race is too much alive, individual by individual, to permit of
successful organization, still less of being standardized either in
behaviour or thought. The foreigner who has come to know Italy will have
encountered various national traits that displease him as conflicting
too much with those of his own country, but nowhere in the whole
peninsula will he have found the grey devitalized dullness of
Anglo-Saxon suburbia or the poetic musical languor popularly ascribed
to the Italian race--why, I have no idea, unless because Neapolitans
frequently sing at night and because _dolce far niente_ is the one
Italian phrase with which all foreigners are acquainted. Misled in
advance by a prolific and incredibly wayward literature, the foreigner,
like a reversed Columbus, expects to find Cathay and instead discovers
the New World. There are in Italians old, old traits that suddenly crop
out at unexpected moments, there are roots that go down into an
unfathomable past, but the spirit of the race is young, vivid, almost
raw. Foreigners unacquainted with Italy were surprised by the phenomenon
of Fascismo. No one with any knowledge of Italy can have been surprised
either by Fascismo or by the sturdy opposition to it.
Nothing, in short, can be falser than the conception of Italy as a
country of dreamers and idealists. On the contrary, the people, by and
large, are matter-of-fact, hard-headed and practical; they like American
bathrooms, central heating and the early operas of Verdi; I often wonder
that no American business-man has had the acumen to open a branch
five-and-ten-cent store in Italy. A full-blooded corkscrew at two lire,
a hearty can-opener at one lira, would sell and sell and sell. Italians
of my acquaintance fairly pore over the advertisements in the _Saturday
Evening Post_; they would love the Sears-Roebuck catalogue.
Then, in the name of consistency, why this mournful emasculated prose?
Well, it is a long story. I think at bottom it goes back to the schools.
At Harvard I went through a number of courses in English composition, in
each of which I had to write a one-page theme every day and a three-page
theme once a fortnight. It took me years to recover from the discipline,
and I have an almost guilty feeling that even now when I have learned to
write in my own way a Harvard professor would still cover my pages with
red marks; but at least we were urged to write simply. Our rhetorical
passages were ruthlessly stricken out; we were held down, even
contemptuously, to a positive bareness of expression. ‘Say what you have
to say, if anything, in as few words as possible’ was the message (only
the word would never have been allowed) dinned into our ears. I still
think it an excellent training.
In Italian schools, beginning with the most elementary, training in
composition is diametrically the opposite. There is a model (and such a
florid model!) for everything. Shall a sunset be described? (‘No!’ they
would have said in an American school). Manzoni (who is never forgotten
for a moment) has done this in just the right way on page 9007 of _I
Promessi Sposi_. Base your description on his. Never, so far as I can
learn, is the child told to describe, as well as he can, exactly and
only what he sees. If Manzoni, however, were the only model, imitative
Italian prose might be less rhetorical than it is and might contain some
reflected vigour; but there are, to mention only two others, Silvio
Pellico (who had a love affair in prison with a spider) and De Amicis,
who wrote some tolerable books but who also wrote _Cuore_. _Cuore_ is
given to every child as soon as the unfortunate creature is able to
read, and as soon as he is able to write he is taught to copy its
sentiments and style. There are more, and more nauseating, tears shed in
_Cuore_ than in all the _Elsie_ books put together. Compared with it,
_Immensee_, which, I am told, no German can, or anyway could some years
ago, read without weeping, is as stony as the dictionary. I know of no
other book so obscene as _Cuore_. No, I withdraw that statement. There
is one worse book. It was written by some Englishwoman, is called _The
Story of Pigling Bland_, and is about a dear little pig who fell in love
with a dear little girl-pig, and gave her peppermints, and watched over
her when she fell asleep; but I do not think that it is used as a
text-book in English schools.
There are models even for letters to be written by a child to its
parents. These are the sentiments the child should have; this is the way
they should be expressed. I know a charming and intelligent woman who
has a daughter of eighteen--like most Italian young girls, almost
indistinguishable from American girls of her generation: hard, _chic_,
slangy, fast, but without ever losing her head, not an ounce of
tenderness in her. ‘See what a delightful letter Elena has written me
from her school,’ said the mother proudly to me one day. I read the
letter, aghast. ‘Beloved Mamma ... I think of you always, always ... I
dream of the hour when we shall be reunited and I can press you again to
my heart.’
