The young man’s intelligence is of the clearest; the woman’s here is inferior, though in “Il Fuoco” the two opposed faculties are almost equal; but the pair are alike far from living in their intelligence, which only serves to bestrew with lurid gleams the black darkness of their sensual life. So far as the intelligence is one with the will our author fundamentally treats it as cut off from all communication with any other quarter—that is with the senses arrayed and encamped. The most his unfortunates arrive at is to carry their extremely embellished minds with them through these dusky passages as a kind of gilded glimmering lantern, the effect of which is merely fantastic and ironic—a thing to make the play of their shadows over the walls of their catacomb more monstrous and sinister. Again in the first pages of “Il Trionfo” the glimmer is given.

That, in a nutshell, is D’Annunzio’s subject-matter; not simply that his characters see in advance what love is worth for them, but that they nevertheless need to make it the totality of their consciousness. In “Il Trionfo” and “Il Fuoco” the law just expressed is put into play at the expense of the woman, with the difference, however, that in the latter tale the woman perceives and judges, suffers in mind, so to speak, as well as in nerves and in temper. But it would be hard to say in which of these two productions the inexhaustible magic of Italy most helps the effect, most hangs over the story in such a way as to be one with it and to make the ugliness and the beauty melt together. The ugliness, it is to be noted, is continually presumed absent; the pursuit and cultivation of beauty—that fruitful preoccupation which above all, I have said, gives the author his value as our “case”—being the very ground on which the whole thing rests. The ugliness is an accident, a treachery of fate, the intrusion of a foreign substance—having for the most part in the scheme itself no admitted inevitability. Against it every provision is made that the most developed taste in the world can suggest; for, ostensibly, transcendently, Signor D’Annunzio’s is the most developed taste in the world—his and that of the ferocious yet so contracted conoscenti his heroes, whose virtual identity with himself, affirmed with a strangely misplaced complacency by some of his critics, one would surely hesitate to take for granted. It is the wondrous physical and other endowments of the two heroines of “Il Piacere,” it is the joy and splendour of the hero’s intercourse with them, to say nothing of the lustre of his own person, descent, talents, possessions, and of the great general setting in which everything is offered us—it is all this that makes up the picture, with the constant suggestion that nothing of a baser quality for the esthetic sense, or at the worst for a pampered curiosity, might hope so much as to live in it. The case is the same in “L’Innocente,” a scene all primarily smothered in flowers and fruits and fragrances and soft Italian airs, in every implication of flattered embowered constantly-renewed desire, which happens to be a blighted felicity only for the very reason that the cultivation of delight—in the form of the wife’s luckless experiment—has so awkwardly overleaped itself. Whatever furthermore we may reflectively think either of the Ippolita of “Il Trionfo” or of her companion’s scheme of existence with her, it is enchanting grace, strange, original, irresistible in kind and degree, that she is given us as representing; just as her material situation with her young man during the greater part of the tale is a constant communion, for both of them, with the poetry and the nobleness of classic landscape, of nature consecrated by association.

The mixture reaches its maximum, however, in “Il Fuoco,” if not perhaps in “The Virgins of the Rocks”; the mixture I mean of every exhibited element of personal charm, distinction and interest, with every insidious local influence, every glamour of place, season and surrounding object. The heroine of the first-named is a great tragic actress, exquisite for everything but for being unfortunately middle-aged, battered, marked, as we are constantly reminded, by all the after-sense of a career of promiscuous carnal connections. The hero is a man of letters, a poet, a dramatist of infinite reputation and resource, and their union is steeped to the eyes in the gorgeous medium of Venice, the moods of whose melancholy and the voices of whose past are an active part of the perpetual concert. But we see all the persons introduced to us yearn and strain to exercise their perceptions and taste their impressions as deeply as possible, conspiring together to interweave them with the pleasures of passion. They “go in” as the phrase is, for beauty at any cost—for each other’s own to begin with; their creator, in the inspiring quest, presses them hard, and the whole effect becomes for us that of an organised general sacrifice to it and an organised general repudiation of everything else. It is not idle to repeat that the value of the Italian background has to this end been inestimable, and that every spark of poetry it had to contribute has been struck from it—with what supreme felicity we perhaps most admiringly learn in “The Virgins of the Rocks.” To measure the assistance thus rendered, and especially the immense literary lift given, we have only to ask ourselves what appearance any one of the situations presented would have made in almost any Cisalpine or “northern” frame of circumstance whatever. Supported but by such associations of local or of literary elegance as our comparatively thin resources are able to furnish, the latent weakness in them all, the rock, as to final effect, on which they split and of which I shall presently speak, would be immeasurably less dissimulated. All this is the lesson of style, by which we here catch a writer in the very act of profiting after a curious double fashion. D’Annunzio arrives at it both by expression and by material—that is, by a whole side of the latter; so that with such energy at once and such good fortune it would be odd indeed if he had not come far. It is verily in the very name and interest of beauty, of the lovely impression, that Giorgio Aurispa becomes homicidal in thought and finally in act.

To these reflections he has been brought by the long, dangerous past which, as the author says, his connection with his mistress has behind it—a past of recriminations of which the ghosts still walk. “It dragged behind it, through time, an immense dark net, all full of dead things.” To quote here at all is always to desire to continue, and “Il Trionfo” abounds in the illustrative episodes that are ever made so masterfully concrete. Offering in strictness, incidentally, the only exhibition in all the five volumes of a human relation other than the acutely sexual, it deals admirably enough with this opportunity when the hero pays his visit to his provincial parents before settling with his mistress at their hermitage. His people are of ancient race and have been much at their ease; but the home in the old Apulian town, overdarkened by the misdeeds of a demoralised father, is on the verge of ruin, and the dull mean despair of it all, lighted by outbreaks of helpless rage on the part of the injured mother, is more than the visitor can bear, absorbed as he is in impatiences and concupiscences which make everything else cease to exist for him. His terror of the place and its troubles but exposes of course the abjection of his weakness, and the sordid squabbles, the general misery and mediocrity of life that he has to face, constitute precisely, for his personal design, the abhorred challenge of ugliness, the interference of a call other than erotic. He flees before it, leaving it to make shift as it can; but nothing could be more “rendered” in detail than his overwhelmed vision of it.

So with the other finest passages of the story, notably the summer day spent by the lovers in a long dusty dreadful pilgrimage to a famous local miracle-working shrine, where they mingle with the multitude of the stricken, the deformed, the hideous, the barely human, and from which they return, disgusted and appalled, to plunge deeper into consoling but too temporary transports; notably also the incident, masterly in every touch, of the little drowned contadino, the whole scene of the small starved dead child on the beach, in all the beauty of light and air and view, with the effusions and vociferations and grimnesses round him, the sights and sounds of the quasi-barbaric life that have the relief of antique rites portrayed on old tombs and urns, that quality and dignity of looming larger which a great feeling on the painter’s part ever gives to small things. With this ampler truth the last page of the book is above all invested, the description of the supreme moment—for some time previous creeping nearer and nearer—at which the delirious protagonist beguiles his vaguely but not fully suspicious companion into coming out with him toward the edge of a dizzy place over the sea, where he suddenly grasps her for her doom and the sense of his awful intention, flashing a light back as into their monstrous past, makes her shriek for her life. She dodges him at the first betrayal, panting and trembling.

