I believe that the novels of Mr Crawford of which the scene and the
characters are Italian are not among those of his works which are the
most generally popular. This fact, if it be a fact, must be due to the
general inability of his English and American public to appreciate their
accuracy of observation and lineation. Nearly all of them have qualities
which cannot be gauged by those to whom the nationality of his
personages in these works is unknown. In my own works, of which the
scene is in Italy, I have dealt almost exclusively with the Italian
peasantry. Mr Crawford has devoted his attention to the middle and the
higher classes. I do not think his portraiture of the Italian
aristocracy always redolent of the soil, but that of the lower and
middle classes is faithful to a wonderful degree. That side of Italian
life which is given in _Marzio's Crucifix_, for instance, is drawn with
an accuracy not to be surpassed. The whole of this story indeed is
admirable in its construction and execution. There is not a page one
would wish cancelled, and nothing could be added which would increase
its excellence. It is to my taste the _capo d'opera_ of all which he has
hitherto done.
I think in his studies of the Italian aristocracy he has given them less
charm and more backbone than they possess. He has drawn their passions
more visible and furious than they are, and their wills less mutable and
less feeble than they are in general. He seems to have mistaken their
obstinacy for strength, while, if he have perceived it, he has not
rendered that captivating courtesy and graceful animation which are so
lovable in them, and which render so many of their men and women so
irresistibly seductive. According to him they are a savage set of
_berserkers_, always cutting each other's throats, and he does not in
any way render that extreme politeness which so effectually conceals the
real thoughts of the Italian gentleman, and which never deserts him
except in rare moments of irresistible fury. No one remembers so
constantly as the Italian of all classes that language is given us to
conceal our thoughts, and no one lives so completely as the Italian does
from the cradle to the grave in strict concealment of his thoughts even
from his nearest and his dearest.
But in his Italian _genre_ pictures, and in portraiture of the people
whom we meet every day in society, Mr Crawford has a delightful pencil;
little side studies also of more humble persons, which many writers
would neglect, are charming in his treatment; take, for instance, the
old priest of Aquila in _Saracinesca_; with how few touches he is made
to live for us. We only see him once, but he will always remain in our
memory; in his whitewashed room with its sweet smell from the pot of
pinks, and his touching regret that he has never seen Rome, and at his
age cannot hope to do so.
His priests, by the way, are always excellently drawn, from the humble
village vicar to the learned and imposing cardinal. He has penetrated
alike their interiors and their characters with that skill which is only
born of sympathy, and it is therefore perhaps only natural that he has
not the faintest conception of the motives and views of the socialist
and republican whom he dreads and hates.
All these charming little details, like the pot of pinks, can only be
thoroughly appreciated by those who know intimately Italian character
and habits; but they abound, and show so much of fine observation and
delicate discernment in the author that one cannot forgive him for ever
beating the big drum of florid sensation.
Let me not be understood to mean that crime, or the impulse of crime, is
not a perfectly legitimate subject for the novelist; both can be made
so, but they are only so when treated as Mr Crawford himself treats them
in _Marzio's Crucifix_. When treated as he treats them in _To Leeward_
and _Greifenstein_ and _Casa Braccio_ they are merely coarse and
inartistic. He has a leaning towards melodrama which is chiefly to be
regretted because it mars and strains the style most natural to him, and
does not accord with his way of looking at life, which is not either
poetic or passionate, but slightly sad, and slightly humorous, modern
and instinctively superficial, superficial in that sense in which
modern society itself is so.
In _Marzio's Crucifix_ he is perfectly natural, and one cannot but wish
that he had never left that manner of treatment. Every motive therein is
natural, every character consistent with itself. This naturalness in his
characters is Mr Crawford's greatest attraction, and when he departs
from it, as he does in such detestable melodramas as the _Witch of
Prague_ and _Greifenstein_, he is no longer himself. It is hard to
understand that the same author can create the most delicate of
aquarelles and the most glaring of posters, or why one who can draw so
well and finely in silver-point can descend to daub with brooms in such
gross distemper. If this be the price of versatility, it were best not
to be versatile. But it is not versatility, because true versatility
consists in possessing a many-sided power which flashes like a jewel of
which all the facets are equally well cut. True versatility, moreover,
does not consist in the mere change of subject, but in the change of
style, of treatment of thought, in fact, the mutation of the entire mind
of an author, such as brings it into entire harmony with its fresh field
and its new atmosphere. There is no such change in these novels. Mr
Crawford is Mr Crawford always. As he never loses himself in his
creations, so he is always present in them to the reader; and his style
never varies, whether he treats of horrible psychological mysteries in
Prague or of pleasant carnival seasons in Rome.
