|Any one who loves simplicity or respects sincerity, any one who feels
the tie binding us all together in the helplessness of our common
human life, and running from the lowliest as well as the highest to the
Mystery immeasurably above the whole earth, must find a rare and tender
pleasure in this simple story of an Italian fishing village. I cannot
promise that it will interest any other sort of readers, but I do not
believe that any other sort are worth interesting; and so I can praise
Signor Verga’s book without reserve as one of the most perfect pieces of
literature that I know.
When we talk of the great modern movement towards reality we speak
without the documents if we leave this book out of the count, for I can
think of no other novel in which the facts have been more faithfully
reproduced, or with a profounder regard for the poetry that resides
in facts and resides nowhere else. Signor Verdi began long ago, in his
_Vita dei Campi_ (“Life of the Fields”) to give proof of his fitness
to live in our time; and after some excursions in the region of French
naturalism, he here returns to the original sources of his inspiration,
and offers us a masterpiece of the finest realism.
He is, I believe, a Sicilian, of that meridional race among whom the
Italian language first took form, and who in these latest days have done
some of the best things in Italian literature. It is of the far South
that he writes, and of people whose passions are elemental and whose
natures are simple. The characters, therefore, are types of good and of
evil, of good and of generosity, of truth and of falsehood. They are
not the less personal for this reason, and the life which they embody
is none the less veritable. It will be well for the reader who comes
to this book with the usual prejudices against the Southern Italians to
know that such souls as Padron ’Ntoni and Maruzza la Longa, with their
impassioned conceptions of honor and duty, exist among them; and that
such love idyls as that of Mena and Alfio, so sweet, so pure, and the
happier but not less charming every-day romance of Alessio and Nunziata,
are passages of a life supposed wholly benighted and degraded. This
poet, as I must call the author, does again the highest office of
poetry, in making us intimate with the hearts of men of another faith,
race, and condition, and teaching us how like ourselves they are in all
that is truest in them. Padron ’Ntoni and La Longa, Luca, Mena, Alfio,
Nunziata, Alessio, if harshlier named, might pass for New England types,
which we boast the product of Puritanism, but which are really the
product of conscience and order. The children of disorder who move
through the story--the selfish, the vicious, the greedy, like Don
Sylvestro, and La Vespa, and Goosefoot, and Dumb-bell, or the merely
weak, like poor ’Ntoni Malavoglia--are not so different from our
own images either, when seen in this clear glass, which falsifies and
distorts nothing.
Few tales, I think, are more moving, more full of heartbreak than this,
for few are so honest. By this I mean that the effect in it is precisely
that which the author aimed at. He meant to let us see just what manner
of men and women went to make up the life of a little Italian town of
the present day, and he meant to let the people show themselves with the
least possible explanation or comment from him. The transaction of the
story is in the highest degree dramatic; but events follow one another
with the even sequence of hours on the clock. You are not prepared to
value them beforehand; they are not advertised to tempt your curiosity
like feats promised at the circus, in the fashion of the feebler novels;
often it is in the retrospect that you recognize their importance
and perceive their full significance. In this most subtly artistic
management of his material the author is most a master, and almost more
than any other he has the rare gift of trusting the intelligence of
his reader. He seems to have no more sense of authority or supremacy
concerning the personages than any one of them would have in telling
the story, and he has as completely freed himself from literosity as the
most unlettered among them. Under his faithful touch life seems mainly
sad in Trezza, because life is mainly sad everywhere, and because men
there have not yet adjusted themselves to the only terms which can
render life tolerable anywhere. They are still rivals, traitors,
enemies, and have not learned that in the vast orphanage of nature they
have no resource but love and union among themselves and submission to
the unfathomable wisdom which was before they were. Yet seen aright this
picture of a little bit of the world, very common and low down and far
off, has a consolation which no one need miss. There, as in every part
of the world, and in the whole world, goodness brings not pleasure, not
happiness, but it brings peace and rest to the soul and, lightens all
burdens; the trial and the sorrow go on for good and evil alike; only,
those who choose the evil have no peace.
W. D. Howells.