Given this methodical corruption of minors, it is not strange that the
prose style of the average mature Italian and of Italian journalism
should be hopelessly verbose and weighted with rhetorical emotional
platitudes that do not express the genuine feelings of the writer. For
example, boxing matches have become very popular in Italy of late, and
there is little perceptible difference between the Italian crowd at one
of these and the crowd at an American fight. There is the same doggy
masculine smell, the same blue haze of smoke drifting across the glare
of the arc-lights above the ring, the same fierce excitement--nothing,
in short, that could possibly have come out of _Cuore_. Such was the
audience at a recent match in Milan when Bruno Frattini, the Italian
champion, was defeated on points by Ted Lewis. But the newspaper account
in the _Ambrosiano_ next day! ‘Could it be that Bruno, our Bruno, was
defeated? For a moment we were silent, dazed. Our eyes were full of
tears.’ I wish I had kept that reporter’s story. It was worth
translating in full--only it would have demanded ten pages.
Here in this absurd instance, perhaps because it is so absurd, we
somehow get a flash of insight into the origin of the problem. For even
with a comment on school training I did not go deep enough. The real
problem is to discover why mature, fairly intelligent Italians permit
that kind of training to continue, and approve of its results. This, I
think, is the answer: to an Italian life is pragmatic, art academic. The
Italian takes life as it comes, with no theories about it, with no
belief in its having a meaning; but for the printed word he has hard and
fast rules. He does not think of art as an interpretation of life; he
thinks of it as something quite separate. (But if you ask me why this
should be true, I confess that I am beyond my depth and do not
know--unless it is simply that the average Italian is too sceptical and
matter-of-fact to believe any interpretation of life possible).
Nowhere--not even in the America of ten years ago, where the majority of
people struggled, as they must always struggle everywhere, to make a
difficult living, but read sunny fairytales by Myrtle Reed and Eleanor
Porter--nowhere have life and art been kept so distinct as they are
still kept in Italy. It is grateful (especially to a writer) to discover
that in Italy more esteem is felt for an author than for a millionaire,
but it is saddening to discover, a little more gradually, that this is
not because the author is held to know more about life than the
millionaire, but that, instead, he is worshipped as the priest of an
esoteric cult with a well-established ritual.
Here, however, it becomes necessary to point out a significant contrast
between the Italian and the American attitude toward the arts. However
far from considering them an interpretation of life, Italians have for
the arts neither contempt nor kindly toleration, but a genuine reverent
love. Literate Italians are passionately devoted to all the arts, and
illiterate Italians to at least one--music. So that, in a sense, the
arts do form an important part of virtually every Italian’s life--but a
shut-off separate part. From this derives a tyranny over the arts, that
could not possibly exist in America or England, where people do not feel
strongly enough about them to desire to tyrannize over them. An American
or an Englishman will listen timidly to music that he does not
understand, or timidly read (or claim to have read) a book that he finds
incomprehensible, or timidly and gravely walk through the halls of a
picture show which, so far as he can see, reveals only insanity. For
‘people who know’ may presently announce that all these things are works
of genius, and then where would he be if he had laughed at them or
protested? And, anyway, what does it all matter? The Italian will throw
aside the book with a curse, laugh with uproarious contempt at the
pictures, and hiss the music into silence. He ‘knows what he likes.’ It
is what he was brought up on; and that, and nothing else, is art. And it
all matters to him very much indeed.
