THE MODERN LITERATURE OF ITALY SINCE THE YEAR 1870.
Not being a man of letters, but an alienist, I will give you a psychological rather than a literary description of the condition of literature in Italy. My presentation will undoubtedly have many defects and deficiencies in details, but it will perhaps thereby gain in originality of treatment.
It is one of the characteristics of European writers, and especially of Italians, to isolate themselves completely from scientific research. Beauty for itself, the imitation of the ancients—this is the defect, or the strength, of our poets. ALEARDI, it is true, put some years ago a little botany and geology into his poetry, as did, nearly a century ago, Mascheroni, in his celebrated epistle Invito a Lesbia Sidonia. ZANELLA, a true priest, has sung in a celebrated ode the Coquille Fossile, which portrays in colors truly poetical the last discoveries of paleontology. But this naturalism was only a light varnish, like the golden powder that coquettes sprinkle on their hair, and which falls at the first movement. It is nevertheless true that some poets, not appreciated yet as they deserve, draw their inspiration from nature or from history.
Such is ARTUR GRAF, who in my opinion owes his genius to an intermixture of race, Italian, Greek, and German, and also to a climatic graft, as he comes from Roumania; which shows the favorable influence of the double race-infusion. (See my work on "Genius.") In his poem Medusa, Graf has mingled naturalism and Schopenhauerianism with a poetical spirit which is highly original. He has also written Il Diabolo and the Legend of Rome among the Nations of the Middle Ages; a work which has philological and historical merit, especially in connection with the Folk-lore of past centuries. These books are in prose; but their form is wholly poetical.
RAPISARDI is truly the Juvenal, and we may also say the Lucretius, of contemporaneous Italy. He began by giving us the best translation of the great Roman poet, and he has absorbed much of his spirit, and perhaps also of the asperity of his verses, and of his contempt for form. His great original poem is the Giobbe (Catania), in which he has given a bitter satire of modern society and of contemporary literary men; however, he would seem to be sometimes too personal; so much so that many persons have not forgiven him. Lately he has published a collection of Religious Poems (Catania, 1888), in which, despite its title, there is much less religion than naturalism. It is a hymn, worthy of its master, to the religion of nature and to the beauty of truth, without forgetting the grand social ideas of justice which our poets so often forget.
PRAGA may be described as the Baudelaire of Italy. He too, like the latter, lived and died an alcoholist and paralytic. He was the first to break with the Græco-Latin traditions; and has drawn his inspiration from the caprices of his disease, which has given him a powerful and original stamp. His best works are Penombre and Tavolozza. The same lot, induced by the same disease, has befallen ROVANI, who in his historical novels (Giulio Cesare and la Storia di centi anni) has performed good work in history and psychology.
Among writers truly original, MANTEGAZZA excels in prose. His is one of those many-sided, versatile minds that are met with in the Latin races; such as Cardano, Leonardo da Vinci, L. B. Alberti, Voltaire, Taine, Richet. He is by turns pathologist, physiologist, chemist, anthropologist, geographer, traveller, and novelist. His novel Dio Ignoto is semi-naturalistic. In his Fisiologia del piacere he has attempted a new kind of personal observations, although it is met with in the novels of Balzac, of Flaubert, and of Gonoret. In his Physiology of pain he has again become pathological, serious; this book has, accordingly, not obtained the success that it merited. In the Feste ed Ebbrezze he describes the pleasures of the people. But Mantegazza, who has the originality of genius, has also its evil and treacherous volubility; and we cannot say what is his patriotic and philosophic faith. He has written pages that seem dictated by a catholic priest, by the side of others worthy of Aretino (Amore degli uomini), and still other pages which could be signed by Victor Hugo.
Less original perhaps, but much more consistent with himself, is M. TREZZA, another versatile writer, a theologist, poet, historian, critic, philosopher, philologist, but who has not changed the facets of his genius, or the conscience of his faith. At one time a priest, he was one of the most ardent preachers; but the study of natural science and of philosophy drew him away from his faith and plunged him in naturalism. He has preserved all the apostolic warmth of the ardent and honest priest of his youth. Thus he has emerged from it a new being immovable in his faith:
"Come torre che non crolla
Giammai la cima per soffiar dei venti."[91]
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Like a tower that shakes not
In the blasts of the storm.