I : ! : : I i HUB «! /^. tf~A- THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BEQUEST OF Mrs. Marian Hooker IDLING IN ITALY IDLING IN ITALY STUDIES OF LITERATURE AND OF LIFE BY JOSEPH COLLINS AUTHOR OF "MY ITALIAN YEAR / loaf and invite my soul NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1920 Offftf COPTBIGHT, 1920, BT CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published September, 1920 LOAN STACK GIFT C < Z5'I TO M. K. C. . . . Io vengo di lontana parte, Dov'era lo tuo cuor. Hf.G PREFACE Nothing obstacled my pleasure so much when I first went to Italy as unfamiliarity with its literature. Every one who would add to his spiritual stature and his emotional equanimity by tarry in Italy should have some intimacy with the Bible, with mythology, and with Italian writers, especially the poets. I sought books about books but was not very successful in find- ing them. Interpretative articles on men and books which are so common in British and American litera- ture are exceptional in Italy. One who is ambitious to get even a bowing acquaintance with them must make the introduction himself. In 1918 an enter- prising Italian, Signor A. T. Formiggini, attempted to supply such introduction by the publication of a literary review called U Italia Che Scrive, a monthly supplement to all the periodicals. He has had grat- ifying success. My purpose in publishing the essays on fictional literature in this volume is in the hope of awakening a larger interest in America in Italian letters and to aid in creating a demand for their translation into English. I shall be glad if they serve to orient any one who is bewildered by his first glance into the maze of Italian modern, improvisional literature. ' Americans go to Italy by the thousands, but very few of them take the trouble to acquaint themselves with her history or with her ideals and accomplish- vii viii PREFACE ments. This is to be regretted, for proportionately as they did that their pleasure would be enhanced and their profit increased. Moreover, it would contribute to better mutual understanding of Americans and Italians. The remaining chapters are the outgrowth of ex- periences and emotions in Italy during and after the war. Some of these essays originally appeared in The Bookman, Scribner's Magazine, and The North Amer- ican Review, and I thank the editors of those journals for permission to make use of them. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Literary Italy 1 II. Literary Italy (continued) 25 III. Gabriele D'Annunzio — Poet, Pilot, and Pirate 44 IV. The Futurist School of Italian Writers . 70 V. Giovanni Papini and the Futuristic Lit- erary Movement in Italy 88 VI. Two Noisy Italian Schoolmasters ... 107 VII. Improvisional Italian Literature of To- Day and Yesterday 121 VIII. Fictional Biography and Autobiography 148 IX. The Literary Mausoleum of Samuel But- ler 159 X. Saints and Sinners 173 XI. Woman's Cause Is Man's: They Rise or Sink Together 185 XII. POSTBELLUM VAGARIES 198 XIII. World Convalescence 214 XIV. Banquets and Personalities 236 ix x CONTENTS CHAPTER PiOB XV. Sentimentality and the Male .... 251 XVI. The Play Instinct in Child ben .... 263 XVII. "If a Man Walketh in the Night, He Stum- bleth; but if He Walketh in the Day He Seeth the Light of This World" . . . 277 XVIII. The American Eagle Changes His Perch . 293 IDLING IN ITALY IDLING IN ITALY CHAPTER I LITERARY ITALY There is something about the word Italy that causes an emotional glow in the hearts of most Ameri- cans. For them Italy is the cradle of modern civiliza- tion and of the. Christian religion; the land where modern literature and science took their faltering first steps; the garden where the flowers of art first bloomed, then reached a magnificence that has never been equalled; the land that after having so long agonized under the tyrant finally rose in its might and deliv- ered her children, carrying the principles of personal liberty to a new and noble elevation. We have an admiration and affection for her that one has for a beautiful mother whose charm and redolency of accomplishment has increased with time. In recent days there have been countless numbers on this western continent who feel that Italy has not had recognition from the world of her decision, her valor, and her accomplishment in shaping the World War to a successful end. Their interest in her has been quickened and their pride enhanced. They look forward with confidence to the time when she will again have a measure of that supremacy in the field of art and literature which once made her the cyno- sure of all eyes, the loadstone of all hearts. They l 2 IDLING IN ITALY hope to see her on a pedestal of political, social, and religious liberty worthy of the dreams of Mazzini, which shall be exposed to the admiring gaze of the whole world. Already there are indications that she is making great strides in literature and a generation of young writers is forging ahead, heralding the coming of a new order. It can scarcely be expected that Italy will achieve the position she had in the sixteenth century when Ariosto and Tasso, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Bandello and Aretino, Cellini and Castiglione gave to literature an unrivalled supremacy. But it may be legitimately hoped that Italy will give up the servile admiration and imitation of foreign literature, and particularly of the French, which has been so evident during the past one hundred years, and at the same time while taking pride in her cinquecento accom- plishments, even in the glories of her romantic period, realize that the vista which appeals to the children of men to-day is that obtained from looking forward and not backward. I shall take a cursory glance over the literature of the nineteenth century preparatory to a survey of that of the twentieth, and note some trends and their significance: the dislocation of habitual ways of looking at things, of modes of thought, and of peeps into the future caused by the French Revolu- tion; the outlook for the Italian people which seemed to be conditioned by the Napoleonic occupation; the imminence of a change in the way in which the world was likely to be ordered and administered suggested by the fall of thrones and governments. Such events LITERARY ITALY 3 could not fail to be reflected in the literature, particu- larly in imaginative literature as parallel conditions to- day are being reflected in literature, practically all of which is burdened with one topic : destruction of privi- lege and liberation from archaic convention that free- dom and liberty shall have a larger significance — in brief, making a new estimate of human rights. With the powerful political and religious reaction that was manifest in all Europe after the French Revolution there developed a kind of contempt, indeed abhorrence, of antique art and literature because it was pagan and republican. The deeds of men, their longings, their aspirations, their loves, their hatreds, their mel- ancholies; the beauties of nature, their potencies to influence the emotional state of man and particularly to contribute to his happiness; the liberation of man- kind from galling tyranny and the universal happi- ness that would flow from further liberation were the themes of writers. These coupled with neglect and disdain of the heroes of antiquity, mythological and actual, caused a romantic literature which moved over Europe like an avalanche. Italy contested every inch of the threatened en- croachment upon its soil, and one of her poets, Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803), who was most potent in resisting it, stood out to the end for the classic ideal. The period of his greatest mental activity and creativeness antedated the French Revolution, and although he was in Paris when it was at its height, its significance in so far as it is reflected in his writings was lost upon him. The same is true of Giuseppe Parini (172&-1799), who, during the last fifty years of the eighteenth century, had great vogue in Italy because 4 IDLING IN ITALY of a poem called "II Giorno" ("The Day"), in which "The Morning," "The Noon," "The Evening," and "The Night" of a Lombard gentleman was depicted to life and satirized. The writings of Ugo Foscolo (1776-1827), which were given far higher rating by contemporaries than by posterity, foreshadowed the yielding of the classic traditions. But it was not until Cesarotti published a translation of MacPherson's "Ossian" that the flood- gates of romance were opened for Italian literature. It was published at Padua (1763-1770). From that date imaginative and lyric literature of Italy began to devote itself to celebrating Italy's glorious past, to an- ticipating its future glories, to recounting and satirizing contemporaries, to pillorying the crimes of the tyrants who had fastened themselves upon Italy, and to ex- posing the corruptions of its governments. Its promoters were obsessed with the idea that they must get away from the classic traditions. They sought to avoid the stern realities of life, its suffer- ings and its tragedies, and instead to depict beauty, pleasure, and happiness. They exalted the comedy and suppressed the tragedy of daily life. It has often been said that Italian romantic liter- ature had its origin in the Societa del Caffe founded in Milan in 1746. But like many other dogmatic state- ments, it should not be accepted literally. "II Caffe," published by the Accademia dei Pugni, was not ro- mantic. Its iconoclastic attitude alone toward lit- erary tradition may entitle it to a certain influence as a remote precursor of the romantic movement. The publication which fought the battle for Romanti- cism was the Conciliatore (1818-1819). Around it LITERARY ITALY 5 was constituted the Romantic school which pro- duced Grossi and the others. Most of its followers in the beginning were Lombardians, therefore under the espionage of the Austrian Government. They were particularly Tommaso Grossi, the author of a romance of the fourteenth century entitled " Marco Visconti," of "Ildegonda," and "I Lombardi" (the best seller of its day), and Giovanni Berchet, who, though of French descent, was the most Italian of Italians, and spent a large part of his life in exile in Switzerland and England. Soon the Romanticists were given a political com- plexion — they were resigned to their fate of being slaves to Austria — at least they were accused of this by the classicists. In truth they were digging the trenches in which were later implanted the bombs whose explosion put the Austrians to flight. The predominant figure of the romantic period was Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873). It is no exaggera- tion to say that he carried fame of Italian letters to greater numbers of people the world over than any writer save Dante. In 1827 he published a novel, "I Promessi Sposi" ("The Betrothed Ones"), which Walter Scott said was the best ever written, and this opinion was seconded by Goethe. He had shown his emancipation from classicism in two earlier plays, "Carmagnola" and "Adelchi," but it was not until the romance above mentioned and which earned his immortality that the romantic triumph can be said to have occurred in Italy. The men who carried the movement forward were Pellico, Niccolini, Grossi, D'Azeglio, Giordani, Leopardi, Giusti, and many others. 