He is not strong or forcible in tragedy. When it is incidental in his
stories like the murder of Montevarchi, or the attempted assassination
of Ser Tommaso, it is admirably sketched in; but when it forms the
structure and essence of a romance he fails entirely to give it
sublimity; it becomes in his hands a mere scarecrow, which makes us only
smile as its wooden hands beat the empty air. One feels that it is not
his natural element, that he does not like it or feel at home in it, and
has merely lent himself to it from some wrong impression that the public
requires it; due, perhaps, to the suggestion of some unwise publisher or
friend. The coarse melodrama with which some of his novels ends is not
in unison with the characters or the scope of his work. It is quite true
that, as murder is, in some circumstances, justified in actual life, so
in some circumstances it may be used as a _denouement_ in fiction with
perfect accuracy; yet it is always a violent ending which fully accords
with romance of wild life or peasant life, but always jars, unless
introduced with the most perfect skill, in stories of men and women of
the world; because the evil passions of this latter class of persons are
of a different quality, and find different modes of relief, from the
primitive and barbarous satisfaction of killing enemies or rivals. All
the influences and habits of society make it almost impossible for men
and women of society to become assassins.
Now Mr Crawford can draw men and women of the world so well that it is a
pity he so often goes out of his way to spoil his portraits of them with
the bowl and dagger taken from a different phase of life from that in
which they move.
He is always a gentleman, and he is at his best when writing of
gentlemen in the society which he knows so well. Duels are quite
natural in good society everywhere, except in England, and no one since
Charles Lever ever described them so well as Mr Crawford; but murders
are not general in the world of well-bred people, indeed are not very
often heard of out of the lowest strata of plebeian life.
In _Casa Braccio_ a fine motive, that of the peasant of Subiaco's
long-cherished vengeance, with its final satisfaction, both based on a
mistake, is wasted, because no one can care in the least for the man who
is slain, and the original sin committed by this victim (marriage with a
nun), although it seems so great to Mr Crawford, appears to us no sin at
all; so that his tragic end neither moves us nor satisfies in us any
sense of justice. What are admirably rendered and true to life in _Casa
Braccio_ are not Griggs and Gloria, or Angus Dalrymple and Maria
Addorata, but the peasants of Subiaco, Stefanone, with his
long-cherished vendetta, and his wife, Sora Nanna, who wears her lost
daughter's shoes because it would have been a sin to waste them. One
regrets that two persons so perfectly natural and well drawn should be
set on a pyre of flaring melodrama which obscures their portraits in its
smoke and flame. Why could he not give us a story of Subiaco, passionate
but natural, in which the action would have passed entirely in that
interesting and little-known part of the Sabine mountains?
When I use the term melodrama, I mean by it that which mimics the
tragic, but falls short of it; the tragic, imitated but so environed,
that it loses dignity and has something of the inflated and grotesque.
The melodrama in _Pietro Ghisleri_, in _Taquisara_, and in _The
Children of the King_ is this kind of melodrama; it does not move us for
a moment; we are, on the contrary, impatient of it in a modern period
and history, with neither of which it has any harmony. In the latter
story the conception of Rughero, though by no means new, is fine; but
the frame in which this mariner is set lacks all fitness for such a
figure; and the man whom he murders is not sinner enough, nor serious
enough in his actions, for the reader to be moved to pardon the act as
the author himself pardons it. If violent delights have violent endings,
violent endings need strong provocation and clear explanation; they
should appear to the reader to be inevitable, the offspring of an
unavoidable result. To the reader such a crime as this should appear to
be the inexorable justice of an inevitable retribution. But in the
violent _denouement_ of _The Children of the King_ the cause is trivial,
the act under the circumstances improbable, and the rude shock of it is
not in accordance with any of the other characters and with the light,
careless modernity of the setting of this story.
This defect of consistency, which is grave in literature, would be
ruinous on the stage where action is so much quicker, and where the
idiosyncrasies of each personage are so visible to the audience; and
such a fault is the more vexatious because it shows that the author was
never really absorbed in his own creations, was never so possessed with
them that they dominated him and made him do what they chose, as Bulwer
Lytton has said that the characters of every true novelist must do,
because a character once conceived is like a child, being once begotten,
it becomes what it must, we cannot control the subsequent shape it
takes.