The wonder-working shrine of the Abruzzi, to which they have previously made their way, is a local Lourdes, the resort from far and wide of the physically afflicted, the evocation of whose multitudinous presence, the description of whose unimaginable miseries and ecstasies, grovelling struggles and supplications, has the mark of a pictorial energy for such matters not inferior to that of Émile Zola—to the degree even that the originality of the pages in question was, if I remember rightly, rather sharply impugned in Paris. D’Annunzio’s defence, however, was easy, residing as it does in the fact that to handle any subject successfully handled by Zola (his failures are another matter) is quite inevitably to walk more or less in his footsteps, in prints so wide and deep as to leave little margin for passing round them. To which I may add that, though the judgment may appear odd, the truth and force of the young man’s few abject days at Guardiagrele, his casa paterna, are such as to make us wish that other such corners of life were more frequent in the author’s pages. He has the supremely interesting quality in the novelist that he fixes, as it were, the tone of every cluster of objects he approaches, fixes it by the consistency and intensity of his reproduction. In “The Virgins of the Rocks” we have also a casa paterna, and a thing, as I have indicated, of exquisite and wonderful tone; but the tone here is of poetry, the truth and the force are less measurable and less familiar, and the whole question, after all, in its refined and attenuated form, is still that of sexual pursuit, which keeps it within the writer’s too frequent limits. Giorgio Aurispa, in “Il Trionfo,” lives in communion with the spirit of an amiable and melancholy uncle who had committed suicide and made him the heir of his fortune, and one of the nephew’s most frequent and faithful loyalties is to hark back, in thought, to the horror of his first knowledge of the dead man’s act, put before us always with its accompaniment of loud southern resonance and confusion. He is in the place again, he is in the room, at Guardiagrele, of the original appalled vision.

This young man’s great mistake, we are told, had been his insistence on regarding love as a form of enjoyment. He would have been in a possible relation to it only if he had learned to deal with it as a form of suffering. This is the lesson brought home to the heroine of “Il Fuoco,” who suffers indeed, as it seems to us, so much more than is involved in the occasion. We ask ourselves continually why; that is we do so at first; we do so before the special force of the book takes us captive and reduces us to mere charmed absorption of its successive parts and indifference to its moral sense. Its defect is verily that it has no moral sense proportionate to the truth, the constant high style of the general picture; and this fact makes the whole thing appear given us simply because it has happened, because it was material that the author had become possessed of, and not because, in its almost journalistic “actuality,” it has any large meaning. We get the impression of a direct transfer, a “lift,” bodily, of something seen and known, something not really produced by the chemical process of art, the crucible or retort from which things emerge for a new function. Their meaning here at any rate, extracted with difficulty, would seem to be that there is an inevitable leak of ease and peace when a mistress happens to be considerably older than her lover; but even this interesting yet not unfamiliar truth loses itself in the great poetic, pathetic, psychologic ceremonial.

That matters little indeed, as I say, while we read; the two sensibilities concerned bloom, in all the Venetian glow, like wondrous water-plants, throwing out branches and flowers of which we admire the fantastic growth even while we remain, botanically speaking, bewildered. They are other sensibilities than those with which we ourselves have community—one of the main reasons of their appearing so I shall presently explain; and, besides, they are isolated, sequestrated, according to D’Annunzio’s constant view of such cases, for an exclusive, an intensified and arid development. The mistress has, abnormally, none of the protection, the alternative life, the saving sanity of other interests, ties, employments; while the hero, a young poet and dramatist with an immense consciousness of genius and fame, has for the time at least only those poor contacts with existence that the last intimacies of his contact with his friend’s person, her poor corpo non piÙ giovane, as he so frequently repeats, represent for him. It is not for us, however, to contest the relation; it is in the penetrating way again in which the relation is rendered that the writer has his triumph; the way above all in which the world-weary interesting sensitive woman, with her infinite intelligence, yet with her longing for some happiness still among all her experiments untasted, and her genius at the same time for familiar misery, is marked, featured, individualised for us, and, with the strangest art in the world—one of those mysteries of which great talents alone have the trick—at once ennobled with beauty and desecrated by a process that we somehow feel to be that of exposure, to spring from some violation of a privilege. “ ‘Do with me,’ ” says the Foscarina on a certain occasion, “ ‘whatever you will’; and she smiled in her offered abjection. She belonged to him like the thing one holds in one’s fist, like the ring on one’s finger, like a glove, like a garment, like a word that may be spoken or not, like a draught that may be drunk or poured on the ground.” There are some lines describing an hour in which she has made him feel as never before “the incalculable capacity of the heart of man. And it seemed to him as he heard the beating of his own heart and divined the violence of the other beside him that he had in his ears the loud repercussion of the hammer on the hard anvil where human destiny is forged.” More than ever here the pitch of the personal drama is taken up by everything else in the scene—everything else being in fact but the immediate presence of Venice, her old faded colour and old vague harmonies, played with constantly as we might play with some rosy fretted faintly-sounding sea-shell.

It would take time to say what we play with in the silver-toned “Virgins of the Rocks,” the history of a visit paid by a transcendent young man—always pretty much the same young man—to an illustrious family whose fortunes have tragically shrunken with the expulsion of the Bourbons from the kingdom of Naples, and the three last lovely daughters of whose house are beginning to wither on the stem, undiscovered, unsought, in a dilapidated old palace, an old garden of neglected pomp, a place of fountains and colonnades, marble steps and statues, all circled with hard bright sun-scorched volcanic scenery. They are tacitly candidates for the honour of the hero’s hand, and the subject of the little tale, which deals with scarce more than a few summer days, is the manner of their presenting themselves for his admiration and his choice. I decidedly name this exquisite composition as my preferred of the series; for if its tone is thoroughly romantic the romance is yet of the happiest kind, the kind that consists in the imaginative development of observable things, things present, significant, related to us, and not in a weak false fumble for the remote and the disconnected.

It is indeed the romantic mind itself that makes the picture, and there could be no better case of the absolute artistic vision. The mere facts are soon said; the main fact, above all, of the feeble remnant of an exhausted race waiting in impotence to see itself cease to be. The father has nothing personal left but the ruins of his fine presence and of his old superstitions, a handful of silver dust; the mother, mad and under supervision, stalks about with the delusion of imperial greatness (there is a wonderful page on her parading through the gardens in her rococo palanquin, like a Byzantine empress, attended by sordid keepers, while the others are hushed into pity and awe); the two sons, hereditarily tainted, are virtually imbecile; the three daughters, candidly considered, are what we should regard in our Anglo-Saxon world as but the stuff of rather particularly dreary and shabby, quite unutterably idle old maids. Nothing, within the picture, occurs; nothing is done or, more acutely than usual, than everywhere, suffered; it is all a mere affair of the rich impression, the complexity of images projected upon the quintessential spirit of the hero, whose own report is what we have—an affair of the quality of observation, sentiment and eloquence brought to bear. It is not too much to say even that the whole thing is in the largest sense but a theme for style, style of substance as well as of form. Within this compass it blooms and quivers and shimmers with light, becomes a wonderful little walled garden of romance. The young man has a passage of extreme but respectful tenderness with each of the sisters in turn, and the general cumulative effect is scarcely impaired by the fact that “nothing comes” of any of these relations. Too little comes of anything, I think, for any very marked human analogy, inasmuch as if it is interesting to be puzzled to a certain extent by what an action, placed before us, is designed to show or to signify, so we require for this refined amusement at least the sense that some general idea is represented. We must feel it present.

Therefore if making out nothing very distinct in “Le Vergini” but the pictorial idea, and yet cleaving to the preference I have expressed, I let the anomaly pass as a tribute extorted by literary art, I may seem to imply that a book may have a great interest without showing a perfect sense. The truth is undoubtedly that I am in some degree beguiled and bribed by the particularly intense expression given in these pages to the author’s esthetic faith. If he is so supremely a “case” it is because this production has so much to say for it, and says it with such a pride of confidence, with an assurance and an elegance that fairly make it the last conceivable word of such a profession. The observations recorded have their origin in the narrator’s passionate reaction against the vulgarity of the day. All the writer’s young men react; but Cantelmo, in the volume before us, reacts with the finest contempt. He is, like his brothers, a raffinÉ conservative, believing really, so far as we understand it, only in the virtue of “race” and in the grand manner. The blighted Virgins, with all that surrounds them, are an affirmation of the grand manner—that is of the shame and scandal of what in an odious age it has been reduced to. It consists indeed of a number of different things which I may not pretend to have completely fitted together, but which are, with other elements, the sense of the supremacy of beauty, the supremacy of style and, last not least, of the personal will, manifested for the most part as a cold insolence of attitude—not manifested as anything much more edifying. What it really appears to come to is that the will is a sort of romantic ornament, the application of which, for life in the present and the future, remains awkwardly vague, though we are always to remember that it has been splendidly forged in the past. The will in short is beauty, is style, is elegance, is art—especially in members of great families and possessors of large fortunes. That of the hero of “Le Vergini” has been handed down to him direct, as by a series of testamentary provisions, from a splendid young ancestor for whose memory and whose portrait he has a worship, a warrior and virtuoso of the Renaissance, the model of his spirit.

