Part 8

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.

Once again, it is not to movements, but to individuals that one must look--to individuals who care nothing for groups and less than nothing for tendencies, either to follow or to combat them, but who carve out unaided their own conception of life. Of such was Giovanni Verga, who died a few years ago more than eighty years old, neglected and almost forgotten, but with a magnificent achievement behind him that throws a bleak pitiless light on the tawdriness of his contemporaries and successors. Now that he is dead, appreciation of what he accomplished is growing; people are reading him more. Imitation of Verga will not be Verga; you cannot create a race of giants without giant blood; but it cannot be quite profitless to turn at last to an author who built literature out of life.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO

Pirandello has written a great deal. In addition to the numerous plays by which he is rightly known, there are several novels and a large number of short stories--so large a number, in fact, that he is collecting them in a twenty-four volume edition under the title, _Novelle per un anno_--one for each day of the year. Five of the twenty-four volumes have been published so far--closely printed books of some three hundred pages each; but I find in them little of the Pirandello who is an important figure in Italian literature to-day. Despite his announcement in the preface that many of the stories are new, that all have been carefully retouched and many rewritten, they bear the brand of journalism. They rarely descend as low as the average American magazine story, but, for all the prolific inventiveness they reveal, they have something of the same monotony, adequate workmanship and lack of distinction. Nor is the significance of the thought or emotion often striking. Now and again one does get a hint of the Pirandello of the plays--in the extraordinary, almost wasteful (and often wasted) power of characterization, for example, or in the preoccupation with death--but these things are obscured by the verbose pedestrian prose, quite without freshness. This lack of distinction is certainly not due to carelessness; rather, the tales seem heavy and laboured. Indeed, from all that I have read of Pirandello I am inclined to believe that it is only conversation, dramatic dialogue, that he can write well and freshly. There would be nothing surprising in this. It is notoriously rare for a good dramatist to be a good novelist or _novellista_. And I am not even convinced that the monotonous melancholy of the stories (somebody dies in almost every one) has much to do with their author’s predisposition to tragedy. The tragic ending is almost as much a convention in an Italian, as the happy ending in an American, story; and since in only a few of these tales have I felt the note of real poignancy and been even faintly moved, I am the more inclined to class their sadness as conventionality.

Those that deal with Pirandello’s own native Sicily have greater warmth, a hint of tenderness. _Lontano_, the story of a Norwegian sailor left, ill with typhoid, by his ship companions at the little town of Porto Empedocle, nursed by the niece of that absurd, delightful, old character, Don Paranza, a Sicilian ‘Vice Consul for Scandinavia,’ finally marrying her, and settling down to live in that sunburnt country, an eternal stranger to every one, including his wife, is genuinely touching. But the undistinguished prose in which it is too wordily told is like a dry field that should be burned over for the sake of the fresh green grass struggling beneath.

The last stories in this volume (the fifth) are the best, hint more clearly at the Pirandello of the plays, at both his virtues and his defects; so it is just possible that the entire collection is being made chronologically (though nothing is said of any such plan in the preface), in which case, to judge them fairly, one ought, I suppose, to await the publication of the other nineteen volumes.

It would be unfair to blame these stories for lacking profundity of thought, since a story may of course have profound significance without actually expressing any thought at all, were it not that there is a great deal of philosophizing in them, and that often it is made the point of the story. Since this is so, it seems fair to note that the philosophizing is pretty superficial. Take, for instance, the story called _Niente_ (which is far superior to most of the others because it is nearly all in dialogue). A hack doctor is awakened at three in the morning at the pharmacy where he is on duty, to attend a young man who has attempted to commit suicide. But on arrival at the horrible tenement-house in which the tragedy took place, he finds that the victim, dying, has been removed to a hospital. So the whole story is simply conversation--first between the doctor and the annoyed middle-class relative of the suicide, then between the doctor and the wretched inhabitants of the apartment in which the young man had lived. Bit by bit through this dialogue the tragedy and its causes are revealed, with a skill worthy of that displayed in _Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore_. (Indeed, of this story a striking one-act play might easily be made). One would like the point to be merely the revelation of the obscure tragedy, with no more moral to it than to Kipling’s _Without Benefit of Clergy_--or with the tremendous moral of its not having one. But what, instead, do we get? The doctor’s philosophizing. The unfortunate young man (he says) had written verses, wanted to be a poet, dreamed of glory--and the daughter of the house was in love with him. Supposing he had lived, what would his dream of glory have come to? A poor useless book of verse. And his dream of love? ‘Your daughter! He’d have married your daughter!’ he cries to the irate dishevelled mistress of the house. ‘Oh, beautiful and adorned with all the virtues, I have no doubt, but still a woman, my dear lady, a woman! And after a little, good God! with children and misery, think what she’d have been! And the world, my dear woman, do you know what the world would have become for him? A house! This house!’ And the doctor goes out, muttering: ‘_No_ books! _No_ women! _No_ house! Nothing!’