Another defect of Mr Crawford's works is usually that their interest
flags towards the close, that this close is too abrupt, and that it
gives the reader the impression of the narrative being brought to an
untimely end because the writer no longer cared about narrating it. This
defect may be noticed in nearly all his stories, beginning with _Mr
Isaacs_, in which it is conspicuous; and is startlingly and irritatingly
visible in one of his latest, _Adam Johnstone's Son_; indeed, in the
last-named story the conclusion is obviously totally different from what
it was intended to be in the opening chapters. Now, a well-constructed
novel may please you or not, may be attractive or offensive, but it will
always be accurately conceived and harmoniously balanced; and nothing
animate or intimate will be introduced into it which has not some
bearing direct or indirect upon the plot. Nothing can be more incorrect
than to excite the expectations of the reader by indications which
result in nothing, sign-posts on a road which do but lead to a blank
wall.
A grave violation of this rule is frequently to be found in the Crawford
stories, no worse one than that in this story of Adam Johnstone's son,
where a long chapter is occupied by an incident with a brutal Neapolitan
carter on the Sorrento road. The man is knocked down by the hero, and
endeavours in return to stab him; carabineers arrive and arrest the
carter and not the Englishman (as in real life they unquestionably would
have done). The whole incident, related with much spirit, is obviously
only in its place, only pardonable as an episode, if the carter be
destined to appear again and sate his thirst for vengeance on the hero.
But he disappears from the scene for ever as the carabineers handcuff
him. We neither see nor hear any more of him, nor does the Englishman
hear any more of the matter, which in actual life certainly would have
caused him much annoyance at the local tribunal. The appetite of the
reader should not be tempted by dishes, which become a mere Barmecide's
feast, in this manner. Some intention must have been in the author's
mind when he created this scene. Why did he not carry out his intention?
In this manner many combinations and situations of the most interesting
and uncommon kind are deliberately thrown away unused. He frequently
introduces personages about whom he excites our liveliest interest, and
whom he then forsakes or dismisses with an indifference which the reader
does not share. It is as though a painter painted into his canvas
numerous figures which he has never finished, though he sends out his
picture as a finished work. The only novels of his which are entirely
free from this defect are the _Cigarette Maker_, the _Three Fates_, and
_Marzio's Crucifix_, and here I cannot resist (though it is not within
the scope of this article, since its venue is America) pointing out how
delicate, subtle, and clever is that story entitled the _Three Fates_.
There is little movement in it, no incident of any note, its interest
lies entirely in the development of character and in the evolution of
feeling, but these are so treated that they suffice to hold the reader's
charmed attention, and the study of the man whose hesitations and
tergiversations make the subject of it is one which may be caviare to
the general, but which may be read again and again with sympathy and
curiosity by those who can appreciate psychological problems. The
persons in it are such as we may have known to-day or may know
to-morrow; and the working of their minds and inclinations is traced
with a masterly skill, and is as correct as a physiologist's diagram of
the nervous system.
What to me is especially attractive in Mr Crawford's novels is the
atmosphere of good breeding which one breathes in them. One feels in the
company of a well-bred man. Their philosophy, their experiences, their
views, are all those of a man of the world; and there is in them a
tolerance and a total absence of prejudice (except in religious and
political matters) which are refreshing, and which are a fair approach
to, if not an actual attainment of, unbiassed liberality. There is in
them no enthusiasm for anything, no altruism, no deep emotion. They are
unfortunately entirely lacking in any perception of those myriads of
other lives not human, but as sentient as the human, such as vibrates in
every line of Pierre Loti's works. We have never in his novels any
profound tenderness like that with which the Freres Rosny speak of the
semi-humanity of inanimate things, or show us the dog gambolling on the
wayside turf in all the simple joy of its youth and its pleasure in
existence. To Mr Crawford as to Peter Bell, a primrose by the river's
side is a primrose, and it is nothing more, and the thrush or the linnet
which sings in the hawthorn above the primrose roots for him has no
existence. He has the American's indifference to all created things
which are not human. There are no animals in his books except two poor
terriers (who have their necks broken by the odious lover in _To
Leeward_), and the unhappy cat, introduced only to be poisoned in
_Taquisara_. There is nothing which indicates that he cares for nature
in any of its phases, and he calls the cicala a locust.
