Chapter VII: Improvisional Italian Literature of To-Day and Yesterday

I never fully appreciated how hazardous it is to speak of the literature of a foreign country until I read an article in the _Tribuna_ of Rome, signed Mario Vinciguerra, on Michaud's "Mystiques et Realistes Anglo-Saxons," which seeks to disparage the originality of some of our Transcendentalists, particularly Emerson, and to trace tendencies in our literature. I hope that I may be more successful in reviewing some of Italy's recent literature and in making an estimate of the merit of those who are responsible for it than Signor Vinciguerra, who says the two most potent romancers of living American writers are Jack London and Upton Sinclair. At least I shall not say that Guido da Verona and Salvator Gotta are the most potent romancers of Italy, and even I shall not go so far as to say that Luciano Zuccoli is. Any writer who would maintain that "Before the breaking out of the war the books that made the greatest stir in the United States were Upton Sinclair's 'A Captain of Industry,' 'The Jungle,' 'The Metropolis,' and Jack London's 'The Iron Heel,'" would not write himself so hopelessly ignorant of American literature as he would were he to claim that Harold Bell Wright and Rex Beach were our leading novelists. Such contention would show either unfamiliarity with our literature or dearth of understanding.

Previous to the war there was no such pouring out of literature in Italy as there was in England, and there were few writers of fiction whose output or content could be compared with that of Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Hugh Walpole, Mr. Gilbert Cannan, Mr. Compton Mackenzie, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, and others. D'Annunzio had long since ceased to write romances. Matilda Serao was in the twilight of her years and literary career. Grazia Deledda was displaying stereotypy and Zuccoli reploughed the familiar acre. French fiction was the favorite pabulum of the Italian who would kill time, dispel ennui, and combat dearth. Since then, however, there has been a great change and there is every indication that Italians will provide literature for their countrymen which will at least obviate the necessity of importation.

That it has not yet been accomplished, however, must be admitted in the beginning. The young writers are like birds trying their wings, aerial pilots striving for altitude tests. From their performances one is justified in hoping, indeed believing, that they will go far and soar high, but up to date Verga dominates the field of Italian fiction just as Hardy dominates the field of English fiction.

No reference to the literature of to-day should fail to take note of the fact that much of the most important and suggestive fiction does not appear in book form, or at least not for a long time, but in periodicals such as the monthlies and quarterlies, and also in such publications as _Novella_ and _Comoedia_. No one can gain a familiarity with the hundred or more active writers of fiction in Italy who does not see and read such publications. They lend themselves readily to brevity and to that speeding up which the Futurists urge, and they tend to do away with the long-drawn-out descriptions which are the despair of the average reader.

Another feature of the newer literature which augurs well for it is that its theme is not wholly portrayal of the genesic instinct and the multiform perversions to which it has been subject by culture and which Christianity has been unable materially to influence. We realize how large the subject has bulked in the literature of every nation, but it is probably not beyond the truth to say that it has bulked larger in the modern literature of Italy even than of France.

It is natural that recent literature has begun to occupy itself with the conditions of the people and to display awareness of the new significance that they are giving to the words liberty and equality, and an attempt is being made to reconcile preaching and practising in their bearings on life here and hereafter.

The acceptable fiction of to-day will reflect in some measure the world thought, or it will soothe man's cravings for assurance of future life and strengthen his belief in it. It is idle to deny that the pitch of man's thought to-day is materialistic, though his unconscious mind is steeped in the mystic. Could we but teach future generations the pleasure-potency of the imagination, we should give them an asset that would enhance the usefulness and efficiency of their lives comparable to health. But for some years at least there has been a mistaken notion that the chief sources of pleasure are responding to the call of the instincts, the fortuitous offerings of chance, and awaiting the day when the vital sap will return from the branches of that universal tree upon which we are the leaves to the trunk, that the spirit may be restored to the Infinite. "Poor vaunt of life, indeed, were man but formed to feed on joy, to solely seek and find and feast."

Pedagogy has never concerned itself with our imaginative life. That is left to endowment and to chance, which sometimes shows itself in the shape of a literary critic. Fortunate, indeed, is the people or nation that breeds competent critics, it matters not what field of activity they cultivate, letters, science, or theology. Italy has had many such, but there is a greater dearth of them now than ever before. With the exception of Benedetto Croce there is perhaps no one of more than national reputation.

