It seems curious that modern Italian literature has made so little impression on the European consciousness. A hundred years ago, when Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi came out, it met with European applause. Along with Sir Walter Scott and Byron, Manzoni stood for “Romance” to all Europe. Yet where is Manzoni now, even compared to Scott and Byron? Actually, I mean. Nominally, I Promessi Sposi is a classic; in fact, it is usually considered the classic Italian novel. It is set in all “literature courses.” But who reads it? Even in Italy, who reads it? And yet, to my thinking, it is one of the best and most interesting novels ever written: surely a greater book than Ivanhoe or Paul et Virginie or Werther. Why then does nobody read it? Why is it found boring? When I gave a good English translation to the late Katharine Mansfield, she said, to my astonishment: I couldn’t read it. Too long and boring.
It is the same with Giovanni Verga. After Manzoni, he is Italy’s accepted greatest novelist. Yet nobody takes any notice of him. He is, as far as anybody knows his name, just the man who wrote the libretto to Cavalleria Rusticana. Whereas, as a matter of fact, Verga’s story Cavalleria Rusticana is as much superior to Mascagni’s rather cheap music as wine is superior to sugar-water. Verga is one of the greatest masters of the short story. In the volume Novelle Rusticane and in the volume entitled Cavalleria Rusticana are some of the best short stories ever written. They are sometimes as short and as poignant as Chekhov. I prefer them to Chekhov. Yet nobody reads them. They are “too depressing.” They don’t depress me half as much as Chekhov does. I don’t understand the popular taste.
Verga wrote a number of novels, of different sorts: very different. He was born about 1850, and died, I believe, at the beginning of 1921. So he is a modern. At the same time, he is a classic. And at the same time, again, he is old-fashioned.
The earlier novels are rather of the French type of the seventies — Octave Feuillet, with a touch of Gyp. There is the depressing story of the Sicilian young man who made a Neapolitan marriage, and on the last page gives his wife a much-belated slap across the face. There is the gruesome book, Tigre Reale, of the Russian countess — or princess, whatever it is — who comes to Florence and gets fallen in love with by the young Sicilian, with all the subsequent horrid affair: the weird woman dying of consumption, the man weirdly infatuated, in the suicidal South-Italian fashion. It is a bit in the manner of Matilda Serao. And though unpleasant, it is impressive.
Verga himself was a Sicilian, from one of the lonely agricultural villages in the south of the island. He was a gentleman — but not a rich one, presumably: with some means. As a young man, he went to Naples, then he worked at journalism in Milan and Florence. And finally he retired to Catania, to an exclusive, aristocratic old age. He was a shortish, broad man with a big red moustache. He never married.
His fame rests on his two long Sicilian novels, I Malavoglia and Mastro-don Gesualdo, also on the books of short pieces, Cavalleria Rusticana, Novelle Rusticane, and Vagabondaggio. These are all placed in Sicily, as is the short novel, Storia di Una Capinera. Of this last little book, one of the leading literary young Italians in Rome said to me the other day: Ah, yes, Verga! Some of his things! But a thing like Storia di Una Capinera, now, is ridiculous.
But why? It is rather sentimental, maybe. But it is no more sentimental than Tess. And the sentimentality seems to me to belong to the Sicilian characters in the book, it is true to type, quite as much so as the sentimentality of a book like Dickens’s Christmas Carol, or George Eliot’s Silas Marner, both of which works are “ridiculous,” if you like, without thereby being wiped out of existence.
The trouble with Verga, as with all Italians, is that he never seems quite to know where he is. When one reads Manzoni, one wonders if he is not more “Gothic” or Germanic, than Italian. And Verga, in the same way, seems to have a borrowed outlook on life: but this time, borrowed from the French. With d’Annunzio the same, it is hard to believe he is really being himself. He gives one the impression of “acting up.” Pirandello goes on with the game today. The Italians are always that way: always acting up to somebody else’s vision of life. Men like Hardy, Meredith, Dickens, they are just as sentimental and false as the Italians, in their own way. It only happens to be our own brand of falseness and sentimentality.
And yet, perhaps, one can’t help feeling that Hardy, Meredith, Dickens, and Maupassant and even people like the Goncourts and Paul Bourget, false in part though they be, are still looking on life with their own eyes. Whereas the Italians give one the impression that they are always borrowing somebody else’s eyes to see with, and then letting loose a lot of emotion into a borrowed vision.