In Italy he lives only for the people around him as he would live in
Pall Mall, or Broadway, or the Champs Elysees. That passion with which
Italy has inspired Shelley, Byron, George Sand, De Musset, Owen
Meredith, even the calm analytic mind of Taine, has never touched him.
He has never felt the ecstasy which is embodied in that single phrase of
Taine's, 'On nage dans la lumiere.' One would say that the moonlight
shining on the waters of Tiber, under the bridge of St Angelo, is no
more to him than a flash-light illumining a grain-elevator on the
Hudson. All which is still Italy, of colour, of perfume, of light, of
legend, of rapture, of emotion, has wholly escaped him; he has never
felt its _hysterica passio_; he has never known its eternal youth, he
has never seen its lost gods rise and walk through its blossoming grass
as the star rays shine in the white cups of the narcissus of its fields.
But of the people who pass him in the Corso and on the Chiaja, who shake
hands with him at Montecitorio and on the Lung' Arno, who lounge and
talk with him at the cafes, and the legations, and the public gardens,
he is an admirable student, and an admirable photographer.
One of the most admirable of his portraits is that of the young Don
Orsino, the hero of the novel of that name. Sant' Ilario, like his
gallant old father, might be a North German, a Hungarian, or a Scottish
noble, his temperament is, indeed, much more northern than southern; but
Don Orsino,[5] his son, is exactly that which he is represented to be, a
youthful Italian of high rank, who has been educated at an English
public school, and has all the vanity, and egotism, and _secheresse de
coeur_ of modern youth in him. The type of the modern youngster of
rank was never so well drawn as in this story of his _debut_ in
speculation and his failure in it. His character is one very difficult
to draw, that coldness, that self-reliance, that self-sufficiency, which
are something at once harder and less contemptible than conceit, the
qualities which will make him successful later on but will never make
him lovable or tender; the instincts of race which hold him back from
meanness but are not strong enough to raise him to nobility, attenuated
as they have been by modern education, all these are rendered with the
utmost skill till the boy, in his sterile and self-satisfied modernity,
lives before us, and vain and selfish though he be, we are loth to part
from him, and curious to know what his future will become. In his
history that one supreme charm of Mr Crawford's, of which I have
previously spoken, his naturalness, is conspicuous; nothing can be more
natural than the relations of Don Orsino with his mother and father and
those who surround him, and the crafty _affaristi_ who get him into
their meshes of speculation.
[Footnote 5: A novel called _Corleone_ reproduces Don Orsino, but was
published after these pages had been printed. It has been very popular,
but in it, unfortunately, Don Orsino is given away deplorably, and
turned into a mere romantic lover, which in real life he never would
have become.]
What is not natural in this story is the character of Madame d'Aranjuez.
She comes before us instinct with all which goes to make up an
unscrupulous adventuress. She is that, or she is nothing. She does her
uttermost to fascinate and capture the son of Saracinesca. She succeeds;
and lo! with one of those _volte-faces_ which are so frequent and so
irritating in Mr Crawford's works, she gives up the game when she has
won it, does nothing that we expect her to do, and marries the
speculator who has beggared Don Orsino on condition that this gentleman
shall restore to Don Orsino all he has lost. Nothing more improbable or
inconsistent, given the character of the woman, could possibly be
conceived; nor is it more probable that the haughty and irascible young
man would endure to be served by her mediation, however it might be
veiled. Everything surrounding this lady promises us passion, intrigue,
perhaps tragedy, certainly peril, but we are balked of them all. The
mysteries concerning her turn out to be very tame ones indeed, she
appears a wholly innocent and harmless person, and even a very large
paper-knife shaped like a dagger, which we are told always lies beside
her and which has no _raison d'etre_, unless it is to be ultimately used
in killing or defending somebody, does nothing whatever and disappears
from the story, leaving us in tantalising ignorance of why we were ever
introduced to it.
Now no French writer of any degree would have created that remarkable
paper-knife, and kept it lying beside the heroine, and laid stress on
its unusual size and splendour, unless he intended to turn it to
account as a _deus ex machina_. To draw the reader's attention to a
conspicuous object, and then to cheat the expectations raised concerning
it, is a great fault in art; but it is one of which English and American
writers are continually guilty. It is true we are told casually, towards
the end, that her husband had hit her with this paper-knife, and that
for this blow the famous fencer Spicca had killed him; but this is
mentioned incidentally, and does not sufficiently account for the
interest we have been excited to take in this weapon. Spicca is, on the
contrary, admirably drawn, and the regard we feel for the merciless old
duellist is roused in us with true art. We have that sense of Spicca
having really lived, and really been that which he is described, which
can only be aroused in a reader by life-like accurate and sympathetic
portraiture.