And elsewhere:—

The book is a singularly rich exhibition of an inward state, the state of private poetic intercourse with things, the kind of current that in a given personal experience flows to and fro between the imagination and the world. It represents the esthetic consciousness, proud of its conquests and discoveries, and yet trying, after all, as with the vexed sense of a want, to look through other windows and eyes. It goes all lengths, as is of course indispensable on behalf of a personage constituting a case. “I firmly believe that the greatest sum of future dominion will be precisely that which shall have its base and its apex in Rome”—such being in our personage the confidence of the “Latin” spirit. Does it not really all come back to style? It was to the Latin spirit that the Renaissance was primarily vouchsafed; and was not, for a simplified statement, the last word of the Renaissance the question of taste? That is the esthetic question; and when the Latin spirit after many misadventures again clears itself we shall see how all the while this treasure has been in its keeping. Let us as frankly as possible add that there is a whole side on which the clearance may appear to have made quite a splendid advance with Signor D’Annunzio himself.

But there is another side, which I have been too long in coming to, yet which I confess is for me much the more interesting. No account of our author is complete unless we really make out what becomes of that esthetic consistency in him which, as I have said, our own collective and cultivated effort is so earnestly attempting and yet so pathetically, if not so grotesquely, missing. We are struck, unmistakably, early in our acquaintance with these productions, by the fact that their total beauty somehow extraordinarily fails to march with their beauty of parts, and that something is all the while at work undermining that bulwark against ugliness which it is their obvious theory of their own office to throw up. The disparity troubles and haunts us just in proportion as we admire; and our uneasy wonderment over the source of the weakness fails to spoil our pleasure only because such questions have so lively an interest for the critic. We feel ourselves somehow in presence of a singular incessant leak in the effect of distinction so artfully and copiously produced, and we apply our test up and down in the manner of the inquiring person who, with a tin implement and a small flame, searches our premises for an escape of gas. The bad smell has, as it were, to be accounted for; and yet where, amid the roses and lilies and pomegranates, the thousand essences and fragrances, can such a thing possibly be? Quite abruptly, I think, at last (if we have been much under the spell) our test gives us the news, not unaccompanied with the shock with which we see our escape of gas spring into flame. There is no mistaking it; the leak of distinction is produced by a positive element of the vulgar; and that the vulgar should flourish in an air so charged, intellectually speaking, with the “aristocratic” element, becomes for us straightway the greatest of oddities and at the same time, critically speaking, one of the most interesting things conceivable.

The interest then springs from its being involved for us in the “case.” We recognise so many suggested consequences if the case is really to prove responsible for it. We ask ourselves if there be not a connection, we almost tremble lest there shouldn’t be; since what is more obvious than that, if a high example of exclusive estheticism—as high a one as we are likely ever to meet—is bound sooner or later to spring a leak, the general question receives much light? We recognise here the value of our author’s complete consistency: he would have kept his bottom sound, so to speak, had he not remained so long at sea. If those imperfect exponents of his faith whom we have noted among ourselves fail to flower, for a climax, in any proportionate way, we make out that they are embarrassed not so much by any force they possess as by a force—a force of temperament—that they lack. The anomaly I speak of presents itself thus as the dilemma in which Signor D’Annunzio’s consistency has inexorably landed him; and the disfigurement breaks out, strikingly enough, in the very forefront of his picture, at the point where he has most lavished his colour. It is where he has most trusted and depended that he is most betrayed, the traitor sharing certainly his tent and his confidence. What is it that in the interest of beauty he most elaborately builds on if not on the love-affairs of his heroes and heroines, if not on his exhibition of the free play, the sincere play, the play closely studied and frankly represented, of the sexual relation? It is round this exercise, for him, that expressible, demonstrable, communicable beauty prevailingly clusters; a view indeed as to which we all generously go with him, subject to the reserve for each of us of our own expression and demonstration. It is these things on his part that break down, it is his discrimination that falls short, and thereby the very kind of intellectual authority most implied by his pretension. There is according to him an immense amenity that can be saved—saved by style—from the general wreck and welter of what is most precious, from the bankruptcy determined more and more by our basely democratic conditions. As we watch the actual process, however, it is only to see the lifeboat itself founder. The vulgarity into which he so incongruously drops is, I will not say the space he allots to love-affairs, but the weakness of his sense of “values” in depicting them.

We begin to ask ourselves at an early stage what this queer passion may be in the representation of which the sense of beauty ostensibly finds its richest expression and which is yet attended by nothing else at all—neither duration, nor propagation, nor common kindness, nor common consistency with other relations, common congruity with the rest of life—to make its importance good. If beauty is the supreme need so let it be; nothing is more certain than that we can never get too much of it if only we get it of the right sort. It is therefore on this very ground—the ground of its own sufficiency—that Signor D’Annunzio’s invocation of it collapses at our challenge. The vulgarity comes from the disorder really introduced into values, as I have called them; from the vitiation suffered—that we should have to record so mean an accident—by taste, impeccable taste, itself. The truth of this would come out fully in copious examples, now impossible; but it is not too much to say, I think, that in every principal situation presented the fundamental weakness causes the particular interest to be inordinately compromised.

I must not, I know, make too much of “Il Piacere”—one of those works of promising youth with which criticism is always easy—and I should indeed say nothing of it if it were also a work of less ability. It really, however, to my mind, quite gives us the key, all in the morning early, to our author’s general misadventure. Andrea Sperelli is the key; Donna Maria is another key of a slightly different shape. They have neither of them the esthetic importance, any more than the moral, that their narrator claims for them and in his elaborate insistence on which he has so hopelessly lost his way. If they were important—by which I mean if they showed in any other light than that of their particular erotic exercise—they would justify the claim made for them with such superior art. They have no general history, since their history is only, and immediately and extravagantly, that of their too cheap and too easy romance. Why should the career of the young man be offered as a sample of pathetic, of tragic, of edifying corruption?—in which case it might indeed be matter for earnest exhibition. The march of corruption, the insidious influence of propinquity, opportunity, example, the ravage of false estimates and the drama of sterilising passion—all this is a thinkable theme, thinkable especially in the light of a great talent. But for Andrea Sperelli there is not only no march, no drama, there is not even a weakness to give him the semblance of dramatic, of plastic material; he is solidly, invariably, vulgarly strong, and not a bit more corrupt at the end of his disorders than at the beginning. His erudition, his intellectual accomplishments and elevation, are too easily spoken for; no view of him is given in which we can feel or taste them. Donna Maria is scarcely less signal an instance of the apparent desire on the author’s part to impute a “value” defeated by his apparently not knowing what a value is. She is apparently an immense value for the occasions on which the couple secretly meet, but how is she otherwise one? and what becomes therefore of the beauty, the interest, the pathos, the struggle, or whatever else, of her relation—relation of character, of judgment, even of mere taste—to her own collapse? The immediate physical sensibility that surrenders in her is, as throughout, exquisitely painted; but since nothing operates for her, one way or the other, but that familiar faculty, we are left casting about us almost as much for what else she has to give as for what, in any case, she may wish to keep.

