FAREWELL LOVE!
British Library
of
Continental Fiction.
Guy de Maupassant.
_PIERRE AND JEAN._
Matilde Serao.
_FAREWELL, LOVE._
Jonas Lie.
_NIOBE._
Count Lyon Tolstoi.
_WORK WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT._
Juan Valera.
_DOÑA LUZ._
Don Armando Palacio Valdés.
_THE GRANDEE._
Gemma Ferruggia.
_WOMAN'S FOLLY._
Karl Emil Franzos.
_THE CHIEF JUSTICE._
Matilde Serao.
_FANTASY._
Rudolf Golm.
_THE OLD ADAM AND THE NEW EVE._
Ivan Gontcharoff.
_A COMMON STORY._
J. P. Jacobsen.
_SIREN VOICES._
Joseph Ignatius Kraszewski.
_THE JEW._
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.
_IN GOD'S WAY._
[Illustration: MATILDE SERAO]
[Illustration]
MATILDE SERAO
FAREWELL LOVE!
A Novel
BY
MATILDE SERAO
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN
BY
Mrs. HENRY HARLAND
LONDON:
LONDON BOOK CO.
1906
(ALL RIGHTS RESERVED)
_SPECIAL LIMITED SUBSCRIPTION EDITION._
_To
MY DEAD FRIEND
... et ultra?_
_M. S._
INTRODUCTION
The most prominent imaginative writer of the latest generation in
Italy is a woman. What little is known of the private life of Matilde
Serao (Mme. Scarfoglio) adds, as forcibly as what may be divined from
the tenour and material of her books, to the impression that every
student of literary history must have formed of the difficulties
which hem in the intellectual development of an ambitious girl.
Without unusual neglect, unusual misfortune, it seems impossible
for a woman to arrive at that experience which is essential to the
production of work which shall be able to compete with the work of
the best men. It is known that the elements of hardship and enforced
adventure have not been absent from the career of the distinguished
Italian novelist. Madame Serao has learned in the fierce school of
privation what she teaches to us with so much beauty and passion in
her stories.
Matilde Serao was born on the 17th of March 1856, in the little town
of Patras, on the western coast of Greece. Her father, Francisco
Serao, was a Neapolitan political exile, her mother a Greek princess,
the last survivor of an ancient noble family. I know not under what
circumstances she came to the Italian home of her father, but it was
probably in 1861 or soon afterwards that the unification of Italy
permitted his return. At an early age, however, she seems to have
been left without resources. She received a rough education at the
Scuola Normale in Naples, and she obtained a small clerkship in the
telegraph office at Rome.
Literature, however, was the profession she designed to excel in, and
she showed herself a realist at once. Her earliest story, if I do not
mistake, was that minute picture of the vicissitudes of a post-office
which is named _Telegraphi dello Stato_ ("State Telegraphs"). She
worked with extreme energy, she taught herself shorthand, and in 1878
she quitted the post-office to become a reporter and a journalist. To
give herself full scope in this new employment, she, as I have been
assured, cut short her curly crop of hair, and adopted on occasion
male costume. She soon gained a great proficiency in reporting,
and advanced to the writing of short sketches and stories for
the newspapers. The power and originality of these attempts were
acknowledged, and the name of Matilde Serao gradually became one
of those which irresistibly attracted public attention. The writer
of these lines may be permitted to record the impression which more
than ten years ago was made upon him by reading a Neapolitan sketch,
signed by that then wholly obscure name, in a chance number of the
Roman _Fanfulla_.
The short stories were first collected in a little volume in 1879.
In 1880 Matilde Serao became suddenly famous by the publication of
the charming story _Fantasia_ ("Fantasy"), which has already been
presented to an English public in the present series of translations.
It was followed by a much weaker study of Neapolitan life, _Cuore
Infermo_ ("A Heart Diseased"). In 1881 she published "The Life and
Adventures of Riccardo Joanna," to which she added a continuation in
1885. It is not possible to enumerate all Madame Serao's successive
publications, but the powerful romance, _La Conquista di Roma_
("The Conquest of Rome"), 1882, must not be omitted. This is a very
careful and highly finished study of bureaucratic ambition, admirably
characterised. Since then she has written in rapid succession several
volumes of collected short stories, dealing with the oddities of
Neapolitan life, and a curious novel, "The Virtue of Cecchina," 1884.
Her latest romances, most of them short, have been _Terno Secco_ ("A
Dry Third"), a very charming episode of Italian life, illustrating
the frenzied interest taken in the public lotteries, 1887; _Addio
Amore_ ("Farewell Love!"), 1887, which is here, for the first time,
published in English; _La Granda Fiamma_, 1889; and _Sogno di una
notte d'estate_ ("A Summer Night's Dream"), 1890.
The method of Matilde Serao's work, its qualities and its defects,
can only be comprehended by those who realise that she came to
literature through journalism. When she began life, in 1878, it was
as a reporter, a paragraph-writer, a woman of all work on any Roman
or Neapolitan newspaper which would give her employment. Later on,
she founded and carried on a newspaper of her own, the _Corriere
di Roma_. After publishing this lively sheet for a few years, she
passed to Naples, and became the editor of _Le Corriere di Napoli_,
the paper which enjoys the largest circulation of any journal in the
south of Italy. She has married a journalist, Eduardo Scarfoglio, and
all her life has been spent in ministering to the appetites of the
vast, rough crowd that buys cheap Italian newspapers. Her novels have
been the employment of her rare and broken leisure; they bear the
stamp of the more constant business of her life.
The naturalism of Matilde Serao deserves to be distinguished from
that of the French contemporaries with whom she is commonly classed.
She has a fiercer passion, more of the true ardour of the South, than
Zola or Maupassant, but her temperament is distinctly related to
that of Daudet. She is an idealist working in the school of realism;
she climbs, on scaffolding of minute prosaic observation, to heights
which' are emotional and often lyrical. But her most obvious merit is
the acuteness with which she has learned to collect and arrange in
artistic form the elements of the town life of Southern Italy. She
still retains in her nature something of the newspaper reporter's
quicksilver, but it is sublimated by the genius of a poet.
EDMUND GOSSE.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PART I 1
I. 3
II. 19
III. 46
IV. 70
V. 86
VI. 114
VII. 128