6 IDLING IN ITALY Among these the two who have been most favored by posterity are Silvio Pellico (1789-1854), prin- cipally because of the book in which he described his experiences in Austrian dungeons, "Le mie Pri- gioni " ("My Prisons"), and Leopardi, the intellec- tual giant of an arid epoch. The immortality of the former is founded in sentiment, of the latter in merit. The poet who had greatest popularity in Italy at this time was Giuseppe Giusti (1809-1850), a satir- ist who chose verse as his medium. Although poster- ity has not given him a very high rating, his "Versi" are still widely read in Italy. His most appealing pos- session was ability to express in scannable, remembera- ble, singable verse what may be called every-day senti- ment, to depict simple characters whose virtues every one would like to have, and to interlace political satires with the most panoplied, pathetic, patriotic sentiments. There is no safer way to sense to-day the sentiment of the first half of the nineteenth century of Italy than to read Giusti's poems. His " A1P Arnica Lontana" ("To the Friend Far Away"), "Gli Umanitari" ("The Hu- manitarians"), and his poems of spleen and of dream have a sprightliness and freshness as if they were of yesterday. Dario Niccodemi has recently borrowed the title "Prete Pero" from one of Giusti's poems for a comedy in which is depicted the conduct of a simple, honest, pious priest confronted with the conflict of ecclesiastical instructions and war problems. Giusti's brief life was a strange mixture of potential joy and actual suffering. In the vigor of his manhood he was seized by a painful disease, and to his sufferings was added the mental agony caused by fear of hydrophobia. Giuseppina Guacci Nobile (1808-1848), of Naples, LITERARY ITALY 7 a contemporary of Giusti, had great popularity as a poetess of sentiment. She sang of love of country, of art, of husband, of children, of heaven, and when the sadness of the times was so profound that she needs must sing of hate she died. Three poets of northern Italy must also be men- tioned. Francesco DalPOngaro, who, though born in the Friuli, went to Venice when he was ten years old and lived for the rest of his life in the northern prov- inces, had a tremendous popularity in the revolu- tionary period of 1848 because of a little collection of lyrics called "Stornelli"; Giovanni Prati, of Dasindo, Trent, whose permanent reputation as a poet depends upon his ballads, became widely known through his poem " Edmenegarda " ; and Aleardo Aleardi, born at Verona in the early years of the nineteenth century, whose best-known book, "Le Prime Storie," was ex- tensively read. The pillars of the romantic movement were soon erected in Central Italy by the writings of Leopardi, Niccolini, and Giusti. Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) had a personality that has fastened itself upon Italy, even unto the pres- ent day, in a most extraordinary — one might even say, inexplicable — way. He was laconic, silent, morose, in- trospective, solitary, celibate. His filial love was readily overdrawn; he loathed his ancestral home and environment; he contended with ill health from infancy; he was denied the understanding friend, save one, whose behavior toward Leopardi has been criti- cised severely. He wandered solitarily about cen- tral Italy wrapped in the mantle of introspection and veiled in melancholy until 1833, when he settled at 8 IDLING IN ITALY Naples, and there he remained four years, until he had attained his thirty-ninth year, when he died under most distressing circumstances. Ranieri, in his "Sette Anni di Sodalizio con Giacomo Leopardi," gives this description of Leopardi's appearance: he was of moder- ate height, bent and thin, with a fair complexion that in- clined to pallor, a large head, a square, broad forehead, languid blue eyes, a short nose, and very delicate features; his voice was modest and rather weak; his smile ineffable and almost unearthly. It is not easy for a foreigner to understand the exalted estimation in which the poetry of Leopardi is held in Italy to-day. To do so one must needs sense the spirit of the times when he lived. The ' l whatever is is right" day of Pope had been succeeded by a day of tragedy the like of which the world had perhaps never known, and things would never be again as they were. Leopardi sung this change. He was the poet of pain and of despair, the versifier of Schopenhauer's phi- losophy. He sang of melancholy, but he was never reconciled to supine resignation. Though classical in form, his poems are steeped with the romantic spirit. Although a supporter of the romantic school, he scarcely can be called an exponent or upholder of it. A famili- arity with his writings is an integral part of the educa- tion of all cultured Italians, and nearly every school- boy can recite parts of the poems "To Italy" or "The Quiet after the Storm." Leopardi considered it was harder to write good prose than good verse. Greek thoughts were clearer and more vivid to him than Latin or Italian. It is a pitiable picture that Ranieri draws of him in Naples, suffering from consumption and from dropsy, unable LITERARY ITALY 9 to read, turning night into day, having dinner at midnight to the discomfiture of the household, having to be nursed and entertained, disliking the country, and living in abject terror of the cholera which then raged in Naples. De Musset praised his work. Sainte-Beuve did homage to him, and at an early date made his name familiar to French readers. The judgment of poster- ity is the one that counts and not the judgment of in- dividuals, and Leopardi is Italy's greatest modern poet. De Sanctis said of him: "His songs are the most pro- found and occult verses of that laborious transition called the nineteenth century." His death marked the close of the first romantic period in Italy. Gian Battista Niccolini (1785-1861) wrote tragedies, historical romances, and poetry, the best known of which is "Arnaldo da Brescia." The Florentines have erected a noble monument to his memory in their Westminster Abbey — the church of Santa Croce. Massimo D'Azeglio (1798-1866), diplomat, states- man, and man of letters, played a very conspicuous part in the political and social life of his day, and left an extraordinarily interesting account of it and of his period in "I miei Ricordi" ("My Recollections"), which no one desirous of acquainting himself with the social life of the risorgimento period fails to read. A literary production of this period which must be mentioned, not because of its merits but because it is a sign of the times, was that of Cesare Cantu (1804-1895), a universal history in thirty-five volumes, which went through forty editions. It displays lucidity of statement, sequential narrative, and finished literary technic. It was highly partisan and not based on crit- 10 IDLING IN ITALY ical study of documentary evidence. He saw in all Italian writers, beginning with Dante, enemies of the church and of God. All had something false in their art which it pleased him to reveal. Italian writers were all anti-Catholic, and classic literature was all pagan; he excepted Manzoni, however, and himself. Two noteworthy historic writers were V. Gioberti (1801-1852) and Pasquale Galluppi (1770-1846), though the latter confined himself chiefly to phi- losophy. No review of the literature of this period should fail to mention Francesco de Sanctis (1817- 1883), one of the most versatile and soundest literary critics, who was assiduous in calling the attention of his countrymen to the writings of foreigners and in keenly analyzing and evaluating home productions, and Pasquale Villari, the historian of Savonarola and Macchiavelli. There were two great literary figures in the romantic triumph of Italy of the nineteenth century, Manzoni and Leopardi, and after their death no figure of any importance came upon the stage for upward of a generation. During this period — from 1830 to 1860, let us say — the rocks from which were to gush forth the waters of liberalism were being drilled. The times were too tense to facilitate imaginative literature, and mere record of events was more startling and absorbing than fiction. It was not until Giosue Carducci (1836-1907) en- tered the arena and dealt romanticism a blow, and at the same time restored classicism, that Leopardi had a worthy successor. To-day there is a Carducci cult in Italy. There are individuals and groups who have the same kind LITERARY ITALY 11 of reverence for him that they or others have for Leo- nardo. There is no praise for him that is too fulsome, no adulation too great. Admirers like Panzini, Pan- zacchi, and Papini ransack dictionaries and archives to find words that will convey their devotion to him. He was a man who incited the admiration and affection of those who came personally in contact with him. His was a sturdy personality, which inspired confidence, generated respect, and mediated an easy belief in his inspiration. The son of a country doctor, he was born in a little village in Tuscany in 1836. Thus his childhood and early youth coincided with those years in which king, pope, and emperor seemed to vie with one another in crushing independent thought in Italy; those years in which men dared not write, fearing their words might be misconstrued, or, writing, were obliged to publish clandestinely. During these years Car- ducci's thirst for liberty and freedom, political, social, and religious, developed, and for a third of a century after he had reached the age of man he externalized it in moving, majestic, musical verse, which made known Italy's rights and aspirations, and encour- aged her loyal sons to continue their struggles. After teaching a few years in the high schools of San Miniato and Pistoia, during which time he pub- lished a selection of religious, moral, and patriotic juvenile poems entitled "Juvenilia," he went to Bo- logna. In 1860 he was called to the chair of Italian literature in the University of Bologna and soon published "Giambi ed Epodi" ("Iambs and Epodes"). In this he preached republican doctrines so openly that he gave offense to the crown and was suspended from his position, which, however, he soon regained. Soon after this he published, under the pseudonym 12 IDLING IN ITALY of "Enotrio Romano/ ' an irreligious or materialistic poem entitled "Inno a Satana" ("A Hymn to Sa- tan "), which gave him great popularity. It is an invective against the church, which through its mys- ticism and asceticism seeks to suppress natural im- pulses and which through its intellectual censorship aims to stifle scientific investigation. It breathed a spirit of revolt against tyranny and privilege, especially clerical privilege, which had made such profound growth in Italy. It inveighed against the efforts of suppres- sion of human rights and bespoke the culture of hu- man reason. It is quite impossible to read under- standingly the "Hymn to Satan" without a knowledge of mythology and Greek history. Indeed, one of the most characteristic features of his poem is the wealth of classic allusion. Agramiania, Adonis, Astarte, Venus, Anadyomene, Cyprus, Heloise, Maro, Flaccus, Lycoris, Glycera are some of the names that are en- countered. It was not until the publication of his "Odi barbare" ("Barbaric Odes") that his stride as an original poet began to be recognized. They called forth the most vicious criticism and at first sight it would seem