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intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant. . He is at home in every society. He has common ground with every class. He has a gift which serves him in public and supports him in retirement, without which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and disappointment have a charm. ...

With a characteristic turn of mind the French humanist concludes his lament by declaring his readiness to accept, with a good grace, the inevitable change.

Secondary education tends to strip itself more and more of that incomparable splendour which it derived from its apparent uselessness. Since such a transformation is necessary, since it corresponds to the change in customs, it is not very philosophical to lament it over-much. If I am inconsolable, my reason condemns me. Nature is never on the side of the inconsolable. . . . Nations have an instinct for what suits them best, and the new France will doubtless find the teaching her children need. Yet we, if this selfish pleasure be allowed us, may rejoice that we have been amongst those called last of all to the Banquet of the Muses. . .

If Anatole France be indeed among the last of the Old Order, if it be true that those who come after him must needs voyage farther and farther from those classic shores where our ancestors sojourned so long, we shall at least strain our ears to catch across the waste of sundering waters the grave, harmonious music wherewith this incomparable flute-player, like the Nectaire of his own" Révolte des Anges," laid the whole world beneath his spell. "One seemed to be listening to the nightingale and the Muses singing together, the soul of Nature and the soul of Man."

J. LEWIS MAY

THE ART OF GIOVANNI VERGA

1. Opere Complete di Giovanni Verga. Florence: Bemporad & Figlio.

Mastro-Don Gesualdo.

2.

Cape. 1925.

Translated by D. H. LAWRENCE. Jonathan

3. The House by the Medlar Tree. (I Malavoglia.) Translated by MARY A. CRAIG. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. 1891.

4.

5.

Little Novels of Italy. Translated and adapted by D. H. LAWRENCE. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1925.

La Letteratura Della Nuova Italia. Saggi Critici. Vol. 3, No. XLIII. Giovanni Verga" by BENEDETTO CROCE. Bari: Laterza & Figli.

"

1915.

6. Giovanni Verga. By LUIGI RUSSO. Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi. 1920.

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IOVANNI VERGA was born at Catania in Sicily in 1840 and died in 1922. His literary activity, which extended over more than forty years, was not continuous, so that the number of his works is not large compared with the length of that period. Moreover the artistic level of his work is unequal: he was an author who developed slowly, rose to a zenith and then to a certain extent declined in power. Had he died after producing the "Storia di una Capinera," Eva" and "Tigre Reale," we should have heard no more of him; had his best been the amusing and lively sketches collected in the volume " Don Candeloro and Cia." he would not long be remembered; but the work of his great maturity will live as long as Italian literature. The stories of Vita dei Campi," the "Novelle Rusticane" and the novels “I Malavoglia" and "Mastro-Don Gesualdo," written in his fifth decade, have placed him, as an Italian novelist, second only to Manzoni, and on the artistic level of the greatest European novelists of the nineteenth century. It has taken his countrymen some little time to recognise this truth, though they recognise it now; but in this country, since the long decline of English interest in Italian letters, we have had small chance of recognising it, our general knowledge of Verga being confined to the libretto of the opera "Cavalleria Rusticana," which is a debasement of one of his most brilliant stories. America, it is true, produced in 1890 a translation of "I Malavoglia," with an introduction by W. D. Howells, which was also published in England: but Miss Craig's

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translation has long been out of print and deserves oblivion. is inaccurate, it entirely misses the vigorous spirit of the original and it arbitrarily omits numerous passages, presumably on the ground that they would offend the delicate susceptibilities of New England. Now, however, America has made amends, though by an English hand. It was for an American publisher that Mr. D. H. Lawrence translated "Mastro-Don Gesualdo " and some of Verga's finest short stories. An English publisher has issued the first, and another will shortly issue the short storiesunfortunately too late for notice in this article some of which have already appeared in the Adelphi. It is only to be hoped that our own great novelist, who thoroughly penetrates Verga's spirit and has a narrative power akin to his, will also translate "I Malavoglia." Then, within the inevitable limits of a translation, English readers will have before them the chief works which are Verga's title to honour and admiration.

It is upon these works, and these alone, that I wish here to concentrate attention. The general critical survey of Verga's work as a whole, though not without interest, is more a matter for the Italians than for ourselves. English readers who follow the literary history of Italy will find in Professor Croce's dry but acute study and in the admirable, though rather prolix, monograph of Signor Russo all that they need to know. They will learn, for instance, how and why Verga's work was obscured in Italy by that of Carducci, D'Annunzio, Pascoli and Fogazzaro, which bore a clearer psychological label and a more definitely personal stamp; how the identification of his masterpieces with the formula of "realism "-an identification fundamentally false though speciously justified in the eyes of Italian formalists—was fatal to their proper appreciation; how his defections from classical diction irritated the rabid champions of linguistic purity; and what was the nature of that earlier work upon which, having once read a rough Sicilian sea-captain's log, Verga turned his back.