There are many pathetic touches in this portrait of Spicca, and little
incidents entirely true to the life of an Italian gentleman of
aristocratic race and straitened means, as when in his distress of mind
his servant persuades him to eat 'a little mixed fry' with a fresh
salad, 'the salad is very good to-day'; and Spicca, touched and
refreshed, examines his meagre purse and takes out a ten-franc note
which he gives to the man, remarking that it will buy him a pair of
boots, and this ten-franc note is, when his purse lies on the table at
night, slipped back into it by the servant, who knows that his master
'never counts.'
I think the most exquisitely drawn of all Mr Crawford's many characters
is this Count Spicca; because the character of a noted duellist who
invariably kills, and kills how and in what way he chooses, with
profound indifference and unerring accuracy, is one very hard to make
sympathetic to the general reader, and especially to the English reader,
by whom duelling is abhorred. But Spicca is so perfect a gentleman, so
sad and simple and calm, so natural and unassuming despite his deadly
power, that no one can regard him without interest and even affection,
and see him without sorrow ill-treated by a woman so extremely
unpleasant as Consuelo Aranjuez, for whom he has done and suffered so
much.
The fencing of Mr Crawford is always very accurate, and we hold our
breath when Leone Saracinesca acts as his son's second. All this is
quite true to life in Italy, where duels with the sabre or rapier are
still of daily occurrence, and are resorted to after any insult, and
after a mere difference of opinion or trivial impoliteness.
It is wonderful that these stories have not been appropriated for the
stage by those unscrupulous thieves the London dramatists, for they are
full of dramatic situations and of duologues in which the give and take
is brilliant. Some have indeed the dramatic effect of inconsistency of
which I have spoken, but all are full of fine suggestions for the
theatre. _Saracinesca_, or _Sant' Ilario_, for instance, would be
transferable to the stage with scarcely any alteration. It is full of
incidents which would be most effective on the stage; and the strong
emotions and sensational scenes which it offers would most certainly
thrill and charm an audience.
One wonders also that their author himself does not write for the
stage, for his command of incident and of intricacies of circumstance
would raise him high above many playwrights of the London theatre. There
are scenes in nearly all his works which might be put upon the boards
with scarcely any alteration, such as the duel between Don Giovanni and
Del Ferice in _Saracinesca_, and the death scene of the librarian
Meschini in _Sant' Ilario_, while the whole story of _The Children of
the King_ would furnish matter for a romantic drama were the causes for
the crime in it made more credible.
Here let me note a small but irritating fault in these works, _i.e._,
the childish habit (common to writers of the last century) of naming
characters after their calling, or after some moral characteristic.
Meschini is the plural of the Italian adjective mean, cowardly, or
contemptible, and is given to a man with these defects; while a very
interesting person, a French artist famous in portraiture, is
unfortunately burdened with the ridiculous and impossible name of
Gouache. Mr Crawford is indeed frequently infelicitous in names. In
_Casa Braccio_, the American lover of Gloria, a stagey sort of person,
but one whom we are invited to regard with admiration and sympathy, is
weighted with the shocking name of Griggs. Mr Crawford does not see that
were Othello or Hamlet called Griggs, either would try to move the souls
of men in vain. If a name does not matter to a rose, it does matter
immensely to a character in a book; and there are so many euphonious
names in use in the world that it is wholly unpardonable to select a
ludicrous or ugly one. The poor little natural child of Gloria in this
same novel is also burdened at its birth by the name of Walter Crowdie,
which, for a baby, has such a comical effect that the very pathetic
position of this poor infant is rendered ridiculous by it. It is perhaps
under the idea of being realistic that these droll names are selected to
jar on tragic circumstances, but then Mr Crawford's stories are not
realistic, and cannot be made so by this one expedient.
