Opinions

by Claude C. Washburn

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.’