Now, intelligence averaging no higher in Italy than elsewhere, the
result of this condition upon the arts is disastrous. It compels them to
retain outworn forms that may be in themselves as good as newer forms,
or even better, but that cannot be employed to-day for the fresh
expression of emotion or thought. A deadly imitative conservatism
crushes the arts in Italy. In painting hardly any influence later than
that of the French Impressionists is apparent; in music almost none
later than Debussy; in stage-setting and lighting none, positively none,
later than Belasco. The staging of operas in the remodelled Scala is
magnificent; the detail is elaborate and costly; the costumes are
impeccable; real stars twinkle in a purple night-sky indistinguishable
from that of Rapallo. But of the interesting experiments in
non-realistic stage-setting that are being made in Germany, America, and
to a lesser extent in France, there is no trace. There daren’t be. Just
one such stage-set was attempted at the Scala last season--a timid one,
at that; but the public would have none of it. Perhaps it is better for
the arts not to have too many people care much about them, and
undoubtedly it is better for the artists. Composers like Malipiero or
painters like Ferrazzi must either be neglected or attain, and be
content with, a reputation abroad; but they may get a wry satisfaction
from the knowledge that if their work is good enough to endure until it
‘dates’ as something perfect out of a dead past, their pictures will
then (but not until then) be hung in every gallery, and their music
performed at every theatre, of their native land.
The tyranny over literature is not quite so great as that over music,
for the obvious reason that a book is read in solitude by an individual,
not performed before a very articulate audience, and also because the
reading public is smaller than the opera public. Nevertheless, if small,
it is of the same kind and only a little more alert to new impressions.
It, too, knows what it wants and that this is art. The result is to
weaken and emasculate literature. Not, of course, that a writer of
integrity will deliberately seek to give the public what it wants, but
he can hardly avoid being discouraged by the knowledge that it wants
only a repetition of something that has already been done. Moreover, the
writer is, after all, himself an Italian, with the Italian’s thorough
early grounding in verbosity, rhetoric and sentimentality, and with his
instinct to keep life and literature separate. He attempts, even
desperately, to write about life, but somehow the attempt does not often
succeed. The result is thin and tired. Some spark is lacking. The stuff
does not ring true. It remains ‘literary.’
But have not writers, and other artists, in all countries had to
struggle with difficulties, from which they have emerged more or less
triumphantly? Surely English literature has sprung from a milieu hostile
to all the arts, and is but the more vigorous for that? True, and so do
they struggle in Italy; but it is as though they must start from farther
back and overcome elementary handicaps that they should surely be
spared. Even to nullify that persistent early training in opulent
rhetoric and that in verbosity must demand heroic effort; yet most of
them have conquered the former, and some the latter. It is a triumph
that they do actually write freshly. But that attitude toward
literature as a thing in itself is hard to overcome. And there are other
dangers and difficulties.
For example, the literary clique. In Italian life the individual is
strong, the organized group weak; which is a splendid and sane condition
of affairs. In Italian literature, as in the other arts, the group
flourishes disastrously and frequently submerges the individual. Let a
man write a few books that reveal talent, and immediately a group forms
about him, with a cult of its hero and a critical estimate of his work
to which he will thereafter find himself attempting to conform, thus,
hedged about by a wall of literary ideas, growing less and less capable
of an individual interpretation of life itself. Or perhaps there are
three or four men about whom the group forms, either because they
resemble one another in thought or in manner of expression, or perhaps
only because they happen to live in the same city. Then the result is
even more harmful, since the various individual writers also react upon
one another. Witness the young Florentine group--Soffici, Palazzeschi,
Papini, etc.--all once writers of promise, all fallen into premature
decay. Panzini has suffered perceptibly from this kind of thing; lesser
writers have suffered even more. When G. A. Borgese was writing his
first novel, _Rubè_, the reverent clique about him heralded the yet
unfinished book as a masterpiece, the first genuine synthesis of--I
forget what, but the word ‘synthesis’ must certainly have been used.
Any one who has read _Rubè_ is aware that it is very far from being a
masterpiece. That is not Signor Borgese’s fault. What _is_ his fault,
however, and of great detriment to the novel, is his obvious
determination throughout to make it a masterpiece.
Ah, well, cults exist in other countries than Italy. One recalls the
well-known scene in Victor Hugo’s salon, where the Master sat on a kind
of pontifical throne, and uttered occasional maxims to the worshippers
grouped about his feet. ‘Je crois en Dieu,’ he announced once, after a
long silence. Another and reverent silence followed. Then a woman spoke.
‘Chose étrange!’ she murmured. ‘Un dieu qui croit en Dieu.’