It is, perhaps, unwise to select from the considerable number of present-day literary critics the names of a few, but I hazard it. Emilio Cecchi, of the Rome _Tribuna_, is a versatile, scholarly writer, a thoughtful, judicious estimator of his fellow writers' works, and a critic who is not obsessed with the impulse that is supposed to dominate a certain type of Irishman, namely, to hit a head whenever he sees it. Giuseppe Prezzolini, who has been very intimate with the Florentine group headed by Papini and who has written a critical estimate of his writings and made a glowing statement of his personal charms, has a sympathy and admiration for the writers of what may be called the new school. That does not prevent him from being a keen observer, a logical thinker with a judicious capacity to weigh the evidence presented by his fellow writers in their claim for popularity and fame. He is a type of literary man new to Italy, a keen critic, a clear thinker, a master of literary expression who devotes much of his energy to his publishing-house and to _La Voce_. His writings are chiefly political and critical, "Il Sarto Spirituale" ("The Spiritual Tailor"), "L'Arte di Persuadere" ("The Art of Persuading"), "Cos' è il Modernismo?" ("What is Modernism?"). He has done more to introduce and bring forward the potent group of young writers than any one in Italy.

Lionello Fiumi, a young poet and critic, has published contributions that are noteworthy, but he has given no real capacity to analyze evidence, to sum it up, or to interpret it judiciously. His last effort to prove that Corrado Giovi is the poetic sun of Italy to-day was anæmic and feeble. The antithesis of him is Gherardo Marone, who thinks that Futurism and anarchism are synonymous, but the agnostic in religion sees no choice between Catholicism and Presbyterianism. He also maintains the extraordinary position that a great poet must needs be a great thinker. He is a very young man and his "Difesa di Dulcinea" ("Defense of Dulcinea") gives promise that when he gets in his stride he will go near the winning post.

Vincenzo Cardarelli is a literary critic whose writings are characterized by erudition, sympathy, understanding, and a sense of responsibility. He has published a volume of poems entitled "Prologhi" in line with the symbolist school of France, and especially Stephane Mallarmé.

Another critic who senses the trend of Italian literature and puts correct interpretation upon it is G. A. Borghese.

Two of the popular writers of fiction of to-day, Alfredo Panzini and Luigi Pirandello, I have discussed in a separate chapter.

Luciano Zuccoli is the most conspicuous and successful exponent in Italy of the type of fiction which was thrown upon the world for the first time now nearly two hundred years ago by Samuel Richardson, father of the novel of sentimental analysis. Though Zuccoli has a score of novels and romances to his credit, he would seem to be now at the height of his fecundity. The literary school in Italy which is the outgrowth of the Futuristic movement points the contemptuous finger at him and scoffs at his productions, but he has, nevertheless, a large following and is a writer of much skill. His success depends largely upon taking characters of the Borghesia and exposing them to the ordinary incidents of life, such as love, matrimony, war, politics, and then depicting what comes "naturally" to some of the victims: disillusionment tugging at the leash until it snaps the illicit splicing of it to another snapped leash (for there is no divorce in Italy); conflict between patriotism and pacifism, and between sentiment and idealism from a political, social, and personal point of view. He has got far away from the simpler delineations of his earlier books, such as "La Freccia nel Fianco" ("The Arrow in the Flank"), in which the love of a sentimental girl of eighteen for a boy of eight, the son of a most dissolute noble who tends to follow in his father's footsteps, is featured, and the meticulous discussion of the daily life of male and female sybarites, who have chosen the smooth and easy road to destruction as it travels through Italy's wickedest city, Milan, as in "Fortunato in Amore" and have come to keep what might be called better company, the company of those whose infraction of convention is conditioned more by environment than by determination.

"L'Amore non c'è più" ("There Is No More Love") and "Il Maleficio occulto" ("Witchcraft") are other popular romances.