that they must sink beneath the avalanche of disapproval, but in reality Italy was ready to listen to a message couched in new form. Conventional rhymes, easily read, easily remembered, were now to give way to rough, sonorous lines in which rhythm took the place of rhyme and straight-from-the-shoulder blows took the place of feints and passes. Carducci met his critics with the "Qa ira." It is the apology of the French Revolution and especially of the Convention. The title of the sonnets comes from the famous revolutionary song of the reign of LITERARY ITALY 13 terror. Within a brief time, namely, from 1883 to 1887, when his books entitled "New Barbaric Odes" and "New Rhymes" were published, there were few competent to express an opinion who did not realize that he was Italy's most learned poet, potent in the art of appreciation, felicitous in conveying noble senti- ments and inspiring thoughts, human in his sympathies with the simple and the oppressed, a tower of strength, a pillar of fire. From that period until to-day Car- ducci's fame as a poet has steadily gained ground in Italy, so that it is no exaggeration to say that many accord him the crown worn by Petrarch and Tasso. Those who fulsomely praise his memory see in him not only a poet but a learned man who was able to strain classic erudition through his understanding mind to such effect that the average individual could avail himself of it to satisfaction and to advantage. They also see in him the noblest work of God, an honest man. His students idolized him. When they left the university and returned to their various spheres of activity they carried his image in their hearts and sounded his praises with tongue or pen. They made propaganda con amore. No one is ever approved of universally in any country, probably least of any in Italy. When Carducci published his "Alia Regina dTtalia" ("Ode to the Queen of Italy"), one of his best — simple, musical, redolent of reverence and affec- tion — he aroused the fury of the republicans, who called him traitor, and the scorn of the envious, who called him snob. In 1891, when he accepted a senatorship of the realm, the students of the University of Bologna howled 14 IDLING IN ITALY and jeered at him, and many of the former students plucked or tore his image from their hearts. They had apotheosized the Great Commoner, and they saw in this truckling to royalty and honors weakness and vanity which they could not believe that he pos- sessed. Yet in 1896, when he completed thirty-five years of service at the university, the event was cele- brated for three successive days, and the outpouring of expressions of admiration and gratitude from col- leagues and students, and from heads crowned with laurel and gold, has scarcely ever been paralleled. In an autobiographical sketch in the volume of "Poesie," of 1871, he relates with great detail the way in which he broke from his early parental teachings and acquired his new literary, political, and religious feelings. Following his Hellenic instincts, the reli- gious trend in him was toward the paganism of the ancient Latin forefathers rather than toward the spiri- tuality that had come in with the infusion of foreign blood. He rebelled against the passive dependence on the fame of her great writers, in which Italy had lived in the apathy of a long-abandoned hope of political independence and achievement. The livery of the slave and the mask of the courtesan disgusted him. His was the hope and joy of a nation waking to a new life. He was the poet of the national mood. Carducci is little known as a poet in this country. There are many reasons why his fame has not made headway in Anglo-Saxon countries. In the first place, he has not been extensively translated, and in the second place, although the subject of his song was so often liberty, his lines are so replete with erudite classic illusions that even though he could be trans- LITERARY ITALY 15 lated he would be found to be hard reading. But more than all there is probably no poet whose matter loses so much of its music and its fire by translation as CarduccL Such exquisite verses as the " Idylls of the Lowlands," "The Ox," "The Hymn to the Seasons," "To the Fountains of Clitumnus" are translatable. It would require a Longfellow to do it so that they should not be emasculated. In 1906 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature and the entire literary world approved of the reward. Two years previously he had resigned his professorship, and parliament voted him a pension of twelve thou- sand lire a year for life, but it was of short duration, for he died in 1907. Mario Rapisardi, to whom a monument has been erected in his native town of Catania, and who is known best for his tragedy "Manfredi" and his phil- osophic poem, "La Palingenesi, " and "Poesie reli- giose," was a ferocious critic of Carducci. In his poem entitled "Lucifer" there are many disparaging allusions to him. Rapisardi was a teacher and a poet, but a spiritual chameleon: a devout believer, he became a radicalist; a monarchist, he became a socialist; a romanticist, he became a classicist. He is one of the best specimens of the old order of poets. His "Falling Stars" and "The Impenitent" have a genuine lyric quality, and such poems as "To a Fire- fly" have movement, rhythm, and luminosity that are impressive. The only poet that approximated Carducci's stature was Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912). Though he was a few years younger, the period of his literary activity was contemporaneous. When Carducci died, Pascoli 16 IDLING IN ITALY succeeded him for a few years in the University of Bologna. His personal story appealed tremendously to Italians, and he was of the masses in appearance and sentiment. After the assassination of his father by an unknown hand the family suffered great poverty, and as a boy the support of two younger sisters fell upon him, and like so many of the talented young men of Italy he accomplished it by teaching school. He was teaching in the high school of Leghorn in 1892 when he published "Myricae," upon which to-day his fame rests most securely. His verses gave him an im- mediate celebrity, and he was soon made professor of Latin and Greek in the University of Messina. From there he went to Pisa and soon afterward to Bologna. Pascoli has been called the greatest Latin poet after Virgil. Some of the titles of his volumes are "Poe- metti" (" Little Poems"), "PoemiConviviali" (" Con- vivial Poems"), "Odi e Inni" ("Odes and Hymns"), "Canti di Castelvecchio" ("Songs of Castelvecchio"), "Nuovi Poemetti" ("New Little Poems"), "Poemetti Italici" ("Little Poems of Italy"), "Le Canzoni di Re Enzio" ("The Songs of King Enzio"), and an inter- pretative volume of Dante entitled "Sotto il Velame" ("Beneath the Veil"). Despite the fact that he was an advanced political thinker, he taught his students to respect the law. He was the poetical evangelist of the humble, of the unfortunate, and of the physically venturesome. He sang of the cravings of the soul, of the problems of existence, of Christian acceptation, of the glory of Italy and the accomplishments of her sons. Posterity, however, is whispering that the name most worthy to be bracketed with Carducci is Gabriele LITERARY ITALY 17 D'Annunzio. I shall consider him in another chap- ter. There is a name in the literary annals of this period that is steadily gaining claim to immortality. It is Giovanni Verga, the chief exponent of the Veristic school, who was born at Catania in 1840 and is still living. Although it is the opinion of those who are competent to judge that his fame as a novelist is greater than that of Fogazzaro, it may truthfully be said that he is scarcely known beyond the confines of Italy, and even there his romances have not had the recep- tion that they deserve. A few years ago when I asked for a copy of "Mastro-don Gesualdo" in the leading bookshop of Palermo and was not successful in ob- taining it, the young man with whom I talked assured me that Zuccoli would prove to be a satisfactory sub- stitute for Verga. If he is known at all in this coun- try, it is as the author of the play entitled "Cavalleria Rustical," upon which was composed the popular opera. He has not been a very prolific writer — eight romances, half a dozen volumes of short stories, and a few plays. He got the material for many of his short stories in central and northern Italy, but most of his romances are of his native Sicily, and the pictures of life in the little villages and towns in the houses of the passionate peasants, in the huts of the poverty-stricken shepherds, in the hovels of the ad- venturous fishermen, and the crumbling palaces of the decayed nobles are so realistic, so true to life, so al- most photographically depicted, that the reader feels that they are mediated by his own senses. Verga has the supreme faculty of creating men and women that the reader has met or would like to meet. 18 IDLING IN ITALY If realism consists in depicting people as they are and particularly people who are battling with the stern realities of life — poverty, illness, passions — then Verga is a great realist. The best of his romances, though not the most popular, are "I Malavoglia" and "Mastro-don Gesualdo." "Tigre Reale" had the greatest popularity, and the "Storia di una Capinera" ("The Story of a Black-hood Novice"), the most ardently romantic of all romantic stories, and "II Ma- rito di Elena" ("The Husband of Helen") were widely read. "I Malavoglia" and "Mastro-don Gesualdo" were to have been succeeded by a third volume which would complete the story of the characters unfolded in them, but it never appeared. When we recall that only eight thousand copies of the former have been sold in forty years, we readily understand the artist's dis- couragement. Posterity is likely to link Verga's name with Leopardi and Manzoni. The great romance-writer of Italy during the days of her resurrection was Manzoni. During the first and second generations of Italy's unity the mantle of his greatness was worn gracefully and becomingly by An- tonio Fogazzaro (1842-1911). Born at Vicenza, he had the bringing-up and education of a gentleman. His best-known books are "Daniele Cortis," "Piccolo Moderno Mondo" ("The Little Modern World"), "Piccolo Mondo Antico" ("The Little Antique World"), and "II Santo" ("The Saint"). "Daniele Cortis" is generally believed to reveal Fogazzaro's moral, religious, and political convictions. It is a series of interesting pictures of intimate life in the upper circles and reveals the mental development of a LITERARY ITALY 19 man of high principles, the skeleton in whose closet is a mother who, having side-stepped the paths of morality in her youth, and who was lost to her son for several years, thrusts herself upon him the very day when he has his feet securely set on the ladder whose apex is a brilliant political career. His struggles be- tween duty to his mother and obligations to his coun- try, his desire not to offend convention or outrage morality, his love for his cousin Eleana, tame for him but consuming to her, unhappily married to a Sicilian roue* brute and baron, are narrated in a way that seduces even the casual reader. Indeed it is wonder- fully done, and attention is sustained to the end, virtue being finally rewarded. "The Saint' ' is a psychological study of abnormal religious development. It