1918 that on the evening of May 4, 1915, when D'Annunzio addressed a meeting at Quarto to commemorate an anniversary of Garibaldi's departure with his faithful thousand to deliver Sicily and Naples from the Bourbon yoke, and a few days later when he addressed them in the Costanzi Theatre in Rome and then went with the enormous crowd to ring the bell of the Campidoglio, the signal was given for the declaration of war against Austria and Germany.

The last books of D'Annunzio, illustrating his new attitude toward life, are "La Leda senza-cigno" ("Leda without the Swan"), "Per la più grande Italia" ("For Greater Italy"), "La Beffa di Buccari" ("Buccari's Joke"), "La Riscossa" ("The Rescue"), "Bestetti e Tuminelli" ("Italy and Death"), "Contro Uno e contro Tutti" ("Against One and against All"), and a series of volumes under the title of "The Archives of Icarius," which are all concerned with incidents in the Great War.

It is too soon to attempt to guess the pedestal that posterity will allot Gabriele D'Annunzio in the gallery of fame. The committee that will do it will estimate his qualifications of lyric poet and Hellenic dramatist—perhaps as warrior.

D'Annunzio is a poet who abounds in lyrical ecstacies. His style is the most remarkable thing about him. He describes armor, architecture, archæology like an expert. He knows the dynamic point of view. He knows how to depict dramatic situations. His personages are all living personages. He is concerned with the neurotic, decadent, hectic, temperamental type of human beings. All his characters have a love of beauty. He is the true decadent of the nineteenth-century literature, to whom the decadent French symbolists cannot hold a candle.

After he had sucked the luscious orange of Italy dry and eaten of its pomegranates to satiety; after he had exhausted sensation in the search for sensation and he could no longer hope for stimulation from vision, from image, from sound, from color; when the nets of Eros were so lacerated and worn from having been dragged upon the rocks and crags of life; when Italian food, though appetizingly spiced and washed down with rare vintage of the Castelli Romani, would no longer nourish him, he abandoned his native land and went to France. His writings while in France were like those of a man who is dominated by a dementia following a protracted delirium, and as he emerged from this dementia he published a pietistic piece called "The Contemplation of Death." It seems to have been suggested to him by the death of the poet Pascoli, for whom he professed an admiration, but more particularly by Adolfo Bermond, whom he had met after he went to France and who apparently had been able to depict the beauties of humility so that they were recognizable to D'Annunzio. In his fatigued, emotional, and enfeebled mental state he asked himself whether humility was not more desirable than pride, love not stronger than hate, spiritual aristocracy more ennobling than aristocracy of blood, of money, of brain, of privilege. In this state of mock humility he wrote: "I always feel above me the presence of the sacrifice of Christ. I see now that the glory of my life is not in the beauty of my possessions. I have never felt so miserable and at the same time so powerful. Never since I lived have I had within me an instinct, a need so deep and so storming. I am aware that a part of my being, maybe the best part, is deeply asleep within me." But soon this spiritual awakening was throttled by the influence of Nietzsche. "What will become of me if I surrender wholly to the Saviour? Surely I want the world to know if in my life, filled with base instincts, there comes the moment of changing. Even if my glory be destroyed I will not be a prisoner to the worse that speaks within me." It was from that hour that he decided to be the Garibaldi of the third Italy. He would then be another Gabriel standing in the presence of God and sent to speak to them and show them glad tidings.

It was a strange awakement that D'Annunzio had when he went to Rome in the early '90's. Perhaps it was before that time that he encountered "L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable," and later "La Sagesse et la Destinée," and he absorbed some of its æsthetic mysticism. He realized that it was another variety of search for wisdom because it is happiness, and he began to portray it in his poetry and tragedies. From the day he began to write he accustomed himself to take as it pleased him from others' writings, and not only lines and paragraphs but subjects, movements, cadences, thoughts, and images which determined the character and decided the nature of the production. Italian critics have taken the trouble to return to the original creators the borrowed constituents of some of his productions, "L'Asiatico," for instance; and that which then remained was the caressing modulation of the verses. When his romances appeared in French many of the passages taken bodily from Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, de Maupassant, Pêladan, de Goncourt, Huysmans, and many others were prudently suppressed. But no one can fail to recognize that he read these authors with a keen eye, a note-book by his side. But he has known how to use what he borrowed. The day came when the conduct of a corrupt people in a decadent fictitious world no longer sufficed to divert him; having drunk from the poisoned springs of lust not only to satiety but to disgust, he, like his prototype of Huysmans's creation, "Des Esseintes," the Thebaide raffinée of "A Rebours," must hide himself away far from the world, in some retreat where he might deaden the discordant sounds of the rumblings of inflexible life, as one deadens the street with straw where an important or beloved one is sick. This retreat was Paris and there we must leave him making scenic plays and erudite verse for a Russian ballerina, and working out his destiny in contemplation of death and in planning the selection of warriors for Valhalla.