He has also another fault which is visible in nearly all his works, and
is a grave one. He forgets at times the attributes which he has given to
his chief characters. Thus Giovanni Saracinesca is described as a man of
strong, noble, and reticent nature, and of intellect so superior that
his wife tells him he will be very great some day; and he resembles,
indeed, precisely, one of those men who become great leaders of other
men. But in the sequel (where he is called Sant' Ilario) all this
changes, and he behaves like an idiot, and of his great qualities we
hear no more and certainly see nothing. And where we still farther
follow his fortunes in the subsequent sequel of _Don Orsino_, he has
sunk into complete self-effacement, so complete that he allows his son
to be the associate and the debtor of that very Del Ferice whose utter
baseness and vileness he knows so well, and who tried in the famous duel
to murder him by foul play. Sequels are always ill-advised trials of the
author's consistency and the reader's memory, and it would have been
unquestionably better to have made Don Orsino stand alone in his history
and not figure as the son of Giovanni Saracinesca and of Corona
d'Astrardente. When a reader has followed with interest and sympathy the
fortune of an impassioned lover it is trying to see him standing in St
Peter's 'a middle-aged man,' talking to a son taller than himself. Great
art is required to make a character 'grow' quite consistently. The
continuation of histories, thus, greatly pleased Anthony Trollope and
Thackeray, but I cannot consider it a desirable thing in fiction.
Mr Crawford misses many opportunities of developing the capacity for
analysis and deduction which he undoubtedly possesses. He is very
observant but he is content to note a fact, he does not trouble himself
to seek its origin or the influences which have made it the fact it is.
When the two young people who wish to marry in _Marzio's Crucifix_
discuss what their house shall be like, and what colour the walls and
furniture, their biographer adds, 'Italians have lost all sense of
colour.' This is true, but it is one of the most amazing, grievous, and
extraordinary truths that exist; it is one for which I search in vain
and in perplexity for an explanation. But Mr Crawford does not seek for
any explanation. He states the fact and passes to another subject.
Again, in this sentence he begins well: 'It is of no use to deny the
enormous influence of brandy and games of chance on the men of the
present day. Something might be gained indeed if we could trace the
causes which have made gambling especially the vice of our generation.
But I do not believe this is possible.' That is to say, he does not care
to be at the trouble of such an investigation, even though he adds the
acute sentence that most of the men and women of the world of pleasure
in our times exhibit 'the peculiar and unmistakable signs of physical
exhaustion, chief of which is cerebral anaemia. They are overtrained and
overworked, in the language of training they are "stale."'
He says in another place, 'Italians have no imagination.' This is but
partially true; I am not sure that it is true at all. Their modern
poetry is beautiful, more beautiful than that of any other nation. Their
popular songs are poetic and impassioned as those of no other nation
are, and one may hear among their peasantry expressions of singular
beauty of sentiment and phrase. A woman of middle age, a contadina, said
to me once, 'So long as one's mother lives, one's youth is never quite
gone, for there is always somebody for whom one is young.' A rough, rude
man, a day labourer, who knew not a letter, and spent all his life bent
over his spade or plough, said to me once, one lovely night in spring,
as he looked up at the full moon, 'How beautiful she is! But she has no
heart. She sees us toiling and groaning and suffering down here, and she
is always fair and calm, and never weeps!' Another said once, when a
tree was hard to fell, 'He is sorry to come away, it has been his field
so long.' And when a flock of solan geese flew over our lands, going
from the Marches to the mountains on their homeward way, and descended
to rest, the peasants did not touch them: 'They are tired, poor souls,'
said one of the women; 'one must not grudge them the soil for their
lodging.' Surely such ideas as these in people wholly uneducated
indicate imagination in the speakers?
And what can he possibly mean by no poets, which he says in another
place? Has he never read a line of Carducci? Much as we may mourn and
resent Carducci's turncoat and reactionary politics, no one can deny
that he is a poet of the purest kind. Has he never heard the ringing
stanzas of Cavallotti which sound like a clarion through the land? Has
he never studied the exquisite if too erotic odes of D'Annunzio, or the
touching verse of Stecchetti? There are others besides these who are
true and fine poets also; and even in the ordinary verses written for
newspapers (which in other countries are so poor and tawdry) there is
frequently in Italy a true and delicate feeling and an adorable lyrical
harmony which make one mourn to see things so fair wasted on so
ephemeral a life.