presented forcibly the ne- cessity for reform of the Vatican and ecclesiastical cus- toms and beliefs. When it was put on the Index it caused its illustrious author, a fervent believer and an exemplary communicant, much pain and remorse. " Leila" continued the history of the leading char- acter of "The Saint." It is said that the author hoped it would make amends for the offense that the latter had given, but it was also put on the Index. He wrote a volume of poetry, and many of his verses are redolent of music and charm, such as "Ultima Rosa" ("The Last Rose") and "Amorum." He has been more widely read in this country than any Italian writer of fiction save D'Annunzio. He raised one slab to his memory which will resist more than granite — "Piccolo Mondo Antico." It will be preserved by time, and cherished for the same reason that one keeps and lauds a marvellous picture of wife or mother, brother 20 IDLING IN ITALY or sweetheart, because it is a bit of perfection and be- cause the owner loves it. An extraordinary figure in Italian literature of yes- terday and of the period under discussion, was Olindo Guerrini (1845-1916), for many years director of the University Library at Bologna. In 1878 he published a volume entitled "Postuma" which purported to be the work of one Lorenzo Stecchetti which caused prud- ish Italy to shiver, prurient Italy to shake, and literary Italy to be enormously diverted. The "Postuma" went through thirty-two editions in forty years, but one should not inquire too closely the reason for this. When critics discovered that the author was alive they assailed his immodest verses, and his responses "Nova Polemica" added to his literary reputation. But it was not until he published his prose writings that he displayed his real literary stature. "Postuma" is still read, that the reader may find something recent to compare with the con- duct of Messalina rather than for its literary qualities. "Rime," which has no panoplied display of the author's libido but many charming idyls, reminiscences, and vignettes is much read to-day. Such poems as "II Guado" ("The Ford") and "Nell' Aria" are as redolent of sentiment and ingenuous experiences that lead to thrills as a rose is redolent of perfume. Every schoolgirl can quote the last two lines of the latter: "Ed io che intesi quel che non dicevi M'innamorai di te perche tacevi." Other poems such as "Congedo" ("Leave-taking") and "Wienerblut," after the waltz of Johann Strauss, LITERARY ITALY 21 had great popularity at the time and were praised by his contemporaries, but to-day it is difficult to find great merit in them. Were one called upon to make specific comment upon his poetry, he would have to point out the very obvious influence of Byron, De Musset, and Heine, and to say that Guerrini in no way is comparable with any of them. Much has been written about him as the index of the revolt against the corrupt romanticism of the third romantic period in Italy. He was the uncompromising foe of cant and hypocrisy in literature and the stanch de- fender of realism. Giuseppe Lipparini, an eminently fair critic, gives him a higher rating as a writer of prose than of poetry. These include "Vita di Giulio Cesare Croce" ("Life of Julius Caesar Croce"), a monograph on Francesco Patuzio, and " Bibliografia per ridere" ("The Laugher's Library"). Although there were countless poets of this period, two or three should be mentioned, more because of the effect they had upon the public taste, perhaps one might say public education, than for the intrinsic merit of their writings; and of these may be mentioned Vittorio Betteloni (1840-1910), the son of a romantic poet. His writings may be said to have popularized the public protest against the romanticism of the third romantic period. He also made known to many of his countrymen the poetry of Byron and of Goethe in faithful poetic translations. Brief mention is here made of two literary men of affairs in Italy, the purpose being more to call attention to a type of individual who is more often found in Italy than in any other country — the versatile, 22 IDLING IN ITALY many-sided, cultivated man of affairs who has also distinctive literary talent. Enrico Panzacchi (1841-1904) published a volume of lyrics, fluid, harmonious, transparent, treating of homely, every-day subjects which appealed very much to the public. He first became known as a writer of seductive romances, then as an accomplished musician, afterward as a lyric poet, then as a critic of literature, aesthetics, and philosophy. He taught the philosophy and history of art; he was the secretary of the Academy of Belle Arti at Bologna, for many years a deputy in Parliament, and at one time undersecretary of state and an orator of great renown. His reputation as a poet depends largely upon "Cor Sincerum, ,, pub- lished in 1902. In his versatility he reminds of Remy de Gourmont, although his literary productions were incomparably less numerous, but in temper of mind, literary equipment, aesthetic appetite, and general vir- tuosity they are brothers. The other is Ferdinando Martini, a governor of one of Italy's colonies, a minister of public instruction, a deputy of long service, a poet, an essayist, a biographer, and a traveller, the Italian Admirable Crichton. He .vas born in Monsummano in 1841, and for forty-five years was without interruption in the Chamber of Deputies. He went under in the last election. He has published many books and articles, amongst which may be men- tioned "Nell' Africa Italiana" ("In African Italy"), but the casual reader will get most pleasurable contact with him from "Pagine Raccolte." He is an excellent example of the cultured man in public life in Italy. His prose integrates the aroma of the classics, while at the same time his sympathies and interests bring his LITERARY ITALY 23 subjects up to the minute. His writings have a prag- matic as well as an aesthetic quality. None of them has the air of preachings. He knows how to be pro- found without being heavy and learned without being pedantic. For him literature has not been an aesthetic exercise or a statement of human rights and human needs. Prospective admirers should not study too closely his political career. Death has claimed nearly all of the conspicuous figures of literature in the period of the risorgimento. One who had a strange tenacity of life, which he but recently yielded, was Salvatore Farina, whose first romances, "Un Segreto" ("A Secret") and "Due Amori" ("Two Loves"), were published more than fifty years ago. He was, perhaps, the truly repre- sentative writer of the Piccolo Borghese in the genera- tion that followed Italy's unity. In the fifty or more volumes that he published (the last of which appeared in 1912 and was called the "Second Book of the Lovers") he portrayed a variety of romanticism which was the outgrowth of the struggle between the drab and commonplace realities of fife and the fan- tastic dreams of simple-minded persons who thought that fife would be ideal if it could be fashioned after their own plans. He was the novelist of sickly senti- ment, the most slavish disciple that Samuel Richardson ever had. Students of Italian literature will read his two reminiscent volumes called "La mia Giornata," the first published in 1910, the second in 1913, to get a picture of the literary doings of one of the grayest and most uncertain periods of modern Italian literature. He is mentioned here merely to note the tremendous popularity which his writings had, and to call atten- 24 IDLING IN ITALY tion to the fact that they left no impression upon the times and that the type of novel which they represent has practically now disappeared the world over. CHAPTER II LITERARY ITALY (continued) Among the interesting literary figures of the old school still living is Renato Fucini, whose pen-name is Neri Tanfucio. He is now nearly eighty years old, and for some years has been living in a small town not far from Florence, writing his recollections. In college he studied civil engineering, but he soon forsook it and secured employment in the office of the Municipal Art Direction in Florence. Later he taught Italian in the technical school at Pistoia and after that was several years an inspector of rural schools. It was dur- ing these years of wandering through Tuscany that he got the intimate knowledge of its simple, industrial, pleasure-loving people, peasant and poacher, landlord and inspector, teacher and pupil, that he has em- bodied in his stories and in his burlesque, tragic, and sentimental verses. His fame rests on his dialect poetry ("Poesie"), chiefly in sonnet form, in which he depicts the virtues and vices, the licenses and inhibitions, the hopes and the despairs, of his fellow Tuscans, at the same time embodying delightful descriptions of their charming, romantic land ; and a few small volumes of prose, all little master- pieces — "Napoli a occhio nudo" ("Naples to the Naked Eye," letters written to a friend about that enchanting city two generations ago when it was still plunged in the misery of its protracted predatory 25 26 IDLING IN ITALY misrule and the majority of its inhabitants were re- duced to a deplorable state) ; "AIT AriaAperta" ("In the Open Air"), scenes and incidents of life among the common people of Tuscany; and "Le Veglie di Neri" ("Fireside Evenings of Neri"), which showed him a man of heart and of mind supremely capable of trans- forming the messages of the former by the latter in such a way as to make great appeal to his fellow beings. His books can be read to-day with the same pleasure that they were read half a century ago, and the pictures which are painted, particularly in the former, are as vivid as the day they were first put on the canvas. Fucini is a type that is indigenous to central Italy, by nature a lover of the fields, the forest, the brooks, he was compelled from earliest infancy to earn his living, and he seemed to be content with a bare sus- tenance, getting pleasure from his wanderings and from books. He did on foot and more intimately what Signore Panzini has done on a bicycle or on way trains. As an inspector of country schools he was obliged to visit countless villages and hamlets, and there he found in the habits, customs, and conduct of their inhabi- tants material for comment and reflections such as most people find in new countries and large cities. His descriptions of them found sympathetic response in the hearts of many who see in the lives of these simple yet sophisticated people the romance of bygone days. Fucini has not cut a great figure in Italian letters, but any one who would get a familiarity with the literature of the early days of Italian unity, or who is in search of diversion and delight should not neglect him. He is a sympathetic figure, whether wander- LITERARY ITALY 27 ing through Tuscany, bending over a table in the Riccardi Library, or awaiting his cue at Empoli. A writer of this period to whom posterity is likely to give a high rating is Alfredo Oriani, who died in 1907. His fame will finally rest on his fiction rather than on his historical contributions. Though "La lotta poli- tica in Italia " ("The Political Struggle in Italy "), from 486 to 1877 in three volumes, is a creditable performance, it is not based on personal research. Malignant-minded critics have occupied themselves with proving him a pilferer, but the work is done with such