He has also another fault which is visible in nearly all his works, and is a grave one. He forgets at times the attributes which he has given to his chief characters. Thus Giovanni Saracinesca is described as a man of strong, noble, and reticent nature, and of intellect so superior that his wife tells him he will be very great some day; and he resembles, indeed, precisely, one of those men who become great leaders of other men. But in the sequel (where he is called Sant' Ilario) all this changes, and he behaves like an idiot, and of his great qualities we hear no more and certainly see nothing. And where we still farther follow his fortunes in the subsequent sequel of Don Orsino, he has sunk into complete self-effacement, so complete that he allows his son to be the associate and the debtor of that very Del Ferice whose utter baseness and vileness he knows so well, and who tried in the famous duel to murder him by foul play. Sequels are always ill-advised trials of the author's consistency and the reader's memory, and it would have been unquestionably better to have made Don Orsino stand alone in his history and not figure as the son of Giovanni Saracinesca and of Corona d'Astrardente. When a reader has followed with interest and sympathy the fortune of an impassioned lover it is trying to see him standing in St Peter's 'a middle-aged man,' talking to a son taller than himself. Great art is required to make a character 'grow' quite consistently. The continuation of histories, thus, greatly pleased Anthony Trollope and Thackeray, but I cannot consider it a desirable thing in fiction.
Mr Crawford misses many opportunities of developing the capacity for analysis and deduction which he undoubtedly possesses. He is very observant but he is content to note a fact, he does not trouble himself to seek its origin or the influences which have made it the fact it is. When the two young people who wish to marry in Marzio's Crucifix discuss what their house shall be like, and what colour the walls and furniture, their biographer adds, 'Italians have lost all sense of colour.' This is true, but it is one of the most amazing, grievous, and extraordinary truths that exist; it is one for which I search in vain and in perplexity for an explanation. But Mr Crawford does not seek for any explanation. He states the fact and passes to another subject.
Again, in this sentence he begins well: 'It is of no use to deny the enormous influence of brandy and games of chance on the men of the present day. Something might be gained indeed if we could trace the causes which have made gambling especially the vice of our generation. But I do not believe this is possible.' That is to say, he does not care to be at the trouble of such an investigation, even though he adds the acute sentence that most of the men and women of the world of pleasure in our times exhibit 'the peculiar and unmistakable signs of physical exhaustion, chief of which is cerebral anæmia. They are overtrained and overworked, in the language of training they are "stale."'
He says in another place, 'Italians have no imagination.' This is but partially true; I am not sure that it is true at all. Their modern poetry is beautiful, more beautiful than that of any other nation. Their popular songs are poetic and impassioned as those of no other nation are, and one may hear among their peasantry expressions of singular beauty of sentiment and phrase. A woman of middle age, a contadina, said to me once, 'So long as one's mother lives, one's youth is never quite gone, for there is always somebody for whom one is young.' A rough, rude man, a day labourer, who knew not a letter, and spent all his life bent over his spade or plough, said to me once, one lovely night in spring, as he looked up at the full moon, 'How beautiful she is! But she has no heart. She sees us toiling and groaning and suffering down here, and she is always fair and calm, and never weeps!' Another said once, when a tree was hard to fell, 'He is sorry to come away, it has been his field so long.' And when a flock of solan geese flew over our lands, going from the Marches to the mountains on their homeward way, and descended to rest, the peasants did not touch them: 'They are tired, poor souls,' said one of the women; 'one must not grudge them the soil for their lodging.' Surely such ideas as these in people wholly uneducated indicate imagination in the speakers?
And what can he possibly mean by no poets, which he says in another place? Has he never read a line of Carducci? Much as we may mourn and resent Carducci's turncoat and reactionary politics, no one can deny that he is a poet of the purest kind. Has he never heard the ringing stanzas of Cavallotti which sound like a clarion through the land? Has he never studied the exquisite if too erotic odes of D'Annunzio, or the touching verse of Stecchetti? There are others besides these who are true and fine poets also; and even in the ordinary verses written for newspapers (which in other countries are so poor and tawdry) there is frequently in Italy a true and delicate feeling and an adorable lyrical harmony which make one mourn to see things so fair wasted on so ephemeral a life.
