Two realistic writers of the end of the nineteenth century must be mentioned, though their work scarcely merits discussion and to do so may be unjust to others. They are Gerolamo Rovetta and Marco Praga. Although the former wrote criticisms, interpretations, and romances, some of which had much success, the contributions by which he is best known are his plays. Rovetta studied contemporary life and depicted it for the stage. His first success, the one upon which his reputation as a man of letters most solidly rests, "La Trilogia di Dorina" ("Dorina's Trilogy"), presents the public pie, upper and lower crust and middle, quite as Zola might have made it. His favorite theme was that man is but a reaction to his environment, expounded particularly in "I Disonesti" ("Dishonest Men"), though his greatest popular success was "Romanticismo" ("Romanticism"), which was a contribution to "idealistic reaction" which would turn us from ugly verities of life. It has been said by competent authorities to be a faithful presentation of public and private sentiment existing in northern Italy previous to her deliverance from tyrannical Austria.
Marco Praga is the son of Emilio Praga, who was the best-known Bohemian poet of Italy in his day (1839-1875), but who abandoned writing to teach dramatic literature in the Conservatory of Music in Milan. He professes to be the dramatic mirror held up to life and to tell the truth as he sees it, that he cannot be persuaded to camouflage it, and that when it is depicted on the stage it shall amuse rather than distress. That is what makes his most successful plays, such as "Le Vergini" ("The Virgins") and "La Moglie Ideale" ("The Ideal Wife"), depressing reading. Such conduct as they depict and such exchange of thought and sentiment as they report undoubtedly exist, but the less one knows of it and comes in contact with it the happier he or she is likely to be. If adultery could only be made a virtue for a few years, it would lose its attractiveness and many writers would have to earn their living.
At the end of the nineteenth century Italy had three women poets of much distinction, one of whom, Ada Negri, had and still has great popularity. Her last book of poems, "Il libro Di Mara" ("The Book of Mara"), has shown that she still has the capacity to put into verse dramatically and lyrically the most delicate and the most dominant notes of love as she or as those she has loved has experienced it. She was born in a little village of Lombardy in 1870. Her mother worked in a factory, and she herself was for some years a teacher in the elementary schools; so she had first-hand knowledge of the shut-in life of those whose repressions and aspirations she sung and published in L'Illustrazione Popolare of Milan. In these she set forth with great sincerity and with stirring lyric quality the sordid sufferings and sorrows of the toiling masses. These poems and others were published under the titles of "Fatality" and "The Tempest" in 1892 and 1894. Two years later a radical change in her social and spiritual environment was brought about by her marriage to Signor Garlanda, and soon she sang of it in a volume called "Maternity," which does for that state what her previous volumes had done for human pain and human poverty. "Dal Profondo" ("From the Depths") was but a continuation of these sentiments, tinctured with philosophical and socialistic knowledge that had been displayed for other purpose in "The Tempest." After this came a volume entitled "Esilio" ("Exile"), which reflected the same thoughts and sentiments in Swiss light. She has written two prose works, a series of short stories entitled "Le Solitarie" and "Orazioni" ("Orisons"). She glorifies purity, idealizes it, and sings its adoration.
In the closing years of the century there was published in Milan a volume of lyrics by one Annie Vivanti, which was praised intemperately by Carducci and by the Nuova Antologia. She had some fiction to her credit which dealt chiefly with the life of the stage, but her advent into the world of letters was like a shooting star; nothing was known of her origin save that she was said to have been born in London, and there was some mystery about her career. In her poetry there was a true lyric wail, especially in "Destino" ("Destiny"), "Non Sarà mai" ("It Can Never Be"), that appealed tremendously to the public mind. Had she been productive she might have been compared to Ella Wheeler Wilcox. After her marriage to Mr. Chartres, a London journalist, she became better known as the mother of a child-wonder violinist. Amongst her romances the one which had greatest popularity was entitled "I Divoratori" ("The Devourers"). It is obviously the story of her life and of her daughter's career, the record of filial shortcomings steeped in wormwood.