consummate literary skill that he has put the reading world under obligations to him. His first books, "Memorie inutili" ("Useless Mem- ories"), "Sullo Scoglio" ("On the Reefs"), and "Al di la, no" ("The Next World, No"), revealed such un- bridled license of morbid tendencies that even Italians could not stomach them. He appeared to them a romanticist after the manner of Guerrazzi, addicted to the Macabre, subject to satanic inspiration, bom- bastic, and rhetorical. When Oriani took up a second phase of his writing in the period from 1880 to 1890 the reading public still continued to mistrust him. Although he brought his spirit to a more stable equilibrium, he carried upon himself the stigma that clung to him in conse- quence of his previous books, and such productions as "IlNemico" ("The Enemy"), "Incenso e Mirra" ("Incense and Myrrh"), "Fino a Dogali" ("Up to Dogal"), "Matrimonio e divorzio" ("Marriage and Divorce"), did not absolve him from previous sins. His turgid style was more objected to than his taints and his themes, and his aggressiveness and 28 IDLING IN ITALY political arrogances found greater opposition than his early decadent manner and his late negations in re- ligious matters. He was accused of being a plagiarist. His greatest work "Lotta Politica" was characterized by a critic, L. Ambrosina, to be wholly devoid of orig- inality. His "Momo" was called an imitation of TurgeniefTs "A Neighbor's Bread." His "LTnvin- cibile" was derived from " Andrea Cornells" of Paul Bourget, and the "Ultimi Barbari" ("The Last Bar- barians") from Verga's "PagHacci" and the "Caval- leria Rusticana." Thus beset, Oriani, despairing of recognition, gath- ered his strength for a final flight and strove to reach heights never reached before, and he wrote "The Political Struggle," "Holocaust," and "Ideal Re- volts." "The Holocaust " is a study of mother and daughter. The mother has, from leading a wayward life, been able to keep body and soul together until middle age has effaced her charms. Reduced to hunger and rags, she decides to sacrifice her fifteen-year-old daughter and offers her to the first stranger whom she encounters walking beside the Arno one evening; she takes him to her contemptible rooms where the emaciated and ragged child awaits, in ignorance of her mission, the mother. The young man of the self-made and aggressive type primed with animal spirits hesitates to be the instrument of the mother's monstrous designs, and hurls himself from the house when he realizes the situation, leaving the contents of his purse with the crushed little flower. The inhuman mother and a friend even more saturated in iniquity spend the money in an im- LITERARY ITALY 29 provised banquet and plan how they shall take the child to the home of a well-known procuress. Their object is realized when this is accomplished and the mother receives a small sum of money, but the child, not having been cut out for the life, soon escapes. A narrative of her experiences, a picture of her suffer- ing, the conflict between filial love and justifiable re- sentment, is set forth in page after page of psycho- logical analysis. From the violence of the encounter flow simultaneously mortal disease and pregnancy. The former gives the author an opportunity to de- pict the child mind in rebellion against both bodily and spiritual salvation. The ministrations of the church are done with great finesse, kindliness, and skill, and give much satisfaction to believers. This may be the author's votive offering to the church, or it may reflect a new illumination of his soul. When the heroine dies the mother realizes her sin in having borne the child and in having betrayed her. It would be difficult to imagine anything more dis- agreeable than the story. The only thing that can be said is that it is well told, but what does it advantage one to read it? As Henry James said, no one is com- pelled to admire any particular sort of writing, but surely there must be compulsion to make one write them. And as Flaubert, whom Oriani probably called master, wrote: "Such books are false; nature is not like that." Oriani lived a singularly isolated life, having little contact with his fellow workers and little recognition. But he was a thinker and idealist, and it is unfortunate that he did not choose more attractive media to pre- sent his thought and project his aspirations. Only 30 IDLING IN ITALY after his death did he begin to get any measure of ap- preciation. The four wars against Austria, the final charge against the Alps, foreseen and invoked by Oriani, were the conditions of his recognition by the Italian people. The most widely read of all Italian writers of this period was Edmondo de Amicis (1846-1908). His books, "Bozzetti Militari" ("Military Life"), which appeared shortly after his period of service in the army, and the book for boys entitled "Cuore" ("Heart"), had a tremendous sale and still have. They were also widely read outside of Italy. He wrote many books of travel, some poetry, literary portraits, and short stories. However, he made no particular impression upon the literary period of his time. Guido Mazzoni, born in 1859, was, and perhaps still is, professor at the University of Florence. He has been for many years secretary of the Crusca and senator of the realm. His critical work is "L'Ottocento." His poetry is of the familiar variety. "Sewing-machine" is one of them. He is an excellent example of the cul- ture of the Italians, but he has made no lasting im- pression upon Italian letters. He is best known in this country from Papini's gibes at him and at the Crusca. His recent contributions, "The Lament of Achilles" and "Con Gli Alpini" ("With the Alpini"), are of the eminently respectable, commendable, poet-laureate va- riety, called forth by valorous deeds of Italy's soldier sons. Nothing shows the flight from romanticism to real- ism that took place at the end of the nineteenth cen- tury so clearly as its stage literature. The dominating LITERARY ITALY 31 figure of that period was Giuseppe Giacosa. *He was not alone the most prolific contributor to the literature of the theatre, but a man who early excited and kept the admiration and affection of fellow artists. He can truthfully be called the literary mirror of that period in Italy. The lamp of enthusiasm was flickering when he first put secure steps upon the literary road, but it lighted him to a great success in "Una Partita a Scacchi" ("A Game of Chess")- Then the car of real- ism came along with a rush, as if it would carry everything in its wake, and he threw a great bouquet into the tonneau in the shape of "Surrender at Dis- cretion." But his ear was always to the ground, and, when he sensed the advent of a new literary period and learned of the existence of readers that did not know just what they wanted but thought they would like to have the truth, the naked truth of life as de- picted in fiction, he wrote "Sad Loves." But the Veristic period did not last long, and Giacosa took leave of it without a tear. Pascoli and D'Annunzio had not only entered idealistic realism in the literary race, .but they were shouting in the most vociferous way for the latter especially to win. When Giacosa became fully cognizant of the favorite colors he was quick to make his entry with "As the Leaves" and "II Piu Forte" ("The Stronger"). The play to which he owed his first success, "A Game of Chess," had a remarkable career in Italy, and it still makes leading appeal to extravagant youth and romantic maturity, who see, in the lovely Iolande or in the dashing Fernando, prototypes who solve perplexing problems of life with an ease and readiness 32 IDLING IN ITALY that is soul-satisfying. They also see in their experi- ences the smouldering or dying embers of their own passions, whose articulate breathings cause them to glow consumingly and pleasantly. Its success turned the author from law, which he despised, to literature, which he adored. His next play, "II Trionfe d'Amore" ("The Triumph of Love"), was along the same lines: life without sorrow or strife save such as make pleasure — which bulks large in life — sweeter. Within a few years Gia- cosa began to depict life as it really was, is, or should be, and the first indication of it was "II Conte rosso" ("The Red Count"), and for a decade he gave himself to the production of historical plays none of which can be used to-day as a wreath on the monument to his memory. It was not until he wrote "Resa a Dis- crezione" ("Surrender at Discretion"), that he came into the field which he finally tilled so profitably, holding up to the contemptuous, scornful gaze of the people the useless, iniquitous, pernicious existences of a certain class, the noble. In this he did the same thing that he had done in his masterpiece, "As the Leaves." But here he portrayed flesh and blood con- fronted with problems conditioned by life, called chance. Instead of desperation and whetted appetite for sen- suous appeasement, we see latent character budding and flowering under the stimulus of adversity; virtue which does not lose its aroma from enforced tarry in putrid milieu; the deadly sins, rooted in ancestral emotions and nurtured by environment displayed in the conduct of human beings of our acquaintance and our intimacy; we see the exaltation and the dep- recation of viciousness just as we see it and accom- LITERARY ITALY 33 plish it in real life. The literary features of the lines, the crispness and naturalness of the dialogue, the fidelity with which he reflected the handling of prob- lems likely to confront any one show the finished artist. Giacosa was a conspicuous literary figure of yester- day's Italy, friend of poets and philosopher, journalist, essayist, lecturer, man of the world, mirror of one side of its mental and emotional activity. Next to Verga the Verists found their chief exponent in Luigi Capuana, a Sicilian born in 1839 and still living. He wrote romances, short stories, plays, and criticisms, none of which save the latter had great vogue, though one of his plays, "Malia" ("Enchant- ment"), gave such offense to Mrs. Grundy that it had great popularity. Like Verga he knows his coun- trymen and women, particularly their emotional re- actions and the conduct conditioned by it, by their inheritancy, and by their environment. Many of his short stories are gems of construction and of narrative. For instance, " Passa PAmore," in "II buon Pastore" ("The Good Pastor"), is a masterly delineation of the struggle between what is usually called good and evil in the person of a saintly old priest. Love had been an abstract conception for the good pastor until he essayed] to reclaim a lamb who had been driven from the fold by the efforts of a cruel father intensively to prepare her for sacrifice at the hands of Cavalier Ferro. Perhaps if Capuana had not been content with merely interesting and diverting the public, as he counselled Bracco to be, and had tried to teach them and lead them he would have greater renown. As it is he is one of the best short-story writers of Italy, a discerning, trustworthy critic, who has written an in- 34 IDLING IN ITALY teresting volume of studies in contemporary literature, and several plays, the last of which, "II Paraninfo" ("The Best-man" ), has recently been published. Nevertheless he must be considered a writer whose potentialities were but partially realized. Two realistic writers of