We are not concerned with his conduct or with his morals. We are concerned with his activities to divert and instruct us, and the influence that his efforts had upon the people of his time. He wrote artistically perfect novels; his poetry is the highest form of lyric expression; he made his dramas the revivification of the elements of Greek tragedy; and he strove to prove that Eros was unconquerable by priest, sage, or warrior. Now, with the world in ferment, they are the only earnest for our acceptation of his assurance that he can shape the fate of Italy more acceptably than its statesmen.

Before the Great War he had practically passed from the stage of letters. That epochal occurrence resurrected him. We can wait to hear what posterity will say of him.

[CHAPTER IV
THE FUTURIST SCHOOL OF ITALIAN WRITERS]

The Italians are a people of great emotional complexity, displaying a strange mixture of idealism and realism. They are at present engaged in constructing an edifice which shall be the admiration of the world for all time, to wit, a third Italy. Naturally the designers, the architects, the builders and the prospective inhabitants hope that it will be more ideal, more commodious, more adapted to its purposes than its predecessors. To the sympathetic observer, however, they appear to limit themselves narrowly to old building material.

There is nothing which mirrors the individual and composite mind of a country so illuminatingly as its literature. The man craving for power prefers the allegiance of a country's song-writers to that of its lawgivers. That a tremendous change has taken place to-day, not only in the songs of Italy but in all her literature, must be admitted. This change has been in process for a generation and is going on with increasing rapidity.

Italian literature is now going through a phase quite as distinct as that which characterized the romanticism initiated by Manzoni and which ended with the advent of Carducci. It would be difficult to find a word which would adequately express the spirit of it—perhaps the most descriptive one is protest. The new writers protest against the social, political, and religious acceptances of the past fifty years. They object to the acceptance of alleged facts substantiated only by tradition; they refuse adherence to teachings, doctrines, modes of thought and expression merely because they are old; they reject dogma originating in self-constituted authority, no matter how long or by whom it has been sanctioned and privileged, no matter how securely rooted. They will have none of the conventionalism which is out of harmony with the present conditions of life and with the present yearning for liberty. They stand against the teaching that the flesh must be punished in order that the soul may be purified, as they do against all slavish stereotypy, moss-covered convention, and archaic laws.

They claim instead that the best of life is to be found in purposeful action; that life should be speeded up, and that every one should be encouraged to live fully for the advantage that may come to himself, to those to whom he is beholden, and to the world. They advocate the strenuous life and invite the new and unforeseen, while urging exploration of untrodden fields and especially determination of things called inaccessible and unrealizable. They advocate equal life for men and women, and seek to give to such words as "patriotism" and "idealism" a fuller significance, so that the former shall not mean the heroic idealization of commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a people but a love of liberty and a knowledge, recognition, and appreciation of what other people and other countries are attempting and accomplishing; and that the latter may be applied to the affairs of life and not to the affairs of the imagination.

This movement, in Italy, was begun by a group of men who called themselves Futurists and, if that name can be dissociated from the connotation that is given to it when applied to art, I see no objection to it. It has been influenced by the French Symbolists of the preceding generation, Baudelaire, de Goncourt, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Huysmans, Rimbaud, whose work so profoundly influenced the course of French literature. Like this school the self-styled futuristic writers of Italy revolt against rhetoric and against tradition. Therefore they reject equally the ardent classicism of Carducci and D'Annunzio's decadent blend of idealism and realism, the crass, slavish Gallicism of Brocchi, the Scandinavian genuflections of Bracco and the Shavian imitations of Pirandello. In protest against all these they seek the full liberty of the written word, as the evangel of socialism seeks the liberty of the individual. Not from other writers but from reality itself, or from the depths of their own imaginations, they have received a vision and this vision they demand the right to evoke in others, by what words or what images they will. The art of expression should be speeded up, abbreviated, and epitomized, while the love of profound essentials is cultivated. To borrow from England's singer of materialistic grandeur and promise, they

" ... want the world much more the world;
Men to men and women to women—all
Adventure, courage, instinct, passion, power."