No enumeration of the handicaps under which an Italian writer must
struggle would be complete without mention of the prolonged baneful
influence on both prose and verse, but especially on prose, of
D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio himself is what he is, and I have no intention of
discussing here the merits and defects of his own important achievement;
I am only glancing at the influence his work has for thirty years
exerted on minor writers--an influence bad almost without qualification.
It has led scores of writers away from simplicity, away from life (by
which I do not mean only away from realism), into a deliberate tortured
complexity, beneath which was nothing, a blank emptiness. Even to-day
Italian prose has not shaken itself quite free from that appalling
influence. It corrupts the work of Virgilio Brocchi oddly, since there
is at bottom nothing ‘Dannunziano’ in its spirit, and it pervades that
of Antonio Beltramelli, to mention only two contemporary novelists of
some talent. It is greatly to the credit of Panzini that there is no
trace of it in his work, though he has been subjected to it all his
life, being of precisely D’Annunzio’s age.
(One firm exception must be made to all that I have said about the
thinness and flaccidity of Italian prose. Side by side with literary
prose, there has always existed in Italy a polemical prose which has
never lacked vitality. To-day it is stronger than ever. It is, in fact,
terrific in its vigour, insolence and scurrility. This is probably
because it is not considered a form of art; so that in it people let
themselves go, and express with unrestrained violence their fiercely
partisan hatreds. At any rate, to find really living, breathing, Italian
prose you must turn to-day to the polemical editorials of the press--the
bitter stinging attacks on political adversaries that you will find in
the _Popolo d’Italia_, the _Giustizia_, _Cremona Nuova_, and the Genoa
_Lavoro_).[1]
Although I have enumerated a good many obstacles to the achievement of
anything really significant in contemporary Italian fiction, I am still
dissatisfied. Given sufficient strength, sufficient vitality, writers
should have surmounted even these difficulties.
Given sufficient strength. Perhaps that is the real point. The men
striving are not strong enough.
Poets come from wherever God put them, but, almost without exception,
the prose writers of Italy spring from the bourgeoisie. From the
‘popolo,’ none; from the aristocracy, ‘Black’ and provincial (even when
residing in Rome itself), occupied only with religion, the retention of
its rights and the adequate marriage of its children, or from the
cosmopolitan aristocracy, occupied only with diversions, there have come
but one or two names. No, the writers come from the bourgeoisie. And the
bourgeoisie, in England far stronger than any other class, is in Italy
the weakest, the least full-blooded.
Despite the fact that my own intimate Italian friends and close
acquaintances are perforce members of the middle and upper classes, it
is of that vast third class, the ‘popolo,’ that I think first when I
think of Italy. Pardon the foreign word. ‘The common people’ is too
superior, ‘the People’ obscured by demagogic connotation. Also, before
continuing, I must beg you to believe that I am not being sentimental,
that I have no parlour belief in the Nobility of Labour, but that I base
what I have to say on what I personally know (and I wish it might be
more) of a great many individuals belonging to this class.
The virtues that make the ‘popolo’ in the main so lovable--cheerfulness,
sturdy patience, kindliness, self-sacrifice, great generosity, ready
active pity for suffering--are of course released through the difficult
laborious existence the ‘popolo’ leads and has always led. Potential
vices lie darkly awaiting their chance in the heart of every man. Not
class, but only the circumstances of class prevent their unfolding. The
second generation of a peasant family that has been promoted (if you can
call it that) to the shop-keeping class is apt to be as harsh and greedy
as any family of Sicilian absentee landlords. The vices so long crushed
down have come into their own with a vengeance. No matter. Greed and
selfishness may be less common in the Italian ‘popolo’ than elsewhere
merely because there is scant nourishment for them in poverty, but that
the virtues I have mentioned are so apparent there is a tribute to the
race. Poverty can release them; it cannot create them.
The point is, however, that the virtues I have mentioned as roughly
characteristic of the Italian ‘popolo’ are the warm-blooded virtues of
life. A generous or a self-sacrificing man is more alive than a greedy
or a selfish man. And life really seems to be richer, fuller and more
exuberant in this class than in any other. There is nothing stolid or
dull about these people. Their passions are strong, but not of the body
alone; they flow over into the mind. An Anglo-Saxon day-labourer or a
Finn or a Swede has his recurrent moments of terrific passion, sexual or
other, but between times appears to relapse into a state of blank mental
non-existence. This is, at least, the impression he makes on an
outsider. Of course, behind his inarticulateness a broad silent stream
of thought _may_ be flowing; but, frankly, I doubt it. Nothing that he
says when he does occasionally break his silence justifies the
assumption. The Italian of a similar class is, if friendly toward you,
immensely communicative; and I submit that if a person is communicative
it is because he has something to communicate.