the end of the nineteenth century must be mentioned, though their work scarcely merits discussion and to do so may be unjust to others. They are Gerolamo Rovetta and Marco Praga. Al- though the former wrote criticisms, interpretations, and romances, some of which had much success, the con- tributions by which he is best known are his plays. Rovetta studied contemporary life and depicted it for the stage. His first success, the one upon which his reputation as a man of letters most solidly rests, "La Trilogia di Dorina" (" Dorina's Trilogy"), presents the public pie, upper and lower crust and middle, quite as Zola might have made it. His favorite theme was that man is but a reaction to his environment, expounded particularly in "I Disonesti" ("Dishonest Men"), though his greatest popular success was "Ro- manticismo" ("Romanticism"), which was a contri- bution to "idealistic reaction" which would turn us from ugly verities of life. It has been said by com- petent authorities to be a faithful presentation of pub- lic and private sentiment existing in northern Italy previous to her deliverance from tyrannical Austria. Marco Praga is the son of Emilio Praga, who was the best-known Bohemian poet of Italy in his day (1839-1875), but who abandoned writing to teach dramatic literature in the Conservatory of Music in Milan. He professes to be the dramatic mirror held up to life and to tell the truth as he sees it, that he LITERARY ITALY 35 cannot be persuaded to camouflage it, and that when it is depicted on the stage it shall amuse rather than distress. That is what makes his most success- ful plays, such as "Le Vergini" ("The Virgins") and "La Moglie Ideale" ("The Ideal Wife"), depressing reading. Such conduct as they depict and such ex- change of thought and sentiment as they report un- doubtedly exist, but the less one knows of it and comes in contact with it the happier he or she is likely to be. If adultery could only be made a virtue for a few years, it would lose its attractiveness and many writers would have to earn their living. At the end of the nineteenth century Italy had three women poets of much distinction, one of whom, Ada Negri, had and still has great popularity. Her last book of poems, "II libro Di Mara" ("The Book of Mara"), has shown that she still has the capacity to put into verse dramatically and lyrically the most delicate and the most dominant notes of love as she or as those she has loved has experienced it. She was born in a little village of Lombardy in 1870. Her mother worked in a factory, and she herself was for some years a teacher in the elementary schools; so she had first-hand knowledge of the shut-in life of those whose repressions and aspirations she sung and published in Ulllustrazione Popolare of Milan. In these she set forth with great sincerity and with stir- ring lyric quality the sordid sufferings and sorrows of the toiling masses. These poems and others were pub- lished under the titles of "Fatality" and "The Tem- pest" in 1892 and 1894. Two years later a radical change in her social and spiritual environment was brought about by her marriage to Signor Garlanda, 36 IDLING IN ITALY and soon she sang of it in a volume called " Maternity," which does for that state what her previous volumes had done for human pain and human poverty. "Dal Profondo" ("From the Depths") was but a continua- tion of these sentiments, tinctured with philosophical and socialistic knowledge that had been displayed for other purpose in "The Tempest." After this came a volume entitled "Esilio" ("Exile"), which reflected the same thoughts and sentiments in Swiss light. She has written two prose works, a series of short stories entitled "Le Solitarie" and "Orazioni" ("Orisons"). She glorifies purity, idealizes it, and sings its adoration. In the closing years of the century there was pub- lished in Milan a volume of lyrics by one Annie Vi- vanti, which was praised intemperately by Carducci and by the Nuova Antologia. She had some fiction to her credit which dealt chiefly with the life of the stage, but her advent into the world of letters was like a shooting star; nothing was known of her origin save that she was said to have been born in London, and there was some mystery about her career. In her poetry there was a true lyric wail, especially in "De- stino" ("Destiny"), "NonSaramai" ("It Can Never Be"), that appealed tremendously to the public mind. Had she been productive she might have been com- pared to Ella Wheeler Wilcox. After her marriage to Mr. Chartres, a London journalist, she became better known as the mother of a child-wonder violinist. Amongst her romances the one which had greatest popularity was entitled "I Divoratori" ("The De- vourers"). It is obviously the story of her life and of her daughter's career, the record of filial shortcomings steeped in wormwood. LITERARY ITALY 37 The third of these interesting writers, half Armenian, half Italian, was Vittoria Aganoor, who was born in Padua in 1855. In 1900 she published a volume called 1 ' Leggenda Eterna " (" Eternal Legend "), which showed her to be a sincere, impassioned artist with a pronounced leaning toward the sentimental. She died in London in the spring of 1910, after a surgical operation, and a few hours later her husband, Guido Pompili, killed himself. Her best-known poems are "II Canto delF Ironia" ("The Song of Irony"), "La vecchia Anima sogna . . ." ("The Old Soul Dreams"), "Mama, sei tu?" ("Mother, Is It Thou?"). A complete vol- ume of her poetry was published in 1912. Italians are astonished when women make a great stir in the world. They have had no Jeanne d'Arc or Florence Nightingale. Their historic women have been mostly mystics who would punish the flesh that they might become spiritually pure, but the generation that is now passing has had five women, four at least of whom will have to be discussed by any historian of the intellectual movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They are Matilde Serao, Grazia Deledda, Maria Montessori, Eusapia Palladino, and Eleanora Duse, and most space will be given to Duse. Matilde Serao is the Marie Corelli of Italy with one important qualification. She has not been obliged to subscribe to the rigors of convention. She has spoken with great frankness about whole sides of life which Miss Corelli knows, but about which she has been compelled to be silent. Not that the romances of Matilde Serao are in any sense pornographic, but she has painted her subjects so vividly and registered her sensations and impressions so sumptuously that 38 IDLING IN ITALY they are considered very improper by Mrs. Grundy. She was in turn school-teacher, telegraphist, journalist, publisher, author, but throughout her writings she has kept the note of the journalist who has made a careful study of Zola and of Flaubert. Her thought is spontaneous, her expression facile, as she depicts the emotions and "feelings" of her Neapolitan char- acters, clad in rags or royal raiment, living in hovel or in palace. Her most successful books were "La Storia di un Monaco," "II Ventre di Napoli" ("The Belly of Naples"), "II Paese della Cuccagna" ("The Land of the Cockaigne"), and "Terno secco" in which the social, economic, and political world of Naples is re- vealed. With the third of those enumerated she tried to do for lottery-gambling in Naples what Charles Dickens did for the private schools of England. Re- grettably her efforts did not have a similar result. In her Neapolitan stories the local color is not a mere background, but the very marrow of their being, with the result that it is almost impossible to reproduce it adequately in translation. Her later books were always pictures of the professional lover in different environments. He loves with fury and usually for a short time only. His amatory conduct has no ancillae of Anglo-Saxon love-making. It is taurine and satyric. He does not always kill after the embrace, but one gathers from his conduct that he would like to do so. Time has tempered Matilde Serao's erotic literary coefficient and her last books are cool, more serene, and less interesting. One of her last books, "Ella non rispose," has recently been translated into English under the title of "Souls Divided." LITERARY ITALY 39 Grazia Deledda has done for her native island of Sardinia that which Signora Serao did for Naples, but to a great extent she kept lubricity out of her writings. In her "II Vecchio della Montagna" ("The Old Man of the Mountain"), "La Via del Male" ("Road to Evil"), "Cenere" ("Ashes"), "Nostalgia," "LTncendio nelP Uliveto" ("The Burning in the Olive Grove"), and many others, she depicted with won- drous accuracy the life, feelings, struggles, ambitions, infirmities of the Sardinians, and painted their sordid surroundings and glorious scenery. She did for that wonderful island, so strangely neglected by the mother country, what Mary Wilkins did for New England. Her imagination was never so vivid nor was her eye so penetrating as that of her Neapolitan sister, nor has she known the voluptuous side of life, seamy or em- broidered, but she has known how to put down in a way that engrosses the reader's attention the pitiable and pathetic plights that circumstance and passion force upon the people with whom she lives. The dis- play of their passions and sorrows are apparently as familiar to her as the landscapes. Unfortunately, how- ever, she does for them that which she does for the latter. She idealizes them or, better said, she strains them through her imagination. In other words, in- stead of recording them as they are she records them as they should be. Her novels give the impression of being photographic until you read Verga. Not that the breath of insincerity which Croce said was the curse of Italy's modern writers comes from her. She is most sincere, but her characters are sandman mani- kins into whose nostrils she has breathed the breath of life. She makes her characters do what she might do if she were one of them. 40 IDLING IN ITALY Whether she is tugging at the end of her intellectual tether or not remains to be seen, but her recent work has not the spontaneity and imaginativeness of her earlier books and she is almost obsessed with describing landscapes, the advent and departure of the sun, and stage-settings generally. Her last story, "The Burning in the Olive Grove," is a conflict between the present and the past, and turns upon a marriage of convention. It gives the author the opportunity to depict the imperious eighty-three-year-old grand- mother, her useless brother, the farm lassie whose worldly success in marrying into a family above her station she owes to her beauty, and a pillar of feminine virtue who would live her own life in her own way despite the schemings of the grandmother of feu- dalists behavior. The scene is filled with character studies which she likes so well: the old soldier of Garibaldi's legion, his lame son whom the heroine loves, and virtuous heroic peasantry. Several of Grazia Deledda's novels have been trans- lated into English, but they have not had great suc- cess. She is one of the last of the realistic idealizers. The most her admirers can hope that the future will do for her is that it will suggest to those in search of Sardinian color that they should consult her writings. Neither the psychologist nor the literary craftsman will disturb her literary remains. The most promising