And in addition, as true Futurists, they want us to have constantly in mind what happened to Lot's wife when she looked back to see how high the flames rose over Sodom and Gomorrah.

The leaders of the Futuristic movement in Italy were Guillaume Apollinaire, then editor of Les Soirées de Paris, and F. T. Marinetti of Milan.

One thing can be said of Signor Marinetti, the pope of Futurism, which no one, I fancy, will deny. He is the most amusing writer in Italy. His idea of beauty is a massive building of concrete in course of construction with the scaffoldings lovingly embracing it. His idea of ugliness is a curve of any kind—save in the feminine body. "Parole in libertà," words free from syntactical shackles are the words with which we shall fight the battle of the future. They are the dynamite which will blow asunder literary Monte Testaccio, in which are buried the useless literary labors of his forebears but which shall also prepare the soil for a fertility that it has never possessed. Dynamism is the master-key. No artificer of the past or wizard of the future can construct a lock that it will not readily open, and as for political manacles they are as fragile as rubber bands when confronted with the doctrines of his new book, "Democrazia Futurista."

Signor Marinetti has no delusions of grandeur; he only pretends that he has. Nor is he the victim of a mental disorder which is characterized by loss of insight and megalomania. It is gratifying to be able to make this diagnosis of one of Italy's literary leaders. It offsets the diagnosis of general paresis made of Woodrow Wilson by one of Mr. Marinetti's fellow citizens and published with such elaborate attempts of substantiation in the Giornale di Italia. He merely overestimates his intellectual and emotional possessions, but he says many clever things and makes some prophecies that are likely to come through. The last European ruler who talked and acted as Signor Marinetti does got a bad spill, as is now fairly widely known. In reality, Marinetti is a Bolshevik who amuses himself behind a mask, but not all the principles of Bolshevism are bad by any means, nor even are they new. The most telling way of making a statement is to overstate it. The most successful way of getting a bad smell out of a house is to burn the house; then, if you have a good plan and plenty of time, money, and building material, you can construct yourself a house free from bad odors. However, there are other ways of making it a very livable and beautiful house, but why one should object to Mr. Marinetti's building his own house his own way is difficult to understand, unless in so doing it he makes himself such a nuisance to his neighbors that they cannot tolerate him. So far he has not done that, but when he joins force with Signor Bruno Corra, as he has in "L'Isola dei Baci" ("The Island of Kisses"), he comes perilously near it.

Apollinaire, a Pole whose real name was Kostrowitski, was born in Rome and lived in Italy until late childhood, when he went to France, where he remained until his death in 1919. He had a tremendous influence upon many of the young symbolist writers of Italy, comparable to that exercised by Stéphane Mallarmé on the young writers in the '80's and '90's. One of them wrote at the time of his death: "Hero of thought and of art, idealist, philosopher, genuine poet, prophetic theorist and critic, sublime soul, comrade, joyous, generous, he was also in the last years of his life a hero of humanity."

The most important figure of the school has been Giovanni Papini, who has gathered about him in Florence a coterie which includes Ardengo Soffici, the painter, critic, and novelist; Aldo Palazzeschi, poet; Alberto Savinio, wanderer, musician, and litterateur; and a long list of names more or less ancillary to Marinetti, some of which I shall mention later.

Papini, who is considered at length in another chapter, does not admit that he is a Futurist. As he puts it, he did not marry Futurism; it was for him one of many intellectual adventures, a mistress that left an indelible impression on him. He simply passed through Futurism's influence and at the same time gave momentum to the best of that school, to Palazzeschi, Govoni, Boccioni, Folgore. Then he proceeded alone, after having become persuaded that it had become too popular and consequently less refined and select, and after the hazardous and aristocratic little group had become a species of low, bigoted democracy into which any one could enter who dangled a rosary of incomprehensible words. He left it in company with Soffici and Palazzeschi and soon Carrà and others followed his example. Thus, on the death of Boccioni, the first generation of Futuristic writers reformed or disappeared.

Then there are many young men carrying the banner of literature in Italy to-day who do not call themselves Futurist, and whose writings contain less of the grotesque, which has been made familiar to Italian readers by Marinetti's "Zang Tumb Tumb." They are men of the stamp of Antonio Beltramelli, Mario Mariani, Luigi Morselli, Gino Rocca, Salvator Gotta, Lorenzo Montano, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Raffale Calzini, Enrico Cavacchioli, Alfredo Grilli, and a score of others who not alone have ideas but who keenly sense the composite world-thought, who believe that the era of Big Business will reach its apogee when it weds Big Justice, and who know how to express their ideas with explosive rhythmic eloquence and with distinction of form.