Now, despite its vividness, this is thin and superficial and, if taken as the moral, at least as inadequate as any other moral would have been to such a tragedy. It may perhaps be taken as an adequate moral if the point of the story is not the young man’s tragedy, but the character of the doctor; but I fear that, instead, we have here Pirandello himself in a characteristic mood of hatred and disgust for grovelling life. In the last story in the book, _La distruzione dell’uomo_, you get the mood again, and the moralizing, unrelieved by a really possible, poignant tragedy. Here a young student murders a commonplace woman of forty-seven because she is about to have a child. She has been pregnant year after year before this, but each time has had a miscarriage. This time it is clear that the child will be born. And the student, in disgust for her, her husband, the squalid tenement-house they, and he, live in, and the squalid world beyond, murders the woman with her unborn child, feeling fiercely that he is murdering humanity itself, destroying Man.

A pity! Not only because there are a dozen moods that might be felt in considering that middle-aged couple, that distressing eighth-rate apartment-house, with its dirty dishevelled walls and ragged display of washing and the filthy children swarming in its courtyard, instead of the one, not very perceptive mood of disgust to which we are held; but also because in the expression of even this one mood Pirandello has here, as often elsewhere, overdone himself, so that positively one finishes the story in such a reaction of cheerfulness as almost to agree with dear Pippa’s favourite remark. There you had it all--a masterly picture of the house, of the quarter (that quarter of Rome has certainly changed for the better of late years), and of the heavy elderly couple, she with vast distorted stomach, he with an only less vast one, making laboriously the daily walk prescribed for her by the doctor, out past the church of Sant’ Agnese and back again, out and back again. Why not let it go at that and leave the reader to feel what he pleases? Most readers, I think, would feel pathos in the solemn anxiety of those two to add one more inhabitant to that house and quarter--and world, if you like. But if disgust was all one could feel, that, too, he would surely feel more keenly if left to feel it undirected.

The best known of the novels, _Il fu Mattia Pascal_, first published some twenty years ago when Pirandello was still a comparatively young man, is better written than the short stories. Or is it? Perhaps it has, rather, a youthful brio that they lack, a kind of gusto that rushes one along through the dry heaps of words. And also it is told in the first person; which gives it an advantage. It is only in this gusto that the book is young, however. Its spirit is not young at all, but cool, rather hard and sophisticated--not in a callow way, but maturely. I like the moralizing in the novel as much as I dislike it in most of the short stories, partly because here it is a natural expression of the characters who indulge in it, partly because it is in itself often very suggestive; indeed, I am inclined to think that the moralizing is the best of the book. On the other hand, the most interesting thing is the plot, because in it one discerns the as yet incoherent beginnings of an idea that, developed, has come to haunt Pirandello--the idea of the reality of illusion, and thus of the manifold nature of personality. In the plays one almost never gets away from some variation on this theme. _Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore_ is hardly less frankly concerned with it than _Vestire gli ignudi_ or _Come prima, meglio di prima_. But in the novel there is only the foreshadowing of the idea; it is certainly not made clear to the reader, and was almost equally certainly not yet clear to Pirandello himself; and the result is confusion.