The author’s view of the whole matter of durations and dates, in these connections, gives the scale of “distinction” by itself a marked downward tilt; it confounds all differences between the trivial and the grave. Giuliana, in “L’Innocente,” is interesting because she has had a misadventure, and she is exquisite in her delineator’s view because she has repented of it. But the misadventure, it appears, was a matter but of a minute; so that we oddly see this particular romance attenuated on the ground of its brevity. Given the claims of the exquisite, the attenuation should surely be sought in the very opposite quarter; since, where these remarkable affections are concerned, how otherwise than by the element of comparative duration do we obtain the element of comparative good faith, on which we depend for the element, in turn, of comparative dignity? Andrea Sperelli becomes in the course of a few weeks in Rome the lover of some twenty or thirty women of fashion—the number scarce matters; but to make this possible his connection with each has but to last a day or two; and the effect of that in its order is to reduce to nothing, by vulgarity, by frank grotesqueness of association, the romantic capacity in him on which his chronicler’s whole appeal to us is based. The association rising before us more nearly than any other is that of the manners observable in the most mimetic department of any great menagerie.

The most serious relation depicted—in the sense of being in some degree the least suggestive of mere zoological sociability—is that of the lovers in “Il Fuoco,” as we also take this pair for their creator’s sanest and most responsible spirits. It is a question between them of an heroic affection, and yet the affection appears to make good for itself no place worth speaking of in their lives. It holds but for a scant few weeks; the autumn already reigns when the connection begins, and the connection is played out (or if it be not the ado is about nothing) with the first flush of the early Italian spring. It suddenly, on our hands, becomes trivial, with all our own estimate of reasons and realities and congruities falsified. The Foscarina has, on professional business, to “go away,” and the young poet has to do the same; but such a separation, so easily bridged over by such great people, makes a beggarly climax for an intercourse on behalf of which all the forces of poetry and tragedy have been set in motion. Where then we ask ourselves is the weakness?—as we ask it, very much in the same way, in respect to the vulgarised aspect of the tragedy of Giorgio Aurispa. The pang of pity, the pang that springs from a conceivable community in doom, is in this latter case altogether wanting. Directly we lift a little the embroidered mantle of that gift for appearances which plays, on Signor D’Annunzio’s part, such tricks upon us, we find ourselves put off, as the phrase is, with an inferior article. The inferior article is the hero’s poverty of life, which cuts him down for pathetic interest just as the same limitation in “Il Piacere” cuts down Donna Maria. Presented each as victims of another rapacious person who has got the better of them, there is no process, no complexity, no suspense in their story; and thereby, we submit, there is no esthetic beauty. Why shouldn’t Giorgio Aurispa go mad? Why shouldn’t Stelio Effrena go away? We make the inquiry as disconcerted spectators, not feeling in the former case that we have had any communication with the wretched youth’s sanity, and not seeing in the latter why the tie of all the passion that has been made so admirably vivid for us should not be able to weather change.

Nothing is so singular with D’Annunzio as that the very basis and subject of his work should repeatedly go aground on such shallows as these. He takes for treatment a situation that is substantially none—the most fundamental this of his values, and all the more compromising that his immense art of producing illusions still leaves it exposed. The idea in each case is superficially specious, but where it breaks down is what makes all the difference. “Il Piacere” would have meant what it seems to try to mean only if a provision had been made in it for some adequate “inwardness” on the part either of the nature disintegrated or of the other nature to which this poisoned contact proves fatal. “L’Innocente,” of the group, comes nearest to justifying its idea; and I leave it unchallenged, though its meaning surely would have been written larger if the attitude of the wife toward her misbegotten child had been, in face of the husband’s, a little less that of the dumb detached animal suffering in her simplicity. As a picture of such suffering, the pain of the mere dumb animal, the work is indeed magnificent; only its connections are poor with the higher dramatic, the higher poetic, complexity of things.

I can only repeat that to make “The Triumph of Death” a fruitful thing we should have been able to measure the triumph by its frustration of some conceivable opportunity at least for life. There is a moment at which we hope for something of this kind, the moment at which the young man pays his visit to his family, who have grievous need of him and toward whom we look to see some one side or other of his fine sensibility turn. But nothing comes of that for the simple reason that the personage is already dead—that nothing exists in him but the established fear of life. He turns his back on everything but a special sensation, and so completely shuts the door on the elements of contrast and curiosity. Death really triumphs, in the matter, but over the physical terror of the inordinate woman; a pang perfectly communicated to us, but too small a surface to bear the weight laid on it, which accordingly affects us as that of a pyramid turned over on its point. It is throughout one of D’Annunzio’s strongest marks that he treats “love” as a matter not to be mixed with life, in the larger sense of the word, at all—as a matter all of whose other connections are dropped; a sort of secret game that can go on only if each of the parties has nothing to do, even on any other terms, with any one else.

I have dwelt on the fact that the sentimental intention in “Il Fuoco” quite bewilderingly fails, in spite of the splendid accumulation of material. We wait to the end to see it declare itself, and then are left, as I have already indicated, with a mere meaningless anecdote on our hands. Brilliant and free, each freighted with a talent that is given us as incomparable, the parties to the combination depicted have, for their affection, the whole world before them—and not the simple terraqueous globe, but that still vaster sphere of the imagination in which, by an exceptionally happy chance, they are able to move together on very nearly equal terms. A tragedy is a tragedy, a comedy is a comedy, when the effect, in either sense, is determined for us, determined by the interference of some element that starts a complication or precipitates an action. As in “Il Fuoco” nothing whatever interferes—or nothing certainly that need weigh with the high spirits represented—we ask why such precious revelations are made us for nothing. Admirably made in themselves they yet strike us as, esthetically speaking, almost cruelly wasted.

This general remark would hold good, as well, of “Le Vergini,” if I might still linger, though its application has already been virtually made. Anatolia, in this tale, the most robust of the three sisters, declines marriage in order to devote herself to a family who have, it would certainly appear, signal need of her nursing. But this, though it sufficiently represents her situation, covers as little as possible the ground of the hero’s own, since he, quivering intensely with the treasure of his “will,” inherited in a straight line from the cinque-cento, only asks to affirm his sublimated energy. The temptation to affirm it erotically, at least, has been great for him in relation to each of the young women in turn; but it is for Anatolia that his admiration and affection most increase in volume, and it is accordingly for her sake that, with the wonderful moral force behind him (kept as in a Florentine casket,) we most look to see him justified. He has a fine image—and when has the author not fine images?—to illustrate the constant readiness of this possession. The young woman says something that inspires him, whereupon, “as a sudden light playing over the dusky wall of a room causes the motionless sword in a trophy to shine, so her word drew a great flash from my suspended volontÀ. There was a virtue in her,” the narrator adds, “which could have produced portentous fruit. Her substance might have nourished a superhuman germ.” In spite of which it never succeeds in becoming so much as a question that his affection for her shall act, that this grand imagination in him shall operate, that he himself is, in virtue of such things, exactly the person to come to her aid and to combine with her in devotion. The talk about the volontÀ is amusing much in the same way as the complacency of a primitive man, unacquainted with the uses of things, who becomes possessed by some accident of one of the toys of civilisation, a watch or a motor-car. And yet artistically and for our author the will has an application, since without it he could have done no rare vivid work.