It would be presumptuous on my part to attempt to select the winners entered in the great sweepstakes of literary fame in Italy, with no qualification for prophecy or judgment than a love of literature and a lifelong ardent consumption of it. I shall, therefore, content myself with brief discussion of the work of some of these younger writers with the particular end in view of suggesting to others the pleasure and profit that may result from more intimate acquaintance with them.

About ten years ago there began to appear in the Florentine publication, La Voce, a series of articles critical and interpretative of French art. It is difficult now to believe that Cézanne, Courbet, Renoir, Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the school of impressionists and neo-impressionists was so little known in Italy as they were at the time of the appearance of these articles from the pen of Ardengo Soffici, a painter by training and profession enrolled in the Futuristic movement. He was, in reality, the first to speak in Italy with appreciation and intelligence of the tendencies in French art shown in the last half-century which have to-day had such a stamp of profound approval put upon them. These criticisms attracted much attention from the first, and they have since been republished under the title of "Scoperte e Massacri" ("Discoveries and Massacres"), and to-day they constitute a trustworthy guide to the schools mentioned both in presentation and in description.

They were quite unlike previous criticisms, more particularly in a note of challenge, of insolence, and of prophecy. His judgments were stated with a firmness and tranquillity that savored of the dogmatic, and, although time has shown him to have been mistaken in his estimate of some of the artists discussed—Gauguin, for instance—it has corroborated most of them with remarkable accuracy. In a small way he did for Italian readers what Mr. MacColl did for English readers in his "Nineteenth Century Art," for, like that writer, he is an artist with a fastidious temperament who knows how to write.

Since that time Signor Soffici has published nearly a score of books—romances, criticisms, fragments which show him to be a clear thinker with a pungent style, writing what he thinks and not what he cribs from others, and not continually advertising himself as the last cry of intelligence or the most perfect type of superman. His first book was called "Ignoto Toscano" ("An Unknown Tuscan"), and appeared in 1909, but it was not until the publication of "Lemmonio Boreo" two years later that it was realized that there had appeared a writer with a definite message: a protest against the utter triviality and purposelessness of Italian middle-class life.

The hero, an artist, who would reform many customs of the land, went about the countryside accompanied by two aids, one chosen for physical strength, the other for his "promoter" type of mind. Their encounters with the predatory innkeeper, with the peculating clerk, with the industrious stone-breaker of the roads, with the pilferer of the farm or the barn, and with the pulchritudinous peasant sitting picturesquely in her cart or gossiping in the village constitute the substance of the book. It was planned to have it run into several volumes, but it stopped after the first one, without accomplishing any of the reforms that the hero had essayed.

Then the writer reverted to art again and published a book on Cubism and one on Cubism and Futurism. Soon he published Giornale di Bordo, a diary of sentiment and philosophy—thoughts engendered by various environments, by reading, and by reflection. In the most casual way the author reveals his impressionable and poetic nature. They are not profound or epoch-making thoughts. They are merely the thoughts of a sane, healthy, artistic mind bathing and refreshing itself in the beauties of nature and contrasting them with the ugliness of most of man's handiwork.

Then came two books about the outgrowth of the military life. "Kubilek" is named after a hill on the Bainsizza Tableland where the author fought and was wounded. It gives a picture of the Italian as a soul which will be recognized as true to life by every one who has had to do with him. No one can read it without feeling an admiration and an affection for that extraordinarily loyal being the Italian soldier who tolerates hardship with equanimity and without complaint and who is so appreciative of anything done for his comfort or welfare. "La Ritirata del Friuli" ("The Retreat from Friuli") is not up to the author's standard.

The next book, a very small one, "La Giostra dei Sensi" ("The Joust of the Senses"), is a portrayal of the capacity shown by a "lost soul" for radiating unselfish love upon an individual who comes to her for meretricious contact but who stays to add to his spiritual stature. The scene is laid in Naples and the author utilizes the sheer beauty of the place and picturesqueness of the people to give an artistic setting for the description of the jousts. It could not possibly be published in England unless the publisher aspired to "languish" in prison.

