TWO NOISY ITALIAN SCHOOLMASTERS
The most diverting and conspicuous figures in the literary world of
Italy to-day are two old school-teachers, Alfredo Panzini, humanist, and
Luigi Pirandello, satirist. Both of them have earned a permanent fame
and their fecundity seems to be increasing with age.
Alfredo Panzini, a pedagogue by profession, is a writer by dint of long
training. Born in Senigaglia, a small town in the Province of Ancona, in
1863, he called Carducci master. After serving a long literary
apprenticeship compiling grammars, readers, dictionaries, anthologies,
his name began to appear in journals and magazines, and gradually he has
forged his way to the front rank as an episodist, an interpreter of the
feelings and sentiments of the average man and woman and their
spokesman, and as a master of prose.
In appearance he is a typical lower middle-class Italian, short, stout,
and ruddy, a kindly, benevolent face, with contented eyes that look at
you uninquiringly from behind gold-rimmed spectacles. One might gather
from looking at him that he had asked but little from the world and got
more than he asked.
His writings display an intimate familiarity with a few classic writers,
especially of Greece and Italy, which he reveals by frequent and
appropriate quotations and references, contrasting the sayings and
doings of the venerated ancients with those of the not always deprecated
modern. He knows the emotional desires and reactions of the average man;
he senses his aspirations and his appeasements; he has keen
understanding of his virtues and his infirmities. He knows his potential
and actual pleasures, and he reveals this understanding of his fellows
to us in a diverting and instructive way and at the same time shows us
idealistic vistas of life and conduct that are most refreshing. It is to
be regretted that he is not equally enlightened about women. If he knows
their aspirations he denies the legitimacy of them; if he discerns their
future he refuses to forecast it; if he knows feminine psychology his
writings do not reveal it. He is the traveller ascending from the plains
whose pleasure is in looking backward to survey the paths over which he
has travelled, to describe the beauty of the country and its
associations, and to moralize about them. Elevations in front of him
from which one may legitimately anticipate more comprehensive vistas he
refuses to consider, or, if constrained to do so, denies that what shall
be seen from them will compare with what he sees and has seen.
His two most successful and commendable books are "La Lanterna di
Diogene" ("Diogenes' Lantern") and "Xantippe." The first is a narrative
of sentimental wandering in which he describes the commonplace world and
the homely conflict of those whom he encounters, and in which he
displays not only tolerance, but love of his fellow men. He is sometimes
playful, more often ironical, but never disparaging or vituperative, and
his prose is clear, limpid--sometimes, indeed, sparkling.
His "Xantippe" does not deal particularly with the virtues or
infirmities of that renowned shrew. It recounts many incidents in the
life, trial, and incarceration of Socrates which, while still redounding
to his fame, are made to show by contrasting them with man's conduct and
customs to-day the weaknesses, inconsistencies, and fallacies of many
conventions of the twentieth century.
"Il Viaggio di un Povero Letterato" ("The Wanderings of a Poor Writer")
shows the same simple-minded, charming vagabondage as "Diogenes'
Lantern." It was published in 1912, when many readers did not share his
distrust of Germany or hold with him in his forecasts. Many of his
statements are to-day prophecies fulfilled.
It is not an imaginary man of letters who starts on a trip in obedience
to a doctor's orders. It is Alfredo Panzini, exhausted from many labors.
He goes wherever his fancy takes him, to Vicenza, Bologna, Pisa, Venice,
and it is with the literary memories of these places that he is chiefly
concerned. At Pisa it is Leopardi, Shelley, and Byron; at Vicenza,
Fogazzaro; but at Bologna the memories become more personal. Here he sat
at the feet of Carducci and learned to love and respect him; here his
budding fancies first showed indications of blooming; here he first
essayed amatory flights. He chances upon an old flame of his student
days leading the old life in the old home, except that she had taken to
writing poems and insists on having his opinion of them. His account of
how he succeeded in meeting her wishes and still maintained his
self-respect is a masterpiece of ingenuousness. The least thing suffices
to start a train of thought and reflection or to decide his next
tarrying-place. The volume ends with an interesting account of a visit
to the birthplace of Pascoli, the socialist and idealist poet of the
Romagna.
In his "Piccole Storie del Mondo Grande" he describes a pilgrimage to
the country of Leopardi, and to Umbria. It is filled with little
anecdotes of literary immortals who wandered there, and of references
that are more significant to Italians than to foreigners, and through it
all there is a strange, melancholy humor which is quite characteristic
of Panzini.