Here at all events we put our finger, I think, on the very point at which his esthetic plenitude meets the misadventure that discredits it. We see just where it “joins on” with vulgarity. That sexual passion from which he extracts such admirable detached pictures insists on remaining for him only the act of a moment, beginning and ending in itself and disowning any representative character. From the moment it depends on itself alone for its beauty it endangers extremely its distinction, so precarious at the best. For what it represents, precisely, is it poetically interesting; it finds its extension and consummation only in the rest of life. Shut out from the rest of life, shut out from all fruition and assimilation, it has no more dignity than—to use a homely image—the boots and shoes that we see, in the corridors of promiscuous hotels, standing, often in double pairs, at the doors of rooms. Detached and unassociated these clusters of objects present, however obtruded, no importance. What the participants do with their agitation, in short, or even what it does with them, that is the stuff of poetry, and it is never really interesting save when something finely contributive in themselves makes it so. It is this absence of anything finely contributive in themselves, on the part of the various couples here concerned, that is the open door to the trivial. I have said, with all appreciation, that they present the great “relation,” for intimacy, as we shall nowhere else find it presented; but to see it related, in its own turn, to nothing in the heaven above or the earth beneath, this undermines, we definitely learn, the charm of that achievement.

And so it is, strangely, that our esthetic “case” enlightens us. The only question is whether it be the only case of the kind conceivable. May we not suppose another with the elements differently mixed? May we not in imagination alter the proportions within or the influences without, and look with cheerfulness for a different issue? Need the esthetic adventure, in a word, organised for real discovery, give us no more comforting news of success? Are there not, so to speak, finer possible combinations? are there not safeguards against futility that in the example before us were but too presumably absent? To which the sole answer probably is that no man can say. It is Signor D’Annunzio alone who has really sailed the sea and brought back the booty. The actual case is so good that all the potential fade beside it. It has for it that it exists, and that, whether for the strength of the original outfit or for the weight of the final testimony, it could scarce thinkably be bettered.

Few attentive readers, I take it, would deny that the English novelist—from whom, in this case, there happens to be even less occasion than usual for distinguishing the American—testifies in his art much more than his foreign comrade, from whatever quarter, to the rigour of convention. There are whole sides of life about which he has as little to say as possible, about which he observes indeed in general a silence that has visibly ended by becoming for the foreign comrade his great characteristic. He strikes the spectator as having with a misplaced humility consented once for all to be admonished as to what he shall or shall not “mention”—and to be admonished in especial by an authority altogether indefinite. He subscribes, when his turn comes round, to an agreement in the drawing-up of which he has had no hand; he sits down to his task with a certain received canon of the “proper” before his eyes. The critic I am supposing reproaches him, naturally, in this critic’s way, with a marked failure ever to challenge, much less to analyse, that conception; with having never, as would appear, so much as put to himself in regard to most of the matters of which he makes his mystery the simple question “Proper to what?” How can any authority, even the most embodied, asks the exponent of other views, decide for us in advance what shall in any case be proper—with the consequent implication of impropriety—to our given subject?

The English novelist would, I imagine, even sometimes be led on to finding that he has practically had to meet such an overhauling by a further admission, though an admission still tacit and showing him not a little shy of the whole discussion—principles and formulas being in general, as we know, but little his affair. Would he not, if off his guard, have been in peril of lapsing into the doctrine—suicidal when reflected upon—that there may be also an a priori rule, a “Thou shalt not,” if not a “Thou shalt,” as to treatable subjects themselves? Then it would be that his alien foe might fairly revel in the sense of having him in a corner, laughing an evil laugh to hear him plead in explanation that it is exactly most as to the subject to be treated that he feels the need laid upon him to conform. What is he to do when he has an idea to embody, we might suspect him rashly to inquire, unless, frankly to ask himself in the first place of all if it be proper? Not indeed—we catch the reservation—that he is consciously often accessible to ideas for which that virtue may not be claimed. Naturally, however, still, such a plea only brings forth for his interlocutor a repetition of the original appeal: “Proper to what?” There is only one propriety the painter of life can ask of his morsel of material: Is it, or is it not, of the stuff of life? So, in simplified terms at any rate, I seem to hear the interchange; to which I need listen no longer than thus to have derived from it a word of support for my position. The question of our possible rejoinder to the scorn of societies otherwise affected I must leave for some other connection. The point is—if point I may expect to obtain any countenance to its being called—that, in spite of our great Dickens and, in a minor degree, of our great George Eliot, the limitations of our practice are elsewhere than among ourselves pretty well held to have put us out of court. The thing least conceded to us moreover is that we handle at all frankly—if we put forward such a claim—even our own subject-matter or in other words our own life. “Your own is all we want of you, all we should like to see. But that your system really touches your own is exactly what we deny. Never, never!” For what it really comes to is that practically we, of all people in the world, are accused of a system. Call this system a conspiracy of silence, and the whole charge is upon us.

The fact of the silence, whether or no of the system, is fortunately all that at present concerns us. Did this not happen to be the case nothing could be more interesting, I think, than to follow somewhat further several of the bearings of the matter, which would bring us face to face with some wonderful and, I hasten to add, by no means doubtless merely disconcerting truths about ourselves. It has been given us to read a good deal, in these latter days, about l’Âme FranÇaise and l’Âme Russe—and with the result, in all probability, of our being rather less than more penetrated with the desire, in emulation of these opportunities, to deliver ourselves upon the English or the American soul. There would appear to be nothing we are totally conscious of that we are less eager to reduce to the mere expressible, to hand over to publicity, current journalistic prose aiding, than either of these fine essence; and yet incontestably there are neighbourhoods in which we feel ourselves within scent and reach of them by something of the same sense that in thick forests serves the hunter of great game. He may not quite touch the precious presence, but he knows when it is near. So somehow we know that the “Anglo-Saxon” soul, the modern at least, is not far off when we frankly consider the practice of our race—comparatively recent though it be—in taking for granted the “innocence” of literature.

Our perhaps a trifle witless way of expressing our conception of this innocence and our desire for it is, characteristically enough, by taking refuge in another vagueness, by invoking the allowances that we understand works of imagination and of criticism to make to the “young.” I know not whether it has ever officially been stated for us that, given the young, given literature, and given, under stress, the need of sacrificing one or the other party, it is not certainly by our sense of “style” that our choice would be determined: no great art in the reading of signs and symptoms is at all events required for a view of our probable instinct in such a case. That instinct, however, has too many deep things in it to be briefly or easily disposed of, and there would be no greater mistake than to attempt too simple an account of it. The account most likely to be given by a completely detached critic would be that we are as a race better equipped for action than for thought, and that to let the art of expression go by the board is through that very fact to point to the limits of what we mostly have to express. If we accept such a report we shall do so, I think, rather from a strong than from a weak sense of what may easily be made of it; but I glance at these things only as at objects almost too flooded with light, and come back after my parenthesis to what more immediately concerns me: the plain reflection that, if the elements of compromise—compromise with fifty of the “facts of life”—be the common feature of the novel of English speech, so it is mainly indebted for this character to the sex comparatively without a feeling for logic.

Nothing is at any rate a priori more natural than to trace a connection between our general mildness, as it may conveniently be called, and the fact that we are likewise so generally feminine. Is the English novel “proper” because it is so much written by women, or is it only so much written by women because its propriety has been so firmly established? The intimate relation is on either determination all that is here pertinent—effect and cause may be left to themselves. What is further pertinent, as happens, is that on a near view the relation is not constant; by which I mean that, though the ladies are always productive, the fashion of mildness is not always the same. Convention in short has its ups and downs, and these votaries have of late years, I think, been as often seen weltering in the hollow of the wave as borne aloft on its crest. Some of them may even be held positively to have distinguished themselves most—whether or no in veils of anonymity—on the occasion of the downward movement; making us really wonder if their number might not fairly, under any steadier force of such a movement, be counted on to increase. All sorts of inquiries are suggested in truth by the sight. “Emancipations” are in the air, and may it not possibly be that we shall see two of the most striking coincide? If convention has, to the tune to which I just invited an ear, blighted our fiction, what shall we say of its admitted, its still more deprecated and in so many quarters even deplored, effect upon the great body under the special patronage of which the “output” has none the less insisted on becoming incomparably copious? Since the general inaptitude of women appears by this time triumphantly to have been proved an assumption particularly hollow, despoiled more and more each day of the last tatters of its credit, why should not the new force thus liberated really, in the connection I indicate, give something of its measure?