Of the many questions I have asked in Italy none has been so unsatisfactorily answered as "Do you let your young folk read that book and what effect does it have?" No one could think of calling Soffici a pornographic writer. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that he is one of the most respected and admired of all the young school of Italian writers, and yet there are passages in the book now under discussion coarser and more vulgar than any in the "Satyricon." Despite this it is not a circumstance to the recent book of a seventeen-year-old girl of Rome, Margherita Emplosi Gherardi, entitled "Il Nudo nelle Anime." It is dedicated to all those who deny that the youthful mind has not the capacity, discernment, liberty, and daring to envisage and interpret the painful mysteries of the human soul. There are few things more disgusting in literature, "Gamiana" excluded, than the sketch entitled "The Impure Hour," for women only.

His remaining books, "Statue e Fantocci" ("Statues and Dolls"), are made up chiefly of critical reviews, many of which have appeared in journals. They show that the writer has a mastery of literary technic and an understanding of modern art and literature creditable to himself and to his country. He can be satirical, caustic, sarcastic, but he is never brutal. He can be an ardent admirer, a valorous champion, a sympathetic interpreter, a critical friend, and a prejudiced judge, but he is never an implacable, insensate enemy, nor a literary fiend. Moreover, one does not gather from his writings that he is what is called the "whole thing" from the literary standpoint.

Signor Soffici has got some bad habits from Papini. Among these are: saying old things as if they never had been said before; taking on an air of complacency after the delivery of a sentiment or a conviction in no wise epoch-making; believing that all his geese are swans and the geese of others decoys; that his every thought is a jewel which people are frenzied to possess unless they are too stupid; and saying trivial things with the subtly conveyed insinuation that the reader should, if he is perspicacious and cultured, find a deep significance in them.

He is yet a long way from his full stature, but he is growing.

Aldo Palazzeschi (1885-) is one of the youngest of the Futuristic group who has gained enduring fame as a poet. His first volume of verses, "Cavalli Bianchi" ("White Horses"), which was published when he was twenty years old, showed him to be a youth of sensibility and originality, with capacity for tuneful verse and for dainty sentiment daintily expressed. The publication of a second volume, entitled "Lanterna" ("The Lantern"), two years later, fully justified the expectations of those who were attracted by the little gems of his early verse. But it was not until 1909, on the publication of a volume entitled "The Poems of Aldo Palazzeschi," that it was realized that there had come upon the scene a poet who might quite easily get a fame equal to that of Carducci or Pascoli.

His poems not only showed the influence of Apollinaire and Marinetti, but also of Whitman, of Mallarmé, of Rimbaud, of Laforgue, and of other French writers. The dyed-in-the-wool critics saw in much of his work clownishness and infantilism, especially in such productions as "E lasciatemi divertire." They thought it should be construed: "And let me divert myself with insane-asylum poetry." They were quite right from their standpoint, but a fellow poet whose emotional mechanism is not so equilibrated as that of the sort of man called normal, would be likely to see in it something of beauty and of merit which the latter could not see, and ask: "Why should not the poet divert himself?" It is to him what exercise is to the average man, and he speaks of it, in fact is proud of it, just as the average man is proud of his golf score when he gets it in that Elysian field, "under ninety."

Those who do not see in Palazzeschi's poetry an adhesion to a certain school of philosophy, an advocacy of certain ethical systems, a restatement of others' thoughts and teachings, miss the very essence of his contribution. This is his capacity to present the world around us in colors which, if not new, at least have been recognized only since the advent of the impressionistic painter. So illuminated, it presents facets of beauty that make appeal to that which within us mediates and interprets pleasure.

In addition to this, he has an extraordinary sense of the fantastic, the grotesque, the panoplied. His eye is microscopic and his mind is telescopic, and his soul waves tend to a rhythm which is akin to that of genius when he reveals them and describes them to others, as he does, for instance, in the "Villa Celeste" ("The Celestial House"); the average man (who is attuned to interpret some poetic waves) realizes that the soul of this young man is the generating station of genuine poetical energy. He puts a reflector before his soul and it reflects the waves in our direction.

"Io metto una lente
dinanzi al mio cuore,
per farlo vedere alla gente."

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.

[CHAPTER V
GIOVANNI PAPINI AND THE FUTURISTIC LITERARY MOVEMENT IN ITALY]

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.

"They cannot grasp it, cannot bear to listen.
The thing I have to tell, unthought before,
Demands another language."

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

"On stepping stones we reach to higher dreams,
And ever high and higher must we climb,
Casting aside our burdens as we go,
Till we have reached the mountain-tops sublime,
Where purged from care and dross the free winds flow."

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.

[CHAPTER VI
TWO NOISY ITALIAN SCHOOLMASTERS]

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.

Idling in Italy: Studies of literature and of life

IDLING IN ITALY