It is through their imagination still more than by their vanity that Italians are led by unscrupulous political flattery and cajoled into disastrous political enterprises. They will believe anything if it be sufficiently captivating to their self-admiration and their fancy, and will dance blindfold on the brink of a bottomless pit. It is only an imaginative people who love so wildly, and kill themselves so madly for affection's sake, as the Italian people do. The other day, because a young soldier was sent to Africa, his brother killed himself in despair, and the father of the two youths then killed himself also. It is an inflammable imagination which makes the nation so easily led away by the promises and the phantasmagoria of glory with which unscrupulous statesmen have enticed it to the brink of ruin. It was its imagination which made it so credulous that when told by its victors that the disgraceful surrender of Makale was a victory, it believed and rejoiced, illuminated and hung out flags, and never saw what a dupe it was being made until cruelly awakened from its delusions by the déroute of Abbu Carima.
Mr Crawford has lived chiefly in cities, and in the cities, even in Rome, the Italian is much debased by contact with foreigners; the influence of foreigners on Italians is excessively bad, especially American and English influence; and in the cities also the preponderance of Jews is great. Innumerable persons who call themselves by Italian names and speak of Italy as their country are Jews and nothing else. A Finnish Jew known to me buys an Italian estate, and with the estate a title, which, by the payment of a large sum to a complaisant Government, he is allowed to adopt; he is decorated by the king for his munificent 'charities' in the land of his adoption; he marries an English woman, and their children masquerade as Italian nobility with not a single drop of Italian blood in their veins. Such 'Italian nobles' are numerous, unhappily, in modern Italy, and do immeasurable discredit to the nationality which they assume. In a generation or two their origin will be forgotten, and they will be taken by society in general to be what they pretend to be. Thus, unhappily, are great nations caricatured, old titles prostituted, and Italy accredited with sons not her own, with pretended offspring who are not even her bastards; persons who impudently affect her name and boast of her blood, when not one single hair of their head or fibre of their flesh has any affiliation to her.
What stifles Italian imagination, and kills the Italian soul, is the passion for money; pure acquisitiveness or avarice, for the desire is to get, little or no pleasure is taken in spending. It is often alleged that this passion is due to their poverty; but poverty is not necessarily accompanied by avarice; the Irish people are very poor, but they are extremely generous; the Spanish people are so also. A comical instance of this stinginess occurred the other day at Milan: a rich tradesman had built himself a fine set of new premises, and opened his new establishment with much feasting; he sent fifteen francs to the municipality to be divided among the poor, and everyone applauded his liberality! This love of money, acquisitiveness, niggardliness, or whatever we call it, is too general not to be injurious to the Italian character; and it enters into all daily life and personal acts, and is frequently the chief motor power of marriage, of career, of education. And then added to this injurious power there is another which is more deleterious still, which weakens, debases, and falsifies the character from infancy: it is the direful influence of the Church. But to treat of this matter would occupy too much space, and would lead too far away from the stories of Mr Crawford, in which there is an unfortunate tendency towards approval of what he calls hierarchical government, although a tendency not strongly enough insisted on by him for it to demand minute examination. The powers of Mr Crawford, however, are limited by the narrowness of what is called religion, and the inability to see the higher side of these subversive opinions which he dreads, and which he has done his best to turn into ridicule by putting them into the mouth of the half-mad artist Marzio.
Indeed, his bigotry on religious subjects is very droll to see in these days; and he speaks of 'unbelievers' in a tone worthy of Puritans in the days of the Mayflower pilgrims. It does not agree with the tone of his books, which is invariably the tone of a man of the world; as such he should possess that liberality of thought which is the chief, perhaps the only, virtue of his generation; and if he had possessed it he would undoubtedly have reached a much higher level, a much finer ideal, than he has actually done. It would seem as if he distrusted and checked the larger intelligence in him, as an over-cautious rider distrusts and checks a horse which only asks to be given a free rein to go at speed over a wide pasture; it would seem as if some extraneous 'influence' were always at his elbow to keep his reason cribbed, cabined and confined.
His religious prejudices have contributed to arrest his intellectual development, for they are puritanical and antiquated in a singular and lamentable degree. He speaks of liberi pensatori as the Church elders of Maine or Massachusetts might have done in the days of witch-torturing and atheist-burning. He thinks that the future great war will be between what he calls believers and unbelievers; and he looks forward with joy to the coming conflict when men shall again fly at each other's throat for the glory of God. This kind of mental cecity has its inevitable results: it makes him step lamely where he would otherwise walk with manly alacrity, and it makes him afraid to face the light of facts which his truer instincts tell him are existing and incontrovertible. Is this the result of early education, of hereditary inclinations, of female or ecclesiastical influence? I do not know; but come whence it may, this taint of bigotry obscures his intelligence and stops his progress, and is matter of profound regret to those who see what he would have been without it.