It is at any rate keeping within bounds to say that the novel will surely not become less free in proportion as the condition of women becomes more easy. It is more or less in deference to their constant concern with it that we have seen it, among ourselves, pick its steps so carefully; but there are indications that the future may reserve us the surprise of having to thank the very class whose supposed sensibilities have most oppressed us for teaching it not only a longer stride, but a healthy indifference to an occasional splash. It is for instance only of quite recent years that the type of fiction commonly identified as the “sexual” has achieved—for purposes of reference, so far as notices in newspapers may be held to constitute reference—a salience variously estimated. Now therefore, though it is early to say that all “imaginative work” from the female hand is subject to this description, there is assuredly none markedly so subject that is not from the female hand. The female mind has in fact throughout the competition carried off the prize in the familiar game, known to us all from childhood’s hour, of playing at “grown-up;” finding thus its opportunity, with no small acuteness, in the more and more marked tendency of the mind of the other gender to revert, alike in the grave and the gay, to those simplicities which there would appear to be some warrant for pronouncing puerile. It is the ladies in a word who have lately done most to remind us of man’s relations with himself, that is with woman. His relations with the pistol, the pirate, the police, the wild and the tame beast—are not these prevailingly what the gentlemen have given us? And does not the difference sufficiently point my moral?

Let me, however, not seem to have gone too far afield to seek it; for my reflections—general perhaps to excess—closely connect themselves with a subject to which they are quite ready to yield in interest. I have lately been giving a happy extension to an old acquaintance, dating from early in the eighties, with the striking romantic work of Matilde Serao; a writer who, apart from other successes, has the excellent effect, the sign of the stronger few, that the end of her story is, for her reader, never the end of her work. On thus recently returning to her I have found in her something much more to my present purpose than the mere appearance of power and ease. If she is interesting largely because she is, in the light of her free, her extraordinary Neapolitan temperament, a vivid painter and a rich register of sensations and impressions, she is still more so as an exceptionally compact and suggestive case, a case exempt from interference and presenting itself with a beautiful unconsciousness. She has had the good fortune—if it be, after all, not the ill—to develop in an air in which convention, in our invidious sense, has had as little to say to her as possible; and she is accordingly a precious example of the possibilities of free exercise. The questions of the proper and the improper are comfortably far from her; and though more than in the line of her sisters of English speech she may have to reckon with prescriptions as to form—a burden at which in truth she snaps her fingers with an approach to impertinence—she moves in a circle practically void of all pre-judgment as to subject and matter. Conscious enough, doubtless, of a literary law to be offended, and caring little in fact, I repeat—for it is her weakness—what wrong it may suffer, she has not even the agreeable incentive of an ability to calculate the “moral” shocks she may administer.

Practically chartered then she is further happy—since they both minister to ease—in two substantial facts: she is a daughter of the veritable south and a product of the contemporary newspaper. A Neapolitan by birth and a journalist by circumstance, by marriage and in some degree doubtless also by inclination, she strikes for us from the first the note of facility and spontaneity and the note of initiation and practice. Concerned, through her husband, in the conduct of a Neapolitan morning paper, of a large circulation and a radical colour, she has, as I infer, produced her novels and tales mainly in such snatches of time and of inspiration as have been left her by urgent day-to-day journalism. They distinctly betray, throughout, the conditions of their birth—so little are they to the literary sense children of maturity and leisure. On the question of style in a foreign writer it takes many contributive lights to make us sure of our ground; but I feel myself on the safe side in conceiving that this lady, full of perception and vibration, can not only not figure as a purist, but must be supposed throughout, in spite of an explosive eloquence, to pretend but little to distinction of form: which for an Italian is a much graver predicament than for one of our shapeless selves. That, however, would perhaps pass for a small quarrel with a writer, or rather with a talker and—for it is what one must most insist on—a feeler, of Matilde Serao’s remarkable spontaneity. Her Neapolitan nature is by itself a value, to whatever literary lapses it may minister. A torch kindled at that flame can be but freely waved, and our author’s arm has a fine action. Loud, loquacious, abundant, natural, happy, with luxurious insistences on the handsome, the costly and the fleshly, the fine persons and fine clothes of her characters, their satin and velvet, their bracelets, rings, white waistcoats, general appointments and bedroom furniture, with almost as many repetitions and as free a tongue, in short, as Juliet’s nurse, she reflects at every turn the wonderful mixture that surrounds her—the beauty, the misery, the history, the light and noise and dust, the prolonged paganism and the renewed reactions, the great style of the distant and the past and the generally compromised state of the immediate and the near. These things were all in the germ for the reader of her earlier novels—they have since only gathered volume and assurance—so that I well remember the impression made on me, when the book was new (my copy, apparently of the first edition, bears the date of 1885), by the rare energy, the immense disinvoltura, of “La Conquista di Roma.” This was my introduction to the author, in consequence of which I immediately read “Fantasia” and the “Vita e Avventure di Riccardo Joanna,” with some smaller pieces; after which, interrupted but not detached, I knew nothing more till, in the course of time, I renewed acquaintance on the ground of “Il Paese di Cuccagna,” then, however, no longer in its first freshness. That work set me straightway to reading everything else I could lay hands on, and I think therefore that, save “Il Ventre di Napoli” and two or three quite recent productions that I have not met, there is nothing from our author that I have not mastered. Such as I find her in everything, she remains above all things the signal “case.”

If, however, she appears, as I am bound to note, not to have kept the full promise of her early energy, this is because it has suited her to move less in the direction—where so much might have awaited her—of “Riccardo Joanna” and “La Conquista” than in that, on the whole less happily symptomatic, of “Fantasia.” “Fantasia” is, before all else, a study of “passion,” or rather of the intenser form of that mystery which the Italian passione better expresses; and I hasten to confess that had she not so marked herself an exponent of this specialty I should probably not now be writing of her. I conceive none the less that it would have been open to her to favour more that side of her great talent of which the so powerful “Paese di Cuccagna” is the strongest example. There is by good fortune in this large miscellaneous picture of Neapolitan life no passione save that of the observer curiously and pityingly intent upon it, that of the artist resolute at any cost to embrace and reproduce it. Admirably, easily, convincingly objective, the thing is a sustained panorama, a chronicle of manners finding its unity in one recurrent note, that of the consuming lottery-hunger which constitutes the joy, the curse, the obsession and the ruin, according to Matilde Serao, of her fellow-citizens. Her works are thus divided by a somewhat unequal line, those on one side of which the critic is tempted to accuse her of having not altogether happily sacrificed to those on the other. When she for the most part invokes under the name of passione the main explanation of the mortal lot it is to follow the windings of this clue in the upper walks of life, to haunt the aristocracy, to embrace the world of fashion, to overflow with clothes, jewels and promiscuous intercourse, all to the proportionate eclipse of her strong, full vision of the more usually vulgar. “La Conquista” is the story of a young deputy who comes up to the Chamber, from the Basilicata, with a touching candour of ambition and a perilous ignorance of the pitfalls of capitals. His dream is to conquer Rome, but it is by Rome naturally that he is conquered. He alights on his political twig with a flutter of wings, but has reckoned in his innocence without the strong taste in so many quarters for sport; and it is with a charge of shot in his breast and a drag of his pinions in the dust that he takes his way back to mediocrity, obscurity and the parent nest. It is from the ladies—as was indeed even from the first to be expected with Serao—that he receives his doom; passione is in these pages already at the door and soon arrives; passione rapidly enough passes its sponge over everything not itself.