The two novels which he has written show that he has the art of the
story-teller in narration, sequence, and constructiveness, but they lack
what the dramatists call action. "Io Cerco Moglie" ("I Seek a Wife") is
his best work. Ginetto Sconer, who oozes prosperity and
self-satisfaction, proceeds in a businesslike way to select a wife. He
consults a pastry-cook and a doctor, to the great glee of the reader. He
sees women in three categories: those who presume to disturb the dreams
of anchorites and are still men's pleasure and despair; the aristocratic
blue-stocking; and the domestic paragon. He had not contemplated
marrying a blue-stocking or even aspiring to blue blood, but when he
meets Countess Ghiselda he realizes that ambition expands with amatory
awakement. Her freedom is handicapped by the attentions of a Futuristic
poet whose intellectual productions and antics are amusing to every one
save Cavaliere Sconer. He has peeps into spiritual and emotional vistas,
but he yields finally to the flesh-box and woos the daughter of the
woman who places a caramel in the mouth of her husband every morning
before he goes to his office.
Signor Panzini knows the present-day Borghese, their thoughts, their
virtues, their absurdities, and their charm, and he has depicted them in
this book in the most interesting way.
Signor Panzini is not what is called a feminist fan, and he utilizes
Ginetto Sconer, who is seeking the ideal mate, as a mouthpiece for his
own convictions and sentiments concerning women. Italy is likely to be
one of the last countries that will yield woman the freedom for
emotional and intellectual development to which she is entitled, and
when it comes, as it is bound to do, it will be despite the kindly and
sentimental protests and ironies of such oppositionists as Signor
Panzini.
"La Madonna di Mamà" ("The Madonna of Mamma") is, in addition to a
splendid character study, a revelation of the disturbance caused in a
gentle and meditative soul, his own, by the war. For, in reality, like
so many Italian writers, Panzini is autobiographical in everything that
he writes. In this book he has shown more insight of feminine psychology
than in any of his other writings, though he is more successful with
Donna Barberina, who represents modern Italian emotional repressions,
than with the English governess, Miss Edith, who forecasts in a timid
way what her countrywomen have obtained. Nevertheless, the strength of
the story is the evolution of the moral and intellectual nature of
Aquilino, to whom the reader is partial from the first page, and Count
Hypolyte, who is "too good to be true." Aquilino is what Alfredo Panzini
would have been had he encountered Conte Ippolito in his early youth.
The reader who makes his acquaintance identifies him with the future
glory of Italy, the type of youth who has no facilitation to success
save ideals and integrity.
Many of his short stories--such as "Novelle d'Ambo i Sessi" ("Stories of
Both Sexes"), "Le Chicche di Noretta" ("The Gewgaws of Little
Nora")--have elicited great praise. To-day Panzini has the reputation of
being one of the most gifted writers of Italy. He has come to his
patrimony very slowly. Without being in the smallest way like George
Meredith or Henry James, his writings have experienced a reception
similar to theirs in so far as it has been said of them that they are
hard to understand. It is difficult for a foreigner to give weight to
this accusation. The reader who once gets a familiarity with them
becomes an enthusiast. To him Panzini is one of the most readable of all
Italian writers. To be sure, if one reads "Xantippe" it is to be
expected that more or less will be said about Socrates and about the
customs and habits of Athens of that day. The same is true of Diogenes
and his lantern. It is also likely that when a man of literary training
and taste wanders about the country, writing of his encounters, he will
be likely to write of people and things, which, when others read them,
will presuppose a certain culture, but the reader who has the misfortune
to lack it need not hesitate to read the books of Signor Panzini. He
will have a certain degree of it after he has read them and he will get
possessed of it without effort. It is not at all unlikely that Signor
Panzini writes his stories and novels in much the same way as he writes
his dictionaries, namely, laboriously. His later writings have some
indication of having been thrown off in a white heat of creative passion
without preparation or conscious premeditation, but most of his books
bear the hallmarks of careful planning, methodical execution,
painstaking revision, and careful survey after completion that the
writer may be sure that his creation exposed to the gaze and criticism
of his fellow beings shall be as perfect as he can make it both from his
own knowledge and from the knowledge of others assimilated and
integrated by him.
The position which Panzini holds in the Italian world of letters to-day
is the index of the protest against the writings of D'Annunzio. Panzini
is sane, normal, human, gentle, kindly. He sees the facts of life as
they are; he fears the ascendancy of materialism; his hopes are that
man's evolutionary progress shall be spiritual, and he does not
anticipate the advent of a few supermen who shall administer the affairs
of the planet.
Alfredo Panzini may finally get a place in Italian letters comparable to
that of Pascoli, and should his call to permanent happiness be delayed
until he has achieved the days allotted by the psalmist he is likely to
have the position in Italian letters which Joseph Conrad has in English
letters to-day. This statement is not tantamount to an admission that it
is to writers like Panzini that we are to look for new developments in
imaginative literature. They will be found rather amongst a group of
writers who are the very antithesis of him--the Futurists.