successor of these women nov- elists is Clarice Tartufari, whose "Rete d'Acciaio" (" Nets of Steel") is a powerful though painful study of the Sicilian brand of jealousy. Arturo Graf (1848-1918), for many years a pro- fessor in the University of Turin, was a materialistic LITERARY ITALY 41 poet whose productions during his lifetime were re- ceived with some favor and are now being given high rating. Fifteen years ago a very flattering review of his dramatic poems, especially "Medusa," appeared in the Nuova Antologia, and recently Signor Vittorio Gian has published in Gazetta di Torino an analysis of his mental processes and an estimate of the merit and significance of his poetical productions which, should they find general acceptance, may give Graf the most important position in the poetic field since Pascoli. Neither his intellectual reactions nor his point of view, however, is Italian. They show both his Teutonic origin and inclinations. His last verses, "Nuove Rime della Selva" ("New Rhymes of the Forest"), are full of delightful imagery, delicate fantasy, and gentle sentiment and they do not display the ma- terialism, pessimism, or the figurative symbolism of his early works. In 1900 he published a psycho- logical romance entitled "Riscatto" ("Redemption"), admittedly a spiritual autobiography which heralded and prepared his after-faith, which was thus also a bat- tle for a faith against materialistic pessimism, against arid positivism which had seduced him and against which he reacted. "He who seeks God laboriously may become more religious than he who coddles Him in the firm belief of having found Him." His book of poems published in 1895 is the poet's voicings of his struggle to this end. His fame is greater as a dramatist and litterateur than as a poet. Nevertheless some of his poetical writings show a rare imagery, a facile capacity for description and versification, though a pessimistic psychology. His best-known poems are entitled "Venezie" ("Venices"), "Le Rose sonq sfio- 42 IDLING IN ITALY rite" ("Faded Roses"), "Silenzio" ("Silence"), "Ane- lito" ("Longings"). Gian says of him: "He did not attain in his career as teacher, writer, and poet that outward recognition that fame and fortune usually be- stow on their favorites," but as a recompense "he was honored with such hatreds as are never the lot of mediocrities and which for this very reason are the sanction and almost the guaranty of true worth." Much of the interesting literature of the past genera- tion has appeared in dialect, especially the poetic liter- ature. Salvatore di Giacomo must be put at the head of all dialectical poets of Italy. He is very little known to English readers, because he has been so little trans- lated, save into German. He is the librarian of the National Library of the Naples Museum. The sub- jects of his poems are drawn from Naples and its peo- ple, its beauty and their ardency; the realism of his verse is sober, its sentiments are healthy and true to human nature but to the human nature of a voluptu- ous, passionate people. He writes of love in all its aspects, and of death, physical, emotional, and mental. He knows the hopes, aspirations, sympathies, longings, customs of his fellow Neapolitans; he knows them when they are ill, when they are happy, and when they are depressed, when they are fortunate and when they are seeped in misfortune, and he puts them into lyrics that they understand and that poetasters praise. His lyrics have been collected into one volume called "Poesie." He has been called the Robert Burns of Italy, and it is likely that he deserves it. It is to be regretted that no one has attempted to render him in English. LITERARY ITALY 43 An Italian poet neglected and almost unknown dur- ing his lifetime (1872-1919), whose literary output was very small, is slowly coming to his estate and it is not unlikely that the coming generation will hail Ceccardo Roccatagliata-Ceccardi as one of Italy's greatest mod- ern poets. "Sonetti e Poemi" contains practically all of his verse save a small collection published when he was twenty. CHAPTER III GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO— POET, PILOT, AND PIRATE The most conspicuous name in the annals of Italian literature of the generation now passing is that as- sumed by a child or a youth when the voice first whis- pered to him that he had been chosen to announce the coming of a new era, to blaze the way for a new social andi inational life: Gabriele D'Annunzio. He was born at Pescara in the Regno, March 13/ 1863, the son of Francescopaolo D'Annunzio and of his wife, Luisa de Benedictis of Ortona. A studied effort has been made to envelop his birth and parentage in a mantle of mys- tery, but it has been thwarted. One day of his infancy, in Ferravilla-on-the-Sea, sud- denly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind. From that moment the little Annun- ciator was filled with the gift of verbal expression. He enhanced the endowment by diligent study in the high school at Prato, in Tuscany, where he spent his boyhood. Thus did he acquire an unparalleled mas- tery of the Italian language. The gods of mythology, the Hellenic heroes and philosophers, the emperors and courtesans of Pagan Rome were the loves of his infancy. After Carducci's "Odi Barbari" exploded his poetic magazine he looked about to find a god and a Greek upon whom to model his conduct. He re- called Dionysus going through the world with Priapus 44 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 45 ostentatiously displaying the Phallus, and the die was cast. But he must have a philosophy as well. He who taught that eternal flux and change is the only actu- ality; that all phenomena are in a state of continuous transition from non-existence to existence and vice versa; that everything is and is not; all things are and nothing remains; that all things must be reduced by way of quasi-condensation to the primary matter from which they originated, in brief — Heraclitus, whose name signified "he who rails at the people," was the one that he selected. The process of quasi-reduction was to be preceded by purification through pleasure, and pleasure was to be obtained by stimulation of the senses. The more they were stimulated the greater became their potency for purification. When he looked about the world he found others had been se- duced by Heraclitus. Nietzsche, whose activity pre- ceded D'Annunzio's by a few years, was the most con- spicuous exponent of the Eternal Recurrence. He too taught a master morality, a morality which says yea to life and nay to morals, rules, and conventions. Christianity is the moral code of slaves. Instinct is the true wisdom. The genesic instinct is the basis of all other instincts. Therefore cultivate it, for in that way one becomes a superman and begets a race of supermen. If we must have a statue of Apollo, as Socrates and Christ taught, let us make it a feminine figure and place it beside Dionysus, first erected by animal men, and around them let us dance a frenzied tarantella while we intoxicate ourselves with foaming wine, the product of sensuous fermentation. No attempt will be made here to put an estimate 46 IDLING IN ITALY ' upon D'Annunzio's conduct or his accomplishments of the past five years, save to say that they have been in keeping with his previous life. Literary criticism is concerned with the genius of the writer and the way in which he makes that genius manifest. It is not concerned with the morals or im- morality of his writing, and yet it has to take some cognizance of them, especially if they are at variance with that which is considered moral or approximately moral. No one who is a public figure or whose activi- ties are concerned with the welfare of the public, whether it be with their diversion, instruction, or pro- tection, can comport himself in a way that is flagrantly offensive to the public without showing the effect of it in his writings. For instance, a writer produces a masterpiece of literature, one that has qualities of conception and construction that evoke universal ad- miration. It has been written for one of three reasons, or all of them. First, because the artist has it in him and he must externalize it, a creative craving that must be satisfied; second, he has a purpose in doing it — he wants to amuse, amaze, or instruct people; third, he wants to gain fame or money. If he is utterly oblivious to the two las*t, his writings may be as immoral or unrighteous as he wishes to make them. If the public does not wish to read them it need not, and if it considers them injurious to others whose mental capacity does not enable them to judge whether they are proper or injurious they can be sup- pressed. If, however, the writer is animated to pro- duction by either of the latter two motives, he must be reconciled to having an estimate made of his work not only from the point of view of literary criticism, but GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 47 also from the point of view of the fitness of his works for literary consumption. That is, he must be recon- ciled to attempts at estimating whether or not the world would not have been better off without his writings. There are few writers to whom these remarks apply with greater force than Gabriele D'Annunzio. It is generally admitted that he is the most consummate master of Italian verse now living. Though his prose writings show that he is not a literary craftsman of the first order, he has understood that art rises out of our primal nature and that it is instinctive. He has sung the praises of sensualism as they never have been sung in modern times, and he has panoplied the pre- liminaries to love's embrace with garlands made of flowers of forced blooming, artificially perfumed and colored so that the average human being does not rec- ognize them as products of nature. He has preached and practised a moral code the antithesis of Christi- anity, and yet no one has sought seriously to save his soul. In truth, D'Annunzio had tired the world of him. The people of it were tired of him as they might have been of a radiantly beautiful woman who had be- come a gorgeously decorated strumpet constantly walk- ing up and down in the world seeking praise and ad- miration. When he went to Paris the world seemed to be satisfied that he should disappear in that mael- strom, as it was willing that a contemporary sensuous egocentrist should disappear when he left Reading Gaol, but D'Annunzio must enter upon the final stage of his mission from the gods, and the Great War gave him the opportunity. 