It is through their imagination still more than by their vanity that
Italians are led by unscrupulous political flattery and cajoled into
disastrous political enterprises. They will believe anything if it be
sufficiently captivating to their self-admiration and their fancy, and
will dance blindfold on the brink of a bottomless pit. It is only an
imaginative people who love so wildly, and kill themselves so madly for
affection's sake, as the Italian people do. The other day, because a
young soldier was sent to Africa, his brother killed himself in despair,
and the father of the two youths then killed himself also. It is an
inflammable imagination which makes the nation so easily led away by the
promises and the phantasmagoria of glory with which unscrupulous
statesmen have enticed it to the brink of ruin. It was its imagination
which made it so credulous that when told by its victors that the
disgraceful surrender of Makale was a victory, it believed and rejoiced,
illuminated and hung out flags, and never saw what a dupe it was being
made until cruelly awakened from its delusions by the _deroute_ of Abbu
Carima.
Mr Crawford has lived chiefly in cities, and in the cities, even in
Rome, the Italian is much debased by contact with foreigners; the
influence of foreigners on Italians is excessively bad, especially
American and English influence; and in the cities also the preponderance
of Jews is great. Innumerable persons who call themselves by Italian
names and speak of Italy as their country are Jews and nothing else. A
Finnish Jew known to me buys an Italian estate, and with the estate a
title, which, by the payment of a large sum to a complaisant Government,
he is allowed to adopt; he is decorated by the king for his munificent
'charities' in the land of his adoption; he marries an English woman,
and their children masquerade as Italian nobility with not a single drop
of Italian blood in their veins. Such 'Italian nobles' are numerous,
unhappily, in modern Italy, and do immeasurable discredit to the
nationality which they assume. In a generation or two their origin will
be forgotten, and they will be taken by society in general to be what
they pretend to be. Thus, unhappily, are great nations caricatured, old
titles prostituted, and Italy accredited with sons not her own, with
pretended offspring who are not even her bastards; persons who
impudently affect her name and boast of her blood, when not one single
hair of their head or fibre of their flesh has any affiliation to her.
What stifles Italian imagination, and kills the Italian soul, is the
passion for money; pure acquisitiveness or avarice, for the desire is to
get, little or no pleasure is taken in spending. It is often alleged
that this passion is due to their poverty; but poverty is not
necessarily accompanied by avarice; the Irish people are very poor, but
they are extremely generous; the Spanish people are so also. A comical
instance of this stinginess occurred the other day at Milan: a rich
tradesman had built himself a fine set of new premises, and opened his
new establishment with much feasting; he sent fifteen francs to the
municipality to be divided among the poor, and everyone applauded his
liberality! This love of money, acquisitiveness, niggardliness, or
whatever we call it, is too general not to be injurious to the Italian
character; and it enters into all daily life and personal acts, and is
frequently the chief motor power of marriage, of career, of education.
And then added to this injurious power there is another which is more
deleterious still, which weakens, debases, and falsifies the character
from infancy: it is the direful influence of the Church. But to treat of
this matter would occupy too much space, and would lead too far away
from the stories of Mr Crawford, in which there is an unfortunate
tendency towards approval of what he calls hierarchical government,
although a tendency not strongly enough insisted on by him for it to
demand minute examination. The powers of Mr Crawford, however, are
limited by the narrowness of what is called religion, and the inability
to see the higher side of these subversive opinions which he dreads, and
which he has done his best to turn into ridicule by putting them into
the mouth of the half-mad artist Marzio.
Indeed, his bigotry on religious subjects is very droll to see in these
days; and he speaks of 'unbelievers' in a tone worthy of Puritans in the
days of the _Mayflower_ pilgrims. It does not agree with the tone of his
books, which is invariably the tone of a man of the world; as such he
should possess that liberality of thought which is the chief, perhaps
the only, virtue of his generation; and if he had possessed it he would
undoubtedly have reached a much higher level, a much finer ideal, than
he has actually done. It would seem as if he distrusted and checked the
larger intelligence in him, as an over-cautious rider distrusts and
checks a horse which only asks to be given a free rein to go at speed
over a wide pasture; it would seem as if some extraneous 'influence'
were always at his elbow to keep his reason cribbed, cabined and
confined.
