The author of the latter is a man of thirty-three years who returned from the war with new ideas regarding the rights of the people, liberty, or whatever one calls that which underlies the present social unrest. He has written many short stories, several romances, of which "Ragnatele" ("Cobwebs"), "Il Figlio Inquieto" ("The Restless Son") and "La più Bella Donna del Mondo" ("The Most Beautiful Woman in the World") are the most important.
Not only is he a man of ideas, but he has disciplined himself to a chaste and virile way of expressing them. In "Our Riches" he has given an admirable picture of the honest, high-principled aristocrat-farmer of his native territory Ivrea, who has the same feeling for his acres that the ideal patriot has for his country: reverence and love, and a paternal interest in the welfare of those who gain their livelihood in serving him. In contrast with him is his grandson, who has the same reverence and affection for the ancestral home and acres but who sees life, its entailments and its privileges, in an entirely different light, who is a socialist in the correct sense of the term. Then he draws with great distinctness the daughter of the former and the mother of the latter, who is confronted with the conflict of choosing between her son, father, and husband, the latter a profiteering shark in the world of affairs. The weakness of the play is the author's failure or unwillingness to define his own state of mind concerning property rights and property distribution, or to define the relationship that should exist between product and producer, capital and labor.
Were I obliged to characterize the fictional output of Italy during the past few years, I should say that it was imaginatively sterile and emotionally fecund. Whereas much of it displays technical efficiency in form, construction, and finish, it lacks originality and does not reveal comprehensive imaginativeness, which the renowned fiction of every country has always had and must continue to have. It must be said, however, that it portrays human nature: that is, thoughts and emotional reactions incited and elicited by new conditions and new aspirations in such a way as to pique the reader's curiosity and sustain his interest.
The Italian novelists of to-day are not story-tellers; they are incident-relaters, narrators of personal experiences, observers armed with cameras.
[CHAPTER VIII
FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY]
Often I find myself thinking of the justification of autobiographical writing in fiction. The modern Italian writer is devoted to it. D'Annunzio set the example a generation ago and carried it to such a point that he outraged all sense of decency. So long as he confined himself to revelation of his own alleged amatory potency and mastery of the arts of love, even though he trampled upon sacred ideals, the public tolerated it. When he strained the sensualities of well-known and beloved notabilities through the percolators of his perverse imagination they sickened of him and denounced him. It is an exquisite form of self-appreciation—the belief that the commonplace events, deliberate thoughts, and vagrant fancies of an individual who has in no way distinguished himself will divert and instruct others, and that they are worthy of record. The fact that such writings are bought is the justification they allege. But the public is like the editor of a magazine. He has to read reams of trash to find one worthy and acceptable contribution. The purpose of fiction may be manifold, but it is read chiefly for distraction and diversion. The critic and interpreter read it to get the temper of the public mind and the trend of its projection, but the purchaser of it reads it to get surcease of the woes of life, whether they be the ruts worn by operating the daily treadmill or the despondencies thrust upon him by circumstances more inexorable than the tigers of Hyrcania. It is not likely that the occurrences in the life of another commonplace individual even though they are pieced with fiction will suffice to provide this. Therefore those who turn to the narration of the lives of others in which there have been stirring events, picturesque phases, and romantic incidents are likely to have greater success. Whether it is a legitimate procedure is another question. It is a matter of taste. It was as justifiable for Mr. Somerset Maugham to portray Paul Gauguin in "The Moon and Sixpence" as it was for Mr. Morley Roberts to describe George Gissing in "The Private Life of Henry Maitland," and even more so, for the latter had revealed himself adequately in his books. Nothing was to be gained by raking up a past that led through prison any more than the prison days of O. Henry is an asset of immortality. Sometimes such writings have a meritoriousness apart from their literary qualities. The "Green Carnation" did much to inform Britishers how prevalent and pernicious was the vice which its prototype was afterward locked in Reading Gaol for practising and apotheosizing. To take a man whose fame has mounted steadily since his death and make a monster of him is a hazardous and, many will think, an iniquitous thing to do, even though the individual during his lifetime was unmoral and immoral. This is what Mr. Somerset Maugham has done for Paul Gauguin, master of the Pont Aven school of painting; dislocater of impressionism and neo-impressionism; liberator of art from stereotyped, slavish copyists of nature; apostle of intellectualism and emotionalism versus æstheticism, and from it he has created Charles Strickland, victim of a strange disease resulting in dissociation of personality. The critics tell us "The Moon and Sixpence" is a "great" book. From the standpoint of literary construction it may be entitled to such designation. From the standpoint of one who desires in fiction some verisimilitude of life as it is, or as it should be if it were ideal, it is disgusting and nauseous, atavistic in implication, primitive in delineation, bestial in its suggestion, and it tends to undermine faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature. It is radicalism in realism carried to the nth degree.
A middle-class Englishman of unknown antecedents, of commonplace somatic and intellectual possessions, of emotional barrenness and shut-in personality, marries, procreates, and serves—on the London Stock Exchange, after the manner of his kind, until he is forty. If artistic impulses had peeped from his unconscious mind to his conscious he had not betrayed them. Then, when constructive incubal activity had passed its height, he becomes big with the idea that his unsightly hulk harbors the soul of an artist. He forsakes his family without warning and without making the smallest provision for their maintenance or welfare, goes to Paris to study art, to scorn convention and decency, and to treat mankind with contumely. He knows no French, and gradually his English vocabulary shrinks to "You are a damn fool" when a man makes proffer of service or supper, and "Tell her to go to hell" if the offer of self or succor comes from a woman. When he writes, however, his mental elaborations encompass the degree that permits him to pen this chaste message: "God damn my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she was in hell."
Like all victims of dementia præcox, when the disorder conditions bizarre conduct for the first time in mid-maturity, he becomes profoundly egocentric, neglectful of his appearance and of his person, and callously insensitive to the feelings and rights of others. As the components of personality dissociate the god disappears, the beast remains, puissant and uncontrollable when under the dominion of primeval appetites or instincts. He has no pride to swallow when he feeds from the hand that still stings from slapping him, no more than does the lion who devours the meat thrust into his cage on the prong that a moment before prodded and wounded him.
"Haven't you been in love since you came to Paris?" is Mr. Maugham's euphemistic question, in his effort to find out for Mrs. Strickland if her husband has been faithful to his marriage vows. After noting Strickland's "slow smile starting and sometimes ending in the eyes, which was very sensual, neither cruel nor kindly, but suggested rather the inhuman glee of the Satyr," he got this answer: "I haven't got time for that sort of nonsense. Life isn't long enough for love and art." This is not what Michaelangelo said to Vittoria Colonna. It is what Tom Cat says when not in the throes of concupiscency. Then Mr. Maugham gives a new verbal dress to the devil, who was sure when ill he would like to be a monk, but who in good health didn't fancy monastic life. "You know that all the time your feet have been walking in the mud. And you want to roll yourself in it, and you find some woman, coarse and low and vulgar, some beastly creature in whom all the horror of sex is blatant, and you fall upon her like a wild animal. You drink till you're blind with rage."