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!’