THE NOVELS OF GRAZIA DELEDDA

THE award of the Nobel Prize for literature to Grazia Deledda, the only Italian to receive it except Carducci, makes the present a fitting moment for reviewing her work. As she already has some thirty volumes to her credit it is unlikely that anything she may do in the future will materially alter her position. Grazia Deledda was born in 1875 and began writing at a very early age. She was only fifteen when she produced her first novel," Sangue Sardo." It appeared in a Roman fashion paper and created a positive scandal in her native town of Nuoro, which had never before known anything so ultra-modern as a woman novelist. She was not the leader of a new movement in opposition to the established authorities, who had to fight long to gain recognition. She succeeded in winning her public at once, and she was welcomed by the Nuova Antologia itself, whose prestige then had something almost official about it. It was under the ægis of this famous review that most of her early works appeared. In fact, to quote an Italian proverb, she came like the cheese on the maccaroni. The regional, realistic movement, which looked to the Sicilians, Verga and Capuana, as its founders, was well under weigh. Sardinia, at that time probably the least known part of Italy, lacked its novelist, and this young writer brought to her task talents of no mean order.

First and foremost she could tell a story, a gift which is not especially common among Italians, to whom the novella seems a more natural means of expression than the novel. She is a novelist, a story-teller before all things, and her short stories, such as the "Conti Sardi," are distinctly inferior to her novels. As a writer of novelle she cannot compare with Verga or even with Pirandello or Matilde Serao. Here again she would seem to be a daughter of her own island, where the art of the cantastorie held its own as a profession, as it did also in Sicily, till it was killed by the spread of education and the growth of the habit of reading. Her own father had a considerable reputation as a poet in the dialect.

Grazia Deledda was born just when the old medieval life, which lasted to within living memory in the remoter districts of

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Italy, was breaking down before the advance of the modern world, much as the forests were vanishing from the mountains before the "speculatore" and his charcoal-burners, so well described in "Il Nostro Padrone." In this transition period she passed her impressionable young days. The discussion in "Sino al Confine," as to whether Gavina on leaving school is to dress in national costume, must have taken place in the families of many of her friends. And something of the atmosphere of the popular story-teller seems to pervade her novels with their pictures of the life of a primitive people, whose passions are violent and elemental, their virtues and vices almost those of patriarchal days. Blood feuds between families have lasted for generations, as we learn from "Colombe e Sparvieri."

She has made this primitive world so completely her own, it is so much a part of herself, that for her it becomes genuine tragedy. Only in an occasional tendency to twist her stories into happy endings does she seem to make concessions to popular taste. Of this world the brigand is the most striking figure. In the story of the widow of a bandit who perished in a raid, Deledda explains the popular attitude :

Then you think brigands are bad men? You are wrong, sorella mia. They are men who feel the need of displaying their prowess, that is all. My husband used to say, "Once upon a time men went to war. Now there are no more wars, but men must still fight, so they organize raids and bardane, not with the intention of doing harm, but merely to show their strength and their pluck." We had been married only a few months, we were well off, sorella cara : we had corn, chestnuts, raisins, lands, houses, horse and dog. My husband was a land-owner; often he had nothing to do and was bored. A friend comes to call. "Zuanne, would you like to join in a hardana? There will be a number of us, guided by bandits of great skill, and we shall attack the house of a cavaliere a long way off who has three chests full of plate and money. . . There are forests to cross, mountains to climb, rivers to ford. Come." My husband told me of his friend's invitation. "Well, said I," what do you want the plate of the cavaliere for?" No," answered my husband, "I spit upon the fork that may fall to my share, but there are forests and mountains to cross, new things to see, and it will be fun. And I want to see how the bandits do it. Nothing will happen to me, via; there will be so many other lads like me who are out to show their courage and pass the time. Well, would it not be worse if I went to the inn and got drunk?" "I wept, I implored,"-continued the widow, busily twisting the thread with her skinny fingers and following the movement of the distaff with her melancholy eyes" but he went. He said he was

going to Cagliari on business." It was rumoured that there was a spy among them. But Pilatu Barras, the leading brigand, exclaimed: "Fratelli in Dio, it is dogs that sniff, not Christians! My nose is of silver (the original had been shot away)—and yours of dead bone. Well, this much I will say, if we disband the company it will be an ugly case of cowardice, seeing that among us there are lads under arms for the first time: all they want to do is to display their skill as you display a new flag. . . . Avanti, puledri !" Avanti, puledri!" ("Cenere.")

The suspicion was true. The house was full of troops. Her husband was recognized and took to the hills, leaving her in poverty. It is not surprising that the Sardinians were among the very best of the Italian troops in the war.

Obviously a brigand is something of a hero to Grazia Deledda herself, as he is in one of the best and most passionate of her novels, "Marianna Sirca." Not that she has any illusions. She brings out the squalid misery of the existence of a small bandit living in hiding in perpetual fear of his life on contributions from farmers, not important enough for a price to be put on his head. Yet Marianna, left independent by the death of a priest uncle to whom she had been little more than a servant, falls in love with Simeone Sole, whose square beard is like that of an Egyptian priest.