His religious prejudices have contributed to arrest his intellectual
development, for they are puritanical and antiquated in a singular and
lamentable degree. He speaks of _liberi pensatori_ as the Church elders
of Maine or Massachusetts might have done in the days of witch-torturing
and atheist-burning. He thinks that the future great war will be between
what he calls believers and unbelievers; and he looks forward with joy
to the coming conflict when men shall again fly at each other's throat
for the glory of God. This kind of mental cecity has its inevitable
results: it makes him step lamely where he would otherwise walk with
manly alacrity, and it makes him afraid to face the light of facts which
his truer instincts tell him are existing and incontrovertible. Is this
the result of early education, of hereditary inclinations, of female or
ecclesiastical influence? I do not know; but come whence it may, this
taint of bigotry obscures his intelligence and stops his progress, and
is matter of profound regret to those who see what he would have been
without it.
Many passages in his works show that he has perceived and grasped the
universal dominance of that corruption which so fatally exists in all
Italian life, and one could wish that he would make a more complete
exposure of it. Take this account of how the banker, Del Ferice,
obtained the decoration for a syndic who was one of his political
supporters:--
'Del Ferice, left to himself, returned to the question of the
mayor's decoration. If he failed to get the man what he wanted,
the fellow would doubtless apply to someone of the opposite
party, would receive the coveted honour, and would take the
whole voting population with him at the next general election,
to the total discomfiture of Del Ferice.
It was necessary to find some valid reason for proposing him
for the distinction. He could not decide what to do just then,
but he ultimately hit upon a successful plan. He advised his
correspondent to write a pamphlet upon the rapid improvement of
agricultural interests in his district under the existing
Ministry, and he even went so far as to compose and send some
notes on the subject. These notes proved to be so voluminous
and complete, that when the mayor had copied them he could not
find a pretext for adding a single word or correction. They
were printed upon excellent paper with ornamental margins under
the title of _Onward, Parthenope!_ The mayor got his decoration
and Del Ferice was re-elected, but no one has ever inquired
into the truth of the statements contained in the pamphlet.'
These passages and others similar give one the conviction that Mr
Crawford, if he had 'let himself go,' might have been a satirist of no
slight force. He has preferred to write charming stories, ingenious in
construction, but slight in development, to amuse his generation; yet
there is, I think, abundant evidence that he might have done stronger
things, perhaps may do them still. He has preferred to lead a seagull's
life, skimming the surface of the deep and shunning its storms. But he
might have led the petrel's. Probably all the influences of an agreeable
social existence have tended to make him indolent and unwilling to raise
tempests in it. Few resist the pressure of a social atmosphere. His book
called _With the Immortals_, marred as it is by the incongruity and
impossibility of its setting, shows that he can reflect if he likes, and
can express his reflections. If this work had been cast in such a form
as Mr Mallock's _New Republic_, or Sir Arthur Helps' _Friends in
Council_, or Christopher North's _Noctes Ambrosianae_ it would have been
remarkable for the arguments and dialogues contained in it. But the
ghost-element, the supernatural scenic effects, kill its excellence. Dr
Johnson, Heine, Pascal, Bayard, Francois de Valois and Caesar are too
ill-assorted for us to accept them in each other's company, and the
idea of these dead men being all able to converse in English, and all
doomed to wear through ages the clothes they wore in life, is so comical
that it destroys all interest and illusion which their conversation
otherwise might excite. There is a regrettable inability in Mr Crawford
to perceive the ridiculous. He lacks humour, and the perception of the
incongruous is not alive in him; nor is there either any poetic feeling
in his way of regarding life. He is essentially a citizen of the world
as the world exists in this last quarter of the fast-fading century, and
the Sirens sing not for him, though he dwells upon their shores.
Let him, therefore, appreciate more thoroughly his own very admirable
powers, and confine himself to painting the men and women of his time
and class, with all that cosmopolitan knowledge of them which he
possesses. I should like to see from him an Italian novel of modern
political life. He has, I make no doubt, had ample opportunities of
studying its machinery and its intrigues. He can dissect with so much
subtlety and correctness the brain and the temper of such a man as Del
Ferice, that there can be no doubt a political novel from him, placed in
Rome, would have alike accuracy and interest and irony. But he must
clear his mind of some of its cobwebs, and he must realise that the
'unbelievers' and revolutionists, who at present horrify him, constitute
the keenest intellectual element in Italy, indeed, the only healthy one,
and contain the only hope there is, if this be but a feeble one, of any
attainment by the nation in the future to any true liberty and
cleanliness in political aims.
I cannot conclude these few remarks upon his Italian stories without a
word of thanks to him for the pleasant hours he has often given me, and
the gallery of interesting portraits with which he has enriched the
memory of all those who read his novels.