The third of these interesting writers, half Armenian, half Italian, was Vittoria Aganoor, who was born in Padua in 1855. In 1900 she published a volume called "Leggenda Eterna" ("Eternal Legend"), which showed her to be a sincere, impassioned artist with a pronounced leaning toward the sentimental. She died in London in the spring of 1910, after a surgical operation, and a few hours later her husband, Guido Pompili, killed himself. Her best-known poems are "Il Canto dell' Ironia" ("The Song of Irony"), "La vecchia Anima sogna ... " ("The Old Soul Dreams"), "Mamà, sei tu?" ("Mother, Is It Thou?"). A complete volume of her poetry was published in 1912.
Italians are astonished when women make a great stir in the world. They have had no Jeanne d'Arc or Florence Nightingale. Their historic women have been mostly mystics who would punish the flesh that they might become spiritually pure, but the generation that is now passing has had five women, four at least of whom will have to be discussed by any historian of the intellectual movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They are Matilde Serao, Grazia Deledda, Maria Montessori, Eusapia Palladino, and Eleanora Duse, and most space will be given to Duse.
Matilde Serao is the Marie Corelli of Italy with one important qualification. She has not been obliged to subscribe to the rigors of convention. She has spoken with great frankness about whole sides of life which Miss Corelli knows, but about which she has been compelled to be silent. Not that the romances of Matilde Serao are in any sense pornographic, but she has painted her subjects so vividly and registered her sensations and impressions so sumptuously that they are considered very improper by Mrs. Grundy. She was in turn school-teacher, telegraphist, journalist, publisher, author, but throughout her writings she has kept the note of the journalist who has made a careful study of Zola and of Flaubert. Her thought is spontaneous, her expression facile, as she depicts the emotions and "feelings" of her Neapolitan characters, clad in rags or royal raiment, living in hovel or in palace.
Her most successful books were "La Storia di un Monaco," "Il Ventre di Napoli" ("The Belly of Naples"), "Il Paese della Cuccagna" ("The Land of the Cockaigne"), and "Terno secco" in which the social, economic, and political world of Naples is revealed. With the third of those enumerated she tried to do for lottery-gambling in Naples what Charles Dickens did for the private schools of England. Regrettably her efforts did not have a similar result.
In her Neapolitan stories the local color is not a mere background, but the very marrow of their being, with the result that it is almost impossible to reproduce it adequately in translation. Her later books were always pictures of the professional lover in different environments. He loves with fury and usually for a short time only. His amatory conduct has no ancillæ of Anglo-Saxon love-making. It is taurine and satyric. He does not always kill after the embrace, but one gathers from his conduct that he would like to do so. Time has tempered Matilde Serao's erotic literary coefficient and her last books are cool, more serene, and less interesting. One of her last books, "Ella non rispose," has recently been translated into English under the title of "Souls Divided."
Grazia Deledda has done for her native island of Sardinia that which Signora Serao did for Naples, but to a great extent she kept lubricity out of her writings. In her "Il Vecchio della Montagna" ("The Old Man of the Mountain"), "La Via del Male" ("Road to Evil"), "Cenere" ("Ashes"), "Nostalgia," "L'Incendio nell' Uliveto" ("The Burning in the Olive Grove"), and many others, she depicted with wondrous accuracy the life, feelings, struggles, ambitions, infirmities of the Sardinians, and painted their sordid surroundings and glorious scenery. She did for that wonderful island, so strangely neglected by the mother country, what Mary Wilkins did for New England. Her imagination was never so vivid nor was her eye so penetrating as that of her Neapolitan sister, nor has she known the voluptuous side of life, seamy or embroidered, but she has known how to put down in a way that engrosses the reader's attention the pitiable and pathetic plights that circumstance and passion force upon the people with whom she lives. The display of their passions and sorrows are apparently as familiar to her as the landscapes. Unfortunately, however, she does for them that which she does for the latter. She idealizes them or, better said, she strains them through her imagination. In other words, instead of recording them as they are she records them as they should be. Her novels give the impression of being photographic until you read Verga. Not that the breath of insincerity which Croce said was the curse of Italy's modern writers comes from her. She is most sincere, but her characters are sandman manikins into whose nostrils she has breathed the breath of life. She makes her characters do what she might do if she were one of them.