The successor to the literary fame of Giacosa is Luigi Pirandello,
another schoolmaster. His earlier writings were cast as romances, but
latterly he has confined himself largely to stage-pieces which reflect
our moralities, satirize our conventions, and lampoon our hypocrisies.
His diction is idiomatic and telling. It reminds of de Maupassant and of
Bernard Shaw. Either he inherited an unusual capacity for verbal
expression or he has cultivated it assiduously.
He is Panzini's junior by three years, having been born in Girgenti,
June 28, 1867. His father was an exporter of sulphur, and his early life
was spent amongst the simple, passionate, emotional, tradition-loving
people of southern Sicily. Unlike his fellow Sicilians, Verga and
Capuana, he has not utilized them to any considerable degree as the
mouthpiece of his satiric comments and reflections on social life. He
has taken the more sophisticated if less appealing people of northern
and central Italy, and puts them in situations from which they extricate
themselves or get themselves more hopelessly entangled for the reader's
amusement or edification. In his last comedy, "L'uomo, la Bestia, e la
Virtu" ("Man, Beast, and Virtue"), the scene is laid "in a city on the
sea, it doesn't matter where," yet the characters are typically
Sicilian.
After graduating from the University of Rome, Pirandello studied at Bonn
and made some translations of Goethe's "Roman Elegies." Soon after he
returned to Rome he published a book of verse and a book of short
stories which made no particular stir. It was not until he published "Il
fu Mattia Pascal" ("The Late Mattias Pascal") that he obtained any real
success. Critics consider it still his best effort in the field of
romance. From the standpoint of construction it deserves the
commendation that it has received, but both the luck and the plans of
the hero are too successful to be veristic, and the eventuations of his
daily existence so far transcend ordinary experience that the reader
feels the profound improbability of it all and loses interest. One
pursues a novel that he may see the revelations of his own experiences
or what he might wish his experiences to be under certain circumstances.
When these circumstances get out of hand or when the events that
transpire are so improbable, or so antipathic, that the reader cannot
from his experience or imagination consider them likely or probable,
then the novel does not interest him. Moreover, the Anglo-Saxon reader,
unless he has lived in Italy, finds the flavor of many passages "too
high"--certain experiences are related in unnecessary detail. Like a
Cubist picture the charm and the beauty disappear in proportion with the
nearness with which it is viewed and the closeness with which it is
examined.
In reality, Pirandello did not get his stride until he began to concern
himself with social and domestic problems, such as those depicted under
the title of "Maschere Nude" ("Naked Masks"). In the play "Il Piacere
dell' Onestà" ("The Pleasure of Honesty"), he pictures a new type of
ménage à trois: the "unhappy" husband in love with the mature daughter
of an aristocratic Philistine mother, who, when she must needs have a
husband for conventional satisfaction, appeals to a facile male cousin
who finds in a ne'er-do-well disciple of Descartes one who is willing to
act the part vicariously, the apparent quid pro quo being the payment of
his gambling debts. The hypocritical, bombastic lover; the sentimental
mother with a "family complex"; the anguishing, passionate daughter; the
suave, aristocratic male procurer, and finally he who was to be the
victim of the machinations of these experienced persons, but who proves
to be the victor because he plays the game in a way new to them--that
is, straight--each in turn delivers herself or himself of sentiments and
convictions that reveal the social hypocrisies and conventional lies
which form the scaffolding and supports of what is called "every-day
life," and give Pirandello an opportunity to display his irony, his
sarcasm, and his humor. The art of Pirandello is a subtle play of
paradoxes and analyses of motives which are second nature to persons
called complex, the result of inherited and acquired artificialities. To
get the full effect of these paradoxes and analyses the closest
attention of the reader and of the auditor is required, and as a matter
of fact Pirandello's comedies read much better than they play. Those who
know maintain that he has little capacity for stage technic, that he
knows nothing of the art of the stage. Hence his comedies have not had
the success of Giacosa and of Bracco.
As human documents they depend upon their humor and veiled irony more
than upon any other qualities. The humor, which seems to be obtained by
simple means, is nearly always the result of an analysis so fine, so
subtle, that sometimes one loses track of the premises on which it is
founded. He compels the attention of his reader and he makes him think.
Without such attention and thought the subtleties of Pirandello often
escape the reader. Sometimes he labors a point almost to a tiresome
degree, for instance, in the play "Così è se vi pare" ("It's so if You
Think It's so"). The central point is the identity of a woman, which
would seem, to the average individual, could be established readily
beyond peradventure, but the point is--is there anything that can be
established beyond peradventure? Is there any such thing as literal
truth? Is not truth in reality synonymous with belief, individual or
collective, or both? Discussion of questions of this sort may become
very tiresome, but Pirandello has the art of mixing them up with human
weaknesses and human virtues which makes the mixture not only palatable
but appetizing. In his last comedies--"Il Giuoco delle Parti" ("Each One
Plays His Own Rôle") and "Ma non è una Cosa Seria" ("But It isn't a
Serious Matter")--he reverts to matrimonial tangles and attempts at
disentanglement, depicting in the former the "temperamental" woman who
gets what she wants, but who finds when she gets it she does not want
it, and the long-suffering husband who is discerning enough to know how
to handle her by conceding what she demands that he may get what he
should have.