The Italian of the ‘popolo’ surely has a great deal. His mind is alert,
his curiosity unbounded, and, best of all, his fancy exuberant. More
often than not, he has a strong sense of humour. His mind is as robust
as his body. And, though he interlards his conversation with proverbs
(his share in the racial curse), it consists otherwise of vivid,
unhackneyed, often magnificently ungrammatical turns of phrase, that
convey freshly his own direct sensations.
Now this last is characteristic only of the ‘popolo.’ In polite
conversation Italians of other classes mostly talk like books. That
appalling education of theirs has been too much for them. Oh, not that
there is any radical difference between them and the Italians of the
‘popolo’! The education has been too much for the latter also--when it
exists. Such letters as I received during the war from slightly educated
Italians of the ‘popolo’ at the front! Letters in the style of Manzoni,
letters in the style of _Cuore_, letters whose rhetoric could not
possibly bear any relation to the sights and sounds and emotions the
writers were experiencing. I felt like crying: ‘Evviva
l’analfabetismo!’
But how different it was when these same men talked of what they had
experienced! Neither war-correspondence nor imaginative writing has ever
given me the illusion of actual presence on the battlefield that I
received from their words. They would describe, quite simply, some small
homely fact, some unimportant episode, because it was what had struck
them, and at once the whole scene would spring into sharp life. Nor was
it always merely straight description. Sentiment and even character
analysis were hidden underneath. Of the new raw officers rushed without
sufficient training to the front after Caporetto, one soldier said
kindly: ‘Poveretti! they didn’t even know the difference between the
sound of an Austrian shell and an Italian.’ ‘When I shot I never aimed
at any one. I didn’t want to kill,’ said another man (who had received
the Bronze Medal for going out with two companions and capturing a
machine-gun). ‘We didn’t like the shocktroops; they frightened us,’ said
the same man. ‘They looked wild. They went out, half drunk, with their
long knives in their teeth, and they never took any prisoners.’
My hope for Italian literature is that sooner or later it may come from
the ‘popolo,’ and that it may come uncorrupted by the kind of education
at present in vogue, and corrupted as little as possible by any
education at all save that in life itself, which the ‘popolo’ already
possesses. If such a revolution in literature ever does take place, it
will be like that in the Middle Ages when writers forsook Latin for the
vernacular. Nor does it seem to me improbable. The condition of the
labouring class is considerably better than before the war; a little
leisure may presently be achieved. And at the same time the old
education is weakening, growing decrepit. Professors are dying out, or
at any rate becoming scarcer, since their salaries are not high enough
to support life in the social condition to which they are condemned. By
its stiffening of standards the Riforma Gentile results in cutting down
drastically the number of young men who can attend a university. And the
salaries of teachers in the elementary schools are so inadequate to the
present cost of living that the ranks must be filled from among the
‘popolo.’
Since the war the pace of life itself is swifter and fiercer than ever,
while literature grows weaker, more anaemic. Presently the water will
rise too high; surplus life will be too strong; with a rush it will flow
over and submerge the old literature with a new rich wave.
It would be unfair not to add that for years the desire for such a
renovation has been cherished by many Italians. What else but a reaction
against the debility of Italian literature was, and still is, the whole
Futurist movement? Consciously it was, among other things, a passionate
protest against verbosity, rhetoric and sentimentalism; less consciously
perhaps, with its demand for velocity, a protest against the separation
of literature from life. And, though Futurism has not itself created
any work of importance, it has had an important influence on Italian
writers, an influence which perhaps did more than any other to overcome
that of D’Annunzio. Even to-day Futurism is still to be reckoned with.
But it, too, is a conscious movement, and thus tends, as Marinetti
himself half admits, to become academic, to crystalline in the forms
with which it reacted against other forms.