In “Cuore Infermo,” in “Addio Amore,” in “Il Castigo,” in the two volumes of “Gli Amanti” and in various other pieces this effacement is so complete that we see the persons concerned but in the one relation, with every other circumstance, those of concurrent profession, possession, occupation, connection, interest, amusement, kinship, utterly superseded and obscured. Save in the three or four books I have named as exceptional the figures evoked are literally professional lovers, “available,” as the term is, for passione alone: which is the striking sign, as I shall presently indicate, of the extremity in which her enjoyment of the freedom we so often have to envy has strangely landed our author. “Riccardo Joanna,” which, like “La Conquista,” has force, humour and charm, sounding with freshness the note of the general life, is such a picture of certain of the sordid conditions of Italian journalism as, if I may trust my memory without re-perusal, sharply and pathetically imposes itself. I recall “Fantasia” on the other hand as wholly passione—all concentration and erotics, the latter practised in this instance, as in “Addio Amore,” with extreme cruelty to the “good” heroine, the person innocent and sacrificed; yet this volume too contributes its part in the retrospect to that appearance of marked discipleship which was one of the original sources of my interest. Nothing could more have engaged one’s attention in these matters at that moment than the fresh phenomenon of a lady-novelist so confessedly flushed with the influence of Émile Zola. Passing among ourselves as a lurid warning even to workers of his own sex, he drew a new grace from the candid homage—all implied and indirect, but, as I refigure my impression, not the less unmistakable—of that half of humanity which, let alone attempting to follow in his footsteps, was not supposed even to turn his pages. There is an episode in “Fantasia”—a scene in which the relations of the hero and the “bad” heroine are strangely consolidated by a visit together to a cattle-show—in which the courage of the pupil has but little to envy the breadth of the master. The hot day and hot hour, the heavy air and the strong smells, the great and small beasts, the action on the sensibilities of the lady and the gentleman of the rich animal life, the collapse indeed of the lady in the presence of the prize bull—all these are touches for which luckily our author has the warrant of a greater name. The general picture, in “Fantasia,” of the agricultural exhibition at Caserta is in fact not the worse at any point for a noticeable echo of more than one French model. Would the author have found so full an occasion in it without a fond memory of the immortal Cornices of “Madame Bovary”?

These, however, are minor questions—pertinent only as connecting themselves with the more serious side of her talent. We may rejoice in such a specimen of it as is offered by the too brief series of episodes of “The Romance of the Maiden.” These things, dealing mainly with the small miseries of small folk, have a palpable truth, and it is striking that, to put the matter simply, Madame Serao is at her best almost in direct proportion as her characters are poor. By poor I mean literally the reverse of rich; for directly they are rich and begin, as the phrase is, to keep their carriage, her taste totters and lapses, her style approximates at moments to that of the ladies who do the fashions and the letters from the watering-places in the society papers. She has acutely and she renders with excellent breadth the sense of benighted lives, of small sordid troubles, of the general unhappy youthful (on the part of her own sex at least) and the general more or less starved plebeian consciousness. The degree to which it testifies to all this is one of the great beauties of “Il Paese di Cuccagna,” even if the moral of that dire picture be simply that in respect to the gaming-passion, the madness of “numbers,” no walk of life at Naples is too high or too low to be ravaged. Beautiful, in “Il Romanzo della Fanciulla,” are the exhibitions of grinding girl-life in the big telegraph office and in the State normal school. The gem of “Gli Amanti” is the tiny tale of “Vicenzella,” a masterpiece in twenty small pages—the vision of what three or four afternoon hours could contain for a slip of a creature of the Naples waterside, a poor girl who picks up a living by the cookery and sale, on the edge of a parapet, of various rank dismembered polyps of the southern sea, and who is from stage to stage despoiled of the pence she patiently pockets for them by the successive small emissaries of her artful, absent lover, constantly faithless, occupied, not too far off, in regaling a lady of his temporary preference, and proportionately clamorous for fresh remittances. The moment and the picture are but a scrap, yet they are as large as life.

“Canituccia,” in “Piccole Anime,” may happily pair with “Vicenzella,” Canituccia being simply the humble rustic guardian, in field and wood—scarce more than a child—of the still more tender Ciccotto; and Ciccotto being a fine young pink-and-white pig, an animal of endowments that lead, after he has had time to render infatuated his otherwise quite solitary and joyless friend, to his premature conversion into bacon. She assists, helplessly silent, staring, almost idiotic, from a corner of the cabin-yard, by night and lamplight, in the presence of gleaming knives and steaming pots and bloody tubs, at the sacrifice that deprives her of all company, and nothing can exceed the homely truth of the touch that finally rounds off the scene and for which I must refer my reader to the volume. Let me further not fail to register my admiration for the curious cluster of scenes that, in “Il Romanzo,” bears the title of “Nella Lava.” Here frankly, I take it, we have the real principle of “naturalism”—a consistent presentment of the famous “slice of life.” The slices given us—slices of shabby hungry maidenhood in small cockney circles—are but sketchily related to the volcanic catastrophe we hear rumbling behind them, the undertone of all the noise of Naples; but they have the real artistic importance of showing us how little “story” is required to hold us when we get, before the object evoked and in the air created, the impression of the real thing. Whatever thing—interesting inference—has but effectively to be real to constitute in itself story enough. There is no story without it, none that is not rank humbug; whereas with it the very desert blooms.

This last-named phenomenon takes place, I fear, but in a minor degree in such of our author’s productions as “Cuore Infermo,” “Addio Amore,” “Il Castigo” and the double series of “Gli Amanti”; and for a reason that I the more promptly indicate as it not only explains, I think, the comparative inanity of these pictures, but does more than anything else to reward our inquiry. The very first reflection suggested by Serao’s novels of “passion” is that they perfectly meet our speculation as to what might with a little time become of our own fiction were our particular convention suspended. We see so what, on its actual lines, does, what has, become of it, and are so sated with the vision that a little consideration of the latent other chance will surely but refresh us. The effect then, we discover, of the undertaking to give passione its whole place is that by the operation of a singular law no place speedily appears to be left for anything else; and the effect of that in turn is greatly to modify, first, the truth of things, and second, with small delay, what may be left them of their beauty. We find ourselves wondering after a little whether there may not really be more truth in the world misrepresented according to our own familiar fashion than in such a world as that of Madame Serao’s exuberant victims of Venus. It is not only that if Venus herself is notoriously beautiful her altar, as happens, is by no means always proportionately august; it is also that we draw, in the long run, small comfort from the virtual suppression, by any painter, of whatever skill—and the skill of this particular one fails to rise to the height—of every relation in life but that over which Venus presides. In “Fior di Passione” and the several others of a like connection that I have named the suppression is really complete; the common humanities and sociabilities are wholly absent from the picture.