The man who usurps the conjugal privileges of the husband must also
discharge his obligations. So it transpires when his temperamental wife
has been insulted by some intoxicated gilded youths who by their conduct
in her house provoke a scandal in the neighborhood, it is necessary for
the _de facto_ husband to challenge the most aggressive of them to a
duel. During the excitement of the preparation the happy thought comes
to him to have the vicarious husband fight the duel. He does so and is
killed. The cause of all the trouble, the lady, is quite ignorant of
this arrangement and thinks the _de facto_ husband is battling with the
most invincible sword of the city and that he will get killed, which is
her desire. On returning to her house she finds her husband lunching as
if nothing unusual had happened. The dramatic climax soon comes when she
scornfully taunts him with having some one fight a duel for him and he
replies: "Not for me but for you."
The play gives Pirandello the opportunity to display his knowledge of
the sentiments and passions of the modern "high life" individual.
Although they talk and act and express familiar sentiment in a way that
makes one think they are real people, in reality they are unreal. They
are taken from the author's imagination rather than from real life.
The second comedy in this volume is much more meritorious than the
first. The author portrays characters who well might have existed in the
flesh. Gasparina, who has put twenty-seven years of continency behind
her and had achieved the direction of a second-class boarding-house, is
derided and maltreated by her "guests." The most swagger of her
boarders, who has been miraculously saved in a duel which followed a
broken engagement, has an original idea. He will make a mock marriage
with her and thus establish freedom from further love, annoyance, and
duels. She sees in the proposal escape from the boarding-house. In the
little villa of the country to which he sends her, under promise that
she is not to make herself evident and where he is not to visit her, she
blooms like a flower. In due course of time he falls in love again, and
in order that he may accomplish matrimony he must free himself from
Gasparina. This could be accomplished, as it never was consummated, but
the messenger, an old aspirant to her favor, is on the point of having
his aspirations realized when the husband in name only sees in Gasparina
the woman he really loves. The curtain falls at an opportune moment
before any hearts are broken or any blood is shed.
It is one of the plays of Pirandello that has had considerable success
on the stage.
He is in reality a finished workman, an accomplished stylist, a happy
colorist, and fecund withal. His most important of the stories are "Erma
bifronte" ("Deceitful Hermes"), "La Vita Nuda" ("Naked Life"), "La
Trappola" ("The Snare"), "E Domani ... lunedi" ("And
To-morrow--Monday"), "Un Cavallo Nella Luna" ("A Horse in the Moon"),
"Quand ero matto" ("When I was Crazy"), "Bianche e Nere" ("Blacks and
Whites"); his romances, in addition to the ones already mentioned, are
"I Vecchi e I Giovani" ("The Old and the Young"), and "Si Gira" ("One
Turns"), the most recent and poorest of them.
It would be a mistake to convey the impression that Pirandello is
universally admired in Italy. His stories and romances have an
adventuresome quality that transcend ordinary experience, and his plays
attempt to dispense with theatricalness and to substitute for it a
subtle analysis of life with corrosive comment, both of which are very
much resented.
It is strange that the Freudians have never explained the popularity of
plays and novels concerned wholly or largely with sexual relations that
infract convention and law as dominancy of the unconscious mind, a "wish
fulfilment" of the waking state. It may be assumed that three-fourths of
those who see and read them never have, and never contemplate (with
their conscious minds) having, similar experiences. They would be
scandalized were any one to assume that they approved such conduct.
Perhaps the explanation of the hold such literature has upon the public
is the same as the interest we have in the accounts of criminals seeking
to evade apprehension. It is not that we sympathize in any way with the
malefactor. We are lawmaking, law-abiding, law-upholding citizens, and
we know he ought not to escape, and, naturally, we hope he will be
caught. However, we cannot help thinking what we would do confronted
with his predicament. We feel that in his place we could circumvent the
sleuths and overcome what would be to the ordinary person insuperable
obstacles. Thus we divert ourselves imagining what we would do if we
were adulterous husbands, lecherous wives, lubricitous wooers, vicarious
spouses, while assuring ourselves we are not and could never be, and
plume ourselves that we could conduct ourselves even in nefariousness in
such a way as to escape detection or, if detected, to disarm criticism.
Meanwhile we enjoy being virtue-rewarded and vice-punished, for it is
only upon the stage or in books that it happens, save in exceptional
instances.