The earlier Verga was a passionate, romantic and provincial young man, intoxicated by his first contact with the luxurious life of large cities and avid of exquisite experiences. "Eva" and the other novels which reflect this state of mind are simply romantic dreams of a wonderful world wherein lovely enchantresses in silks and satins fascinate, inspire and ruin young but gifted artists, amid

the scents of exotic flowers, the pop of corks and the chatter of gilded society. One observes the almost pathetic contrast between their personal sincerity and their artistic falsity. They had a value, however, for the artist himself, for they purged the humours of his youthful extravagance. All at once he became sensible of the grotesque unreality of this stagey vision and, as Signor Russo truly says, he rose " to the austere understanding of suffering in all its humility and sublimity, in all the comedy and tragedy of its realism." With the sketch of "Nedda " (1874) and “Primavera e altri Racconti " (1876) he felt his way to the true vision of life. The stories of "Vita dei Campi" (1880) showed him in full and noble possession of it, a mature and finished artist. "I Malavoglia "(1881) and “Novelle Rusticane " (1883) soon followed, for they are part of the same inspiration. After a slight pause, " Mastro-Don Gesualdo " appeared in 1888. But that pause was significant: the fire was dying at its heart, and the flames that it sent up thereafter had not the old pure brightness.

That supreme artistic excellence, the power of converting casual experience into an arresting symbol of the deep mysteries and movements that flow in the bed of consciousness, whether we call it beauty, or significance, or artistic truth, is not dependent on any particular set of circumstances. One artist finds it here, another there but Giovanni Verga could only find it in the scenes, the speech and the people of his childhood's memories. The fishing villages and their folk, the sea that fed and preyed upon them, the inland hamlets with their fields of corn, their olives and their vines among the cactus hedges, the wilder pastures where the herdsman blew his melancholy pipe, the herds of wandering ponies, the lusty mules and the overburdened donkeys, the little sun-baked piazzas with their knots of eager gossips, their fairs and their fireworks, their churches and their priests, the rival saints and their processions, the vivid images and rhythmical proverbs of the rustic talk, the throb of naked passions—hunger, love and avarice-the acute anxiety of every harvest, the bitter poverty that could degrade without dehumanising, the thrills, lusts and catastrophes of abortive revolution, the strange reasoning and ruefully humorous philosophy of ignorant minds, the tragic violences and equally tragic submissions of primitive men and women-these were the stuff out of which Verga fashioned his masterpieces. He was impersonal in the sense that he put

himself as a writer at their level and left them to speak for themselves but it was with the best of his artistic personality that he controlled, selected and ordered them, so as to represent the ineluctable rhythm of life itself. Verga, says Signor Russo, "come ogni grande artista, investe la vita degli uomini con un grande spirito di equanimità." He pities without excusing, explains without judging, laughs without derision.

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It was made a reproach to him that he was a regional" storyteller. Yet it was not in the photographic reality of his regionalism that his greatness lay, but rather in the power of his creative imagination to recognise and weld this regional material into an intensely vital work of art. When Verga chose to convey the manner of Sicilian speech and thought in the common linguistic form of educated Italy he shocked the purists, who were scandalised to see the language of Boccaccio and Manzoni constrained to follow the ungrammatical but vivid volubilities of the peasant. We English, with our affection for regionalism-from Scott and Miss Edgeworth to Mr. Hardy and Miss Sheila KayeSmith-have no such scruples. Those who cannot read Verga's Italian may easily conceive upon an English model a parallel to his method. Take for instance any racy speech of Mrs. Poyser's :

Pleasant and what else did y' expect to find him but pleasant? I should think his countenance is pleasant indeed! and him a gentleman born, and 's got a mother like a picter. You may go the country round, and not find such another woman turned sixty-six. It's summat-like to see such a man as that i' the desk of a Sunday ! As I says to Poyser, it's like looking at a full crop o' wheat, or a pasture with a fine dairy o' cows in it; it makes you think the world's comfortable-like. But as for such creaturs as you Methodisses run after, I'd as soon go to look for a lot o' bare-ribbed runts on a common. Fine folks they are to tell you what's right, as look as if they'd never tasted nothing better than bacon-sword or sour-cake i' their lives.

And imagine the whole of " Adam Bede" written, but without mis-spelling, in this rapid, highly coloured speech; or better still perhaps, imagine an Irish novelist, some Synge without Celtic mysticism, using in English dress the idiom of "The Playboy of the Western World," yet maintaining in it, at will, the strain of bare tragedy and simple passion-and the style of Verga's great Sicilian stories is before you. Not only in the dialogues and the unspoken soliloquies, but in the big descriptive scenes of ensemble, it is a Sicilian rustic who is telling the story. Thus in the masterly

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