She was almost afraid to turn towards him, though he had been her servant. To her he appeared like someone who had returned from a long journey in other lands, where he had grown, where he had become a man and had learnt all the evil and also all the good things of life, like the emigrants who come back from America.

The picture of Marianna's life in her lonely house in Nuoro, described in every detail of its contents, is extraordinarily vivid, and the passion has the fierce animal intensity that makes it terrible to its victims. There are few more passionate love scenes in these novels than that where Simeone visits Marianna surreptitiously on Christmas Eve in Nuoro and brings her a little wild boar as a present :-.

They looked at each other in silence. Marianna trembled, her legs bent under her. She felt as if he were drawing out her soul with his eyes and that their hands would never be unclasped again. And all her will melted before him as the snow he had brought from outside melted before the flame of the hearth.

The old servant, Zia Fidè, tells the story of a bandit raid on a wealthy couple when the cruelty of the brigands so terrified her

that from that day she ceased to be a woman from shock, a climax which always sent her young mistress into fits of laughter.

This rough, racy peasant humour, which Grazia Deledda has obviously caught from the life around her, is the only relief of the kind she allows herself in some of the best of her novels. The suddenness with which it flashes out is almost disconcerting in its effect. We have heard young Italians speak with dislike of the gloomy, Nordic character of her books, and she has been compared to the Russians. There is little of the brightness of the south about them. Fate seems to brood over them as does the mountain Orthobene over Nuoro. Nature too is no mere setting, but in close relation with man and his moods, as for instance in "Il Vecchio della Montagna "; and her leading characters are haunted by a dream world, which is as real to them as the world in which they live, and seems to deepen the mystery of existence.

Nor is it possible to escape the consequences of sin. Predu Maria in "Il Nostro Padrone" is convinced that in being forced into marrying the pretty, frivolous Sebastiana instead of Marielena, to whom he had been engaged, he is being punished for murdering his stepfather. Annessa feels during the beautiful scene in the tiny mountain chapel in "L'Edera," where the sacristan has to ring the bell right through Mass to drive off the mice of which the old priest is so afraid, that the decision of the doctors that Zio Zuà died a natural death is a proof that her murder had been forgiven. But she must expiate her crime, as well as her guilty love for Paolo, by the terrible years she will spend with him and his degenerate daughter, when his dissipated life has produced the inevitable consequences; for drink plays havoc among these idle young land-owners. Even the simple, God-fearing Costantino, as devout a Christian as his merry friend Isidoro the leech-catcher, in " Naufraghi in Porto," believes that his sentence for a murder of which he is innocent is a punishment for having married his wife only civilly, because he could not afford the expense of a religious ceremony. In "Canne al Vento we see something of the superstitions of this island, which has known Saracen as well as Spanish rule. They strike us as Nordic rather than Italian, but this is not the case with the rites for charming away the tarantula bite in "Naufraghi in Porto." The subject of an old and respected family on the verge of

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ruin is a favourite one with Grazia Deledda. In "L'Edera " we find Don Paolo in desperate straits to save his family which has been brought to the verge of ruin by his extravagance. His riding round the fairs, as he had been wont to do in his youth for pleasure, staying at the houses of friends (for the rite of hospitality is sacred in the island) gives opportunity for some admirable pictures of the life of these Sardinian landowners, and we see the quantities of meat and bread prepared for a shepherd's feast. At home, Zia Rachele joyously and conscientiously prepares the dinner for the poor, who must be served on silver by herself, in accordance with a duty laid on the succession of the estate, the very day before the crash. Annessa's love for Paolo is as passionate as that of Marianna. It drives her to strangle the rich uncle who alone could save the family just when he had been induced by the priest to buy the house and pay the creditors. Clearly Annessa," pilu brundu," as her lover calls her in the dialect, is a favourite with her creator. The portrait displays Deledda's powers of detailed observation, which adds so much to the vividness of her work.

She was small and slender: she looked like a child. The lamplight threw a tint of gilded bronze on to her round, olive-coloured face, while the dimple on the chin increased its almost babyish grace. But the mouth, a little large, with its brilliantly white, close, even teeth, wore a slightly mocking, cruel expression. The blue eyes, on the contrary, under the great dark eyebrows were gentle and sad. There was something contemptuous and soft, too; the smile of an evil old woman and the glance of a sad child were in the face of this silent and delicate servant, whose head bent backwards, as if drawn by the weight of an enormous plait of bright, fair hair twisted on her neck. The long neck, less dark than the face, stood out bare from the collarless blouse: the bodice of the country shut in a tiny breast; and the whole was graceful, active, youthful, bewitching; the long, skinny hands alone betrayed her mature age.

Thoroughly real though Deledda's characters are, one feels sometimes that these books are rather portions of a great popular frieze or even film of Sardinia, of which they give so varied a picture, than individual works of art. She is drawing on the vast store of her impressions and emotions which flow naturally into the mould of a novel.

Imprisonment is regarded as little more than a piece of bad luck in this Sardinian world. Elias, in "Elias Portolu," is

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