Virgilio Brocchi is a similar writer, though his writings have never had similar popularity. His most meritorious books have been "Mite" and "Le Aquile." His later books, such as "Isola Sonante," show the author's progress in literary craftsmanship. His last book, "Secondo il Cuor mio" ("According to My Heart"), shows that he has had his ear to the ground and has noticed that the chariot labelled "Public Taste in Letters" is being driven on a new road. There is a note of idealism in the conduct of Gigi Leoni, the artist passionately devoted to his art, in love with Merine Dialli, proud and rich; he refuses to accept her suggestion that he relinquish his art and do something that will lead to material success. After she has made a failure in matrimony with an army officer and returns to the artist, Zuccoli succeeds in drawing with masterly strokes the portrait of a real hero, who, when he perishes later on the field of battle, excites unreservedly the admiration of his readers. In reality it is a book in which passion, of life or of the senses, as it sways an attractive man full of nobility and of dreams, is depicted in the traditional idealistic manner.

The Harold Bell Wright of Italian fiction is Guido Da Verona, and this does Mr. Wright an injustice, for he has never written pornographically and Signor Da Verona has rarely written otherwise. But he is Italy's best-seller. It is depressing to think that really great romances, like the "I Malavoglia" of Verga, stories such as Capuana's "Passa L'Amore," or Renato Fucini's, or even Panzini's "La Madonna di Mamà," should have a sale of only a few thousand copies, while books of the character of "Mimi Bluette," the flower of Signor Da Verona's garden, should go up toward the hundred-thousand mark. It is an index of the salaciousness of the average person, whoever he may be. Any review of Italy's recent literature must mention "The Woman Who Invented Love," "Life Begins To-morrow," if for no other purpose than to show that there is a kind of literature in every country which has a great popularity. In Belgium its clientele is found in the prurient of other countries; in France the "best people" do not read it or say they do not; in England the public censor prohibits it; and we have Mr. Comstock and his successors. "Madeline," which has recently cost its guiltless publisher a fine, is "soft stuff" compared with "Mimi Bluette," and I doubt if Mr. George Moore could revoke any memories of his dead life that could hold a candle to some of Signor Da Verona's actual life.

There is little to be said in favor of his books that could not be said for narcotic-taking, gambling-hells, and underworld tango palaces. They have a glamour about them and an aroma that appeals to the feeble-minded, the inherently decadent, and the ennuyed idle. It is a realism whose reality exists only in a mind made lubricitous by cupidity.

Marino Moretti is one of the young writers whose short stories and romances have found much favor. There is an atmosphere of triviality, of lightness, of inconsequentiality about his writings which is an important part of his art. In reality he is a finished technician and an artist with a wonderful mastery of perspective and of color, and a commendable capacity for expression. His particular charm is that he creates an atmosphere or a situation, but does not insist upon giving a chemical analysis or physical description of either. When he takes you to a drawing-room or to the bathing-beach at the fashionable hour he does not insist on presenting you to every one or giving you a detailed history of their lives and particularly of their amatory tidal waves. Although he seems to give his clientele soft food, he does not insist on spoon-feeding them. In the guise of pap he gives them often thought-making pabulum.

Some of his popular books are "Il Sole del Sabato" ("Saturday's Sun"), "Guenda," "La Voce di Dio" ("The Voice of God"), and "Adamo ed Eva."

Antonio Beltramelli is another writer who has studied literary form to great purpose and with it he combines imaginative gifts of an exceptional order. His earlier books, short stories entitled "Anna Perena" and "I Primogeniti" ("First-born Sons"), were well received. He has recently come back to similar presentations in "La Vigna Vendemmiata" ("The Harvested Vineyard"), which while not revealing the spiritual growth which his admirers expected from him, shows him, nevertheless, to be a man of parts. His chief defect is his ignorance of behavioristic psychology which is nowhere better shown than in this collection of short stories, "La Madre," for instance. Moreover, it is an ambitious writer who makes a story of these unromantic facts; a stupid man with some of the characteristics of the ox and the rat is married to a gross, slovenly creature who deceives him. A friendly neighbor opens his eyes and he finds her and her paramour in the brake and cane around the vineyard. On his way thence he encounters the parish priest and asks him if one would be justified in meting out personal punishment to such transgressors. "Perhaps yes, perhaps no" is the reply. When he comes upon the guilty couple he kills the man with the blow of a stick, then falls back upon the priest's words for justification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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