This is the trouble with Verga. But on the other hand, everything he does has a weird quality of Verga in it, quite distinct and like nothing else. And yet, perhaps the gross vision of the man is not quite his own. All his movements are his own. But his main motive is borrowed.
This is the unsatisfactory part about all Italian literature, as far as I know it.
The main motive, the gross vision of all the nineteenth-century literature, is what we may call the emotional-democratic vision or motive. It seems to me that since 1860, or even 1830, the Italians have always borrowed their ideals of democracy from the northern nations, and poured great emotion into them, without ever being really grafted by them. Some of the most wonderful martyrs for democracy have been Neapolitan men of birth and breeding. But none the less, it seems a mistake: an attempt to live by somebody else’s lights.
Verga’s first Sicilian novel, I Malavoglia, is of this sort. It was considered his greatest work. It is a great book. But it is parti pris. It is one-sided. And therefore it dates. There is too much, too much of the tragic fate of the poor, in it. There is a sort of wallowing in tragedy: the tragedy of the humble. It belongs to a date when the “humble” were almost the most fashionable thing. And the Malavoglia family are most humbly humble. Sicilians of the sea-coast, fishers, small traders — their humble tragedy is so piled on, it becomes almost disastrous. The book was published in America under the title of The House by the Medlar Tree, and can still be obtained. It is a great book, a great picture of poor life in Sicily, on the coast just north of Catania. But it is rather overdone on the pitiful side. Like the woebegone pictures by Bastien Lepage. Nevertheless, it is essentially a true picture, and different from anything else in literature. In most books of the period — even in Madame Bovary, to say nothing of Balzac’s earlier I.ys dans la Vallee — one has to take off about twenty per cent of the tragedy. One does it in Dickens, one does it in Hawthorne, one does it all the time, with all the great writers. Then why not with Verga? Just knock off about twenty per cent of the tragedy in I Malavoglia, and see what a great book remains. Most books that live, live in spite of the author’s laying it on thick. Think of Wuthering Heights. It is quite as impossible to an Italian as even I Malavoglia is to us. But it is a great book.
The trouble with realism — and Verga was a realist — is that the writer, when he is a truly exceptional man like Flaubert or like Verga, tries to read his own sense of tragedy into people much smaller than himself. I think it is a final criticism against Madame Bovary that people such as Emma Bovary and her husband Charles simply are too insignificant to carry the full weight of Gustave Flaubert’s sense of tragedy. Emma and Charles Bovary are a couple of little people. Gustave Flaubert is not a little person. But, because he is a realist and does not believe in “heroes,” Flaubert insists on pouring his own deep and bitter tragic consciousness into the little skins of the country doctor and his uneasy wife. The result is a discrepancy. Madame Bovary is a great book and a very wonderful picture of life. But we cannot help resenting the fact that the great tragic soul of Gustave Flaubert is, so to speak, given only the rather commonplace bodies of Emma and Charles Bovary. There’s a misfit. And to get over the misfit, you have to let in all sorts of seams of pity. Seams of pity, which won’t be hidden.
The great tragic soul of Shakespeare borrows the bodies of kings and princes — not out of snobbism, but out of natural affinity. You can’t put a great soul into a commonplace person. Commonplace persons have commonplace souls. Not all the noble sympathy of Flaubert or Verga for Bovarys and Malavoglias can prevent the said Bovarys and Malavoglias from being commonplace persons. They were deliberately chosen because they were commonplace, and not heroic. The authors insisted on the treasure of the humble. But they had to lend the humble by far the best part of their own treasure, before the said humble could show any treasure at all.
So, if I Malavoglia dates, so does Madame Bovary. They belong to the emotional-democratic, treasure-of-the-humble period of the nineteenth century. The period is just rather out of fashion. We still feet the impact of the treasure-of-the-humble too much. When the emotion will have quite gone out of us, we can accept Madame Bovary and I Malavoglia in the same free spirit with the same detachment as that in which we accept Dickens or Richardson.
Mastro-don Gesualdo, however, is not nearly so much treasure-of-the-humble as I Malavoglia. Here, Verga is not dealing with the disaster of poverty, and calling it tragedy. On the contrary, he is a little bored by poverty. He must have a hero who wins out, and makes his pile, and then succumbs under the pile.