Mattia Pascal is believed by his family and friends to have committed suicide. A body supposed to be his is discovered and formally buried. Taking advantage of this, he gives himself a new name, Adriano Meis, invents a past for himself, and sets out to live anew, free. But he finds that he cannot endure the emptiness of liberty any more than he could endure the chains in which he struggled when alive. He is sucked back into life, and eventually falls in love with a girl, Adriana, but cannot marry her because the man as whom she knows him is a fictitious man, with no papers, no _stato civile_, nothing. He--or, at least, the man he was before he died--has a wife already. So he ‘commits suicide’ a second time, becomes once more Mattia Pascal, and returns to his home--to find his wife long since married to his best friend, and with a baby. As far as I can make it out, what he then does is to live in a state half-way between life and death. He leaves his wife to his friend, and becomes--calls himself--‘the late Mattia Pascal.’

Now this is all very unsatisfactory, not really worked out, and in that single sense ‘young.’ Whatever significance was intended remains obscure, because, I am convinced, it was obscure to the author. There is an abundance, a super-abundance, of ideas--enough, it must be admitted, to justify in part those critics who already twenty years ago found Pirandello ‘too cerebral.’ But my own objection is not that Mattia Pascal reasons about himself exceedingly at every moment, nor even that I cannot discern significance beneath the story, can only feel that it might have held some profound significance. A study of a man who reasons exceedingly is a quite legitimate subject for a novel, and it is not essential that a study of character should pretend to be anything more. My objection is that, even granting the contradictions that go to make up any individual, Mattia Pascal does not hold together. He is shown us at the beginning as an impetuous young man of considerable force of character; yet, when freed from his unpleasant surroundings, and, by a run of luck at Monte Carlo, the possessor of 82,000 lire, he sets out to live frugally on this sum for the rest of his life, doing nothing at all. Would he really have behaved in this way? The explanation, that he could never have a _stato civile_, is weak. He was not so possessed of love for his own country as to have to live there. He could have gone anywhere else, almost (this being before the war), and have been taken at his word. Indeed, before his stroke of luck, he had seriously thought of emigrating to America. Neither was he a sick soul burdened by life and glad to be free from it. He was merely, quite justifiably, burdened by the conditions of his own personal environment. He might well, being curious and cynical, have done for a short time what he did; but two months of it would have bored into action the Mattia Pascal we had met. Again, he is hard to the point of callousness, if not of brutality; that we see at once. Nevertheless, in his way, he did love the girl he married, and that he was not incapable of intense emotion we see from his grief at the death of his child. Then, allowing for all possible contradictions, is it conceivable that he could have so gaily let his wife imagine him dead and, if not grieve for him, at least remain in misery, while here was he with 82,000 lire in his pocket? He might have done it--but so blithely? Again, we are shown him really in love with the gentle and pathetic Adriana. Yet he can simulate a second suicide and leave _her_, at any rate, to an agony of grief. Why? Because as Adriano Meis he has no real existence, is but a shadow. He has no _stato civile_, and can’t marry her; while, if he is Mattia Pascal, he can’t marry her, since he has a wife already. Nonsense! He could have told Adriana the truth, broken the whole tenuous chain of reasoning, and let her decide whether she would escape abroad with him and marry him as Adriano Meis. A hundred to one that she would have done so despite her religion! But if she had not, she would have been infinitely less unhappy than he made her by what he did do. There is a hardness, a cruelty, about all this that is due more to the author than to the protagonists. It is as though he would not let them alone. They are flesh and blood, and he will treat them as marionettes--for the purpose of his thesis. And, to save me, I cannot make out what his thesis really is. It might be: that there is no such thing as freedom, no escape from life; or that liberty is more unbearable than slavery; or that everything is illusion. It does not seem to me to be clearly any one of these things or any other--least of all what Pirandello himself indicates in a short essay written for the new edition of the novel: that people are the marionettes of their own idea of themselves until that idea becomes intolerable and they tear off the mask and reveal their naked faces. This is, in truth, an idea that underlies the plays, and Pirandello, writing to-day, may now read it back into what he wrote twenty years ago, but I challenge any one to discover it in the novel itself. A perplexing, unsatisfactory, frustrated book, but closer than the short stories, in power, to the plays.