The effect of this is extraordinarily to falsify the total show and to present the particular affair—the intimacy in hand for the moment, though the moment be but brief—as taking place in a strange false perspective, a denuded desert which experience surely fails ever to give us the like of and the action of which on the faculty of observation in the painter is anything but favourable. It strikes at the root, in the impression producible and produced, of discrimination and irony, of humour and pathos. Our present author would doubtless contend on behalf of the works I have mentioned that pathos at least does abound in them—the particular bitterness, the inevitable despair that she again and again shows to be the final savour of the cup of passione. It would be quite open to her to urge—and she would be sure to do so with eloquence—that if we pusillanimously pant for a moral, no moral really can have the force of her almost inveterate evocation of the absolute ravage of Venus, the dry desolation that in nine cases out of ten Venus may be perceived to leave behind her. That, however, but half meets our argument—which bears by no means merely on the desolation behind, but on the desolation before, beside and generally roundabout. It is not in short at all the moral but the fable itself that in the exclusively sexual light breaks down and fails us. Love, at Naples and in Rome, as Madame Serao exhibits it, is simply unaccompanied with any interplay of our usual conditions—with affection, with duration, with circumstances or consequences, with friends, enemies, husbands, wives, children, parents, interests, occupations, the manifestation of tastes. Who are these people, we presently ask ourselves, who love indeed with fury—though for the most part with astonishing brevity—but who are so without any suggested situation in life that they can only strike us as loving for nothing and in the void, to no gain of experience and no effect of a felt medium or a breathed air. We know them by nothing but their convulsions and spasms, and we feel once again that it is not the passion of hero and heroine that gives, that can ever give, the heroine and the hero interest, but that it is they themselves, with the ground they stand on and the objects enclosing them, who give interest to their passion. This element touches us just in proportion as we see it mixed with other things, with all the things with which it has to reckon and struggle. There is moreover another reflection with which the pathetic in this connection has to count, even though it undermine not a little the whole of the tragic effect of the agitations of passione. Is it, ruthlessly speaking, certain that the effect most consonant, for the spectator, with truth is half as tragic as it is something else? Should not the moral be sought in the very different quarter where the muse of comedy rather would have the last word? The ambiguity and the difficulty are, it strikes me, of a new growth, and spring from a perverse desire on the part of the erotic novelist to secure for the adventures he depicts a dignity that is not of the essence. To compass this dignity he has to cultivate the high pitch and beat the big drum, but when he has done so he has given everything the wrong accent and the whole the wrong extravagance. Why see it all, we ask him, as an extravagance of the solemn and the strained? Why make such an erotic a matter of tears and imprecations, and by so doing render so poor a service both to pleasure and to pain? Since by your own free showing it is pre-eminently a matter of folly, let us at least have folly with her bells, or when these must—since they must—sound knells and dirges, leave them only to the light hand of the lyric poet, who turns them at the worst to music. Matilde Serao is in this connection constantly lugubrious; even from the little so-called pastels of “Gli Amanti” she manages, with an ingenuity worthy of a better cause, to expunge the note of gaiety.

This dismal parti pris indeed will inevitably, it is to be feared, when all the emancipations shall have said their last word, be that of the ladies. Yet perhaps too, whatever such a probability, the tone scarce signifies—in the presence, I mean, of the fundamental mistake from which the author before us warns us off. That mistake, we gather from her warning, would be to encourage, after all, any considerable lowering of the level of our precious fund of reserve. When we come to analyse we arrive at a final impression of what we pay, as lovers of the novel, for such a chartered state as we have here a glimpse of; and we find it to be an exposure, on the intervention at least of such a literary temperament as the one before us, to a new kind of vulgarity. We have surely as it is kinds enough. The absence of the convention throws the writer back on tact, taste, delicacy, discretion, subjecting these principles to a strain from which the happy office of its presence is, in a considerable degree and for performers of the mere usual endowment, to relieve him. When we have not a very fine sense the convention appears in a manner to have it on our behalf. And how frequent to-day, in the hurrying herd of brothers and sisters of the pen, is a fine sense—of any side of their affair? Do we not approach the truth in divining that only an eminent individual here and there may be trusted for it? Here—for the case is our very lesson—is this robust and wonderful Serao who is yet not to be trusted at all. Does not the dim religious light with which we surround its shrine do more, on the whole, for the poetry of passione than the flood of flaring gas with which, in her pages, and at her touch, it is drenched? Does it not shrink, as a subject under treatment, from such expert recognitions and easy discussions, from its so pitiless reduction to the category of the familiar? It issues from the ordeal with the aspect with which it might escape from a noisy family party or alight from a crowded omnibus. It is at the category of the familiar that vulgarity begins. There may be a cool virtue therefore even for “art,” and an appreciable distinction even for truth, in the grace of hanging back and the choice of standing off, in that shade of the superficial which we best defend by simply practising it in season. A feeling revives at last, after a timed intermission, that we may not immediately be quite able, quite assured enough, to name, but which, gradually clearing up, soon defines itself almost as a yearning. We turn round in obedience to it—unmistakably we turn round again to the opposite pole, and there before we know it have positively laid a clinging hand on dear old Jane Austen.

We feel it not to be the paradox it may at the first blush seem that the state of the novel in England at the present time is virtually very much the state of criticism itself; and this moreover, at the risk perhaps of some added appearance of perverse remark, by the very reason that we see criticism so much in abeyance. So far as we miss it altogether how and why does its “state” matter, and why and how can it or should it, as an absent force, enjoy a relation to that constant renewal of our supply of fiction which is a present one so far as a force at all? The relation is this, in the fewest words: that no equal outpouring of matter into the mould of literature, or what roughly passes for such, has been noted to live its life and maintain its flood, its level at least of quantity and mass, in such free and easy independence of critical attention. It constitutes a condition and a perversity on the part of this element to remain irresponsive before an appeal so vociferous at least and so incessant; therefore how can such a neglect of occasions, so careless a habit in spite of marked openings, be better described than as responsibility declined in the face of disorder? The disorder thus determines the relation, from the moment we feel that it might be less, that it might be different, that something in the way of an order even might be disengaged from it and replace it; from the moment in fact that the low critical pitch is logically reflected in the poetic or, less pedantically speaking, the improvisational at large. The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its so ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life; and thanks to it the general question of how to refine, and of why certain things refine more and most, on that happy consciousness, becomes for us of the last importance. Then we cease to be only instinctive and at the mercy of chance, feeling that we can ourselves take a hand in our satisfaction and provide for it, making ourselves safe against dearth, and through the door opened by that perception criticism enters, if we but give it time, as a flood, the great flood of awareness; so maintaining its high tide unless through some lapse of our sense for it, some flat reversion to instinct alone, we block up the ingress and sit in stale and shrinking waters. Stupidity may arrest any current and fatuity transcend any privilege. The comfort of those who at such a time consider the scene may be a little, with their curiosity still insistent, to survey its platitude and record the exhibited shrinkage; which amounts to the attempt to understand how stupidity could so have prevailed. We take it here that the answer to that inquiry can but be ever the same. The flood of “production” has so inordinately exceeded the activity of control that this latter anxious agent, first alarmed but then indifferent, has been forced backward out of the gate, leaving the contents of the reservoir to boil and evaporate. It is verily on the wrong side of the gate that we just now seem to see criticism stand, for never was the reservoir so bubblingly and noisily full, at least by the superficial measure of life. We have caught the odd accident in the very fact of its occurrence; we have seen the torrent swell by extravagant cheap contribution, the huge increase of affluents turbid and unstrained. Beyond number are the ways in which the democratic example, once gathering momentum, sets its mark on societies and seasons that stand in its course. Nowhere is that example written larger, to our perception, than in “the new novel”; though this, we hasten to add, not in the least because prose fiction now occupies itself as never before with the “condition of the people,” a fact quite irrelevant to the nature it has taken on, but because that nature amounts exactly to the complacent declaration of a common literary level, a repudiation the most operative even if the least reasoned of the idea of differences, the virtual law, as we may call it, of sorts and kinds, the values of individual quality and weight in the presence of undiscriminated quantity and rough-and-tumble “output”—these attestations made, we naturally mean, in the air of composition and on the esthetic plane, if such terms have still an attenuated reference to the case before us. With which, if we be asked, in the light of that generalisation, whether we impute to the novel, or in other words the novelist, all the stupidity against which the spirit of appreciation spends itself in vain, we reply perforce that we stop short of that, it being too obvious that of an exhibition so sterilised, so void of all force and suggestion, there would be nothing whatever to say. Our contention is exactly that, in spite of all vain aspects, it does yet present an interest, and that here and there seem written on it likelihoods of its presenting still more—always on condition of its consenting to that more intimate education which is precisely what democratised movements look most askance at. It strikes us as not too much to say that our actual view of the practice of fiction gives as just a measure as could be desired of the general, the incurable democratic suspicion of the selective and comparative principles in almost any application, and the tendency therewith to regard, and above all to treat, one manner of book, like one manner of person, as, if not absolutely as good as another, yet good enough for any democratic use. Criticism reflects contentiously on that appearance, though it be an appearance in which comfort for the book and the manner much resides; so that the idea prompting these remarks of our own is that the comfort may be deeply fallacious.