48 IDLING IN ITALY Although so long a conspicuous figure in the public eye, he has managed to wrap certain layers of the man- tle of mystery about him so closely that little is known of his origin or of the forces that contributed to the making and development of his extraordinary career. It is confidently stated by those who pretend to know him that he is a Jew, but he is not claimed by Hebrew writers, who are proud of enrolling Bergson and Brandes, Spinoza and Strauss in their list. Vainly offering his life for Italy, he is not somatically, mentally, or emo- tionally an Italian. Knowing her history, her tradi- tions, and her reactions as few of her sons have known them, until the war he had not sung her virtues or mir- rored her wondrous accomplishments of nation-build- ing. His face has steadily been turned not toward the east, where the sun of her glory is arising, but toward the west, where he has revelled in the resurrected glows of sunsets of pagan and Renaissance days. He' has treated his friends disdainfully when it suited his whim; he has meted out contumely to his adulators when it pleased his fancy; he has disdained those who have accused him; he has passed unnoticed those who have sought to belittle him; and he has gone among his superiors as if he were their king. He has been called everything save Philistine and fool. He has been called the greatest literary figure of modern Italy and it is likely that he merits it. He is a poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist, politician, critic, propagandist, prophet, aviator, hero, dictator, and self-constituted arbiter of Italy's destinies. Neither his peer nor his superior has ever denied him a rare imagination, an artistic intelligence of ex- traordinary range, depth and exquisiteness, a stu- GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 49 pendous versatility and productiveness, a tireless en- ergy, a fearless daring and a supreme contempt for the feelings, beliefs, and accomplishments of others. There are two ways of approaching an estimate of D'Annunzio. One is to analyze him — to set him up as a god or a monster and to dissect him and study the elements of his complex mechanism, then put them to- gether patiently and laboriously as one puts together a jigsaw picture-puzzle. It is the tempting way, but it risks injuring the sensibilities of his admirers and the judicially minded who are so constituted that they cannot pass judgment unless they are in possession of all the facts concerning him and his career: what he did and the circumstances attending the doing of them, that is, the environment in which they were done — both that which he created and that which was thrust upon him. Finally they want to view him in rest and in action. Then they are ready to render a verdict in much the same way as a jury renders a ver- dict with or without the analysis and summing up of the testimony and evidence by proponent or opponent advocate. The way of synthesis would be the way to approach an interpretation of D'Annunzio if the man were under discussion, but here only an estimate of his literary career is attempted. There is no dearth of evidence to show that he was a precocious child and a youth of prodigious intellec- tual acumen and prehensility, of boundless self-con- fidence and fathomless egocentrism. His first collection of verse, "Primo Vere" (" First Beginnings"), was published when he was fifteen years old, and two years later he published a second edition " corrected with pen and fire and augmented." From the beginning it 50 IDLING IN ITALY was pointed out by critic and commentator that he plagiarized line and verse from poets of Italy, such as Giambattista Marino, Niccolo Tommaseo, and Giosue Carducci, and of other countries; but if the accusations made any impression upon him it was not evident in his future conduct, for later he took from Verga and Capuana, from Nietzsche and Tolstoy, from Maeter- linck and Flaubert, from Ibsen and Dostoievsky, and from countless others that which it pleased him to take. His fame in Italy as a poet was heralded by the poet Giuseppe Chiarini, who published an article which did for him what Octave Mirabeau's article in the Figaro of August 24, 1890, did for Maeterlinck. Before he had reached his maturity he was hailed as the coming poet, whose originality was admirable, whose sensuality was shocking but acceptable, whose versatility was marvellous. There is nothing morbid, decadent, or blatant in his early poems. In the " Canto Novo," published in 1882, he displayed the torridity of his tem- perament, the splendor of his imagination, the ardency of his loves, and the implacability of his hatreds. It swept like a fire over Italy. It was a lyric of the joy of life, "the immense joy of living, of being strong, of being young, of biting with eager teeth the fruits of the earth, of looking with flaming eyes upon the divine face of the world, as a lover looks upon his mistress." It was followed in quick succession by " Terra Vergine," "Intermezzo di Rime," and "II libro delle Vergini" ("The Book of the Virgins"), which enhanced his reputation and caused the Italians to hail him intem- perately. He then went to Rome and began work as a journal- GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 51 ist, but this did not interfere with his output of poetry, and by 1892, when he began publishing romances, he had established, by the publication of "Isaotta Gutta- dauro," the "Elegie romane" and the "Odi navali," a reputation with the reading public of being the most appealing, most satisfying poet in Italy, and the critics were not at all sure he would not surpass Carducci, who was then considered Italy's greatest poet and whose fame has steadily increased. His fame as a poet being established to his own satis- faction he turned to the field of romance, and in the next five years (1893-1898) there flowed from the printing-presses a series of romances that veritably flooded literary Italy: "LTnnocente," "II Piacere," "Giovanni Episcopo," "Trionfo della Morte," "Le Vergini delle Rocce," "Forse che si forse che no," and the "Novelle della Pescara." They had a quality that is not easily characterized by word or brief descrip- tion. They were "sensuous," "decadent," "daring," "shocking," "brilliant." They were modelled on Flaubert, Prevost, Huysmans; they were saturated with the philosophy of Nietzsche, the psychology of Ibsen, the mysticism of Maeterlinck, the morality of Petronius; they reek of the bestialities of Wilde and Verlaine; they are the glorification of pagan ethics; they are the apotheosis of lust. But they were read, discussed, admired, praised, not only in Italy but the world over. I doubt that praise was ever given so lavishly, so widely, and so unjustifiably as was given to this series of romances, which to-day, a generation after their publication, are as constant a reminder of a wayward step which Italian literature took at the end of the nineteenth century as the linea alba on the 52 IDLING IN ITALY torso of a woman whose reputation for virtue is es- tablished and admitted reminds her of a faux pas of her youth. In these volumes the author showed that he had a marvellous capacity to depict states of exalted sensibility; that he had an extraordinary, almost superhuman sensitiveness to beauty as it is revealed in nature and in art; that he had a clairvoyant knowl- edge of the activity of the unconscious mind of human beings and how it conditions their behavior under cir- cumstances and environments fortuitous or chosen — in other words, until it is revealed to them behavioris- tically; that he had a comprehensive familiarity with plastic and pictorial art; an intimacy with ancient his- tory and modern literature that was stupendous, and withal a capacity to externalize his visions, his emo- tional elaboration, and his mental content in words so linked together that the very juxtaposition of them is a pleasure to the eye and a satisfaction to the soul. But that which he knew best of all was the history of eroticism. Not only was he familiar with its an- cestry to the remotest time, but he had guarded its infant days with such solicitude that he knew every impression that worldly contact made upon its plastic consciousness, and when it got its growth he set to work to ornament it so that contact with it would be the apogee of all beauty, intimacy with it the purpose of all ambition, union with it the object of all strife. There are features of his romances that cannot be adequately praised; there are features that cannot be sufficiently condemned. A poem that contains no particular thought may excite our profoundest ad- miration, just as does a papier-mache triumphal arch GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 53 or monument; but a romance or novel depicts some phase or aspect of life, reveals man's aspirations or accomplishments, his behaviors and reactions under certain conditions, reflects his nobilities, depicts his frailties, and extols his ambitions and what he would like to do, experience, or accomplish. In a general way, it is expected that it shall be tuned to an ethical pitch that will not give offense to the man of average Christian or pagan morality, or outrage universally accepted and acceptable convention. The most suc- cessful horticulturist in the world would find no mar- ket for his roses, even though they were more exquisite than those of all other florists, should he impregnate them with a scent obtained from the Mustelidae. This is what D'Annunzio did. It would be very difficult to find a religion, a form of government, a code of ethics, a type of beauty, a map of life, a canon of morals, a custom, habit, or a con- vention that something could not be said in praise of it. Bolshevism has its attractive facet, even though the present-day proponents of it have got it so deeply sub- merged in the mire of ambition and power, and so defaced with lust for revenge that it cannot be rec- ognized. There is scarcely any form of those various indulgences and commissions which are labelled "vice" that have not some commendable and praiseworthy feature, but there is one aberration of human conduct that has never had a champion in the open. It is incest, and Gabriele D'Annunzio is its champion. Concealed or openly, it goes through his writings with the same constancy that streams flow through plains that go out from glacier mountains. In the English translations of his romances elaborate descriptions of other forms 54 IDLING IN ITALY of perversion of the genesic instinct have been largely expurgated, but it is impossible to purge them en- tirely of the incest theme, for in many of his writings it is beyond the verbal description. It is the atmosphere of the book. Take, for instance, the novel "L'lnno- cente." On the face of it, it is the narration of the conduct of a man who, having wedded a superior woman of great intellectual charm and bodily attractions, yields to the temptations of the life of dissipation in which he had distinguished himself previous to an ideal matrimony and a contented paternity. He realizes that his digressions are scandalous, and that their frequent deliberate repetitions justify his wife in living apart from him, though her love, being beyond control, still continues. They agree to live with each other as brother and sister. The moment he succeeds in placing her in his soul as his sister an irresistible im- pulse seizes him to have carnal possession of her, and the burden of the book is a description of his seduction of his own wife, who in the new covenant is his sister. Meanwhile with consummate art he has described in the first chapter as the only true love that which exists between brother and sister, his apostrophe of it having been called forth by re- calling the sister whom death had fortunately removed. Before he has accomplished the seduction of his wife-sister he has precipitated her into a vulgar ad- venture with his own brother, a pattern of all the vir- tues. It is a part of his consummate art to create cir- cumstantial evidence that will tend to put the paternity of her child upon a fellow author who in other days had been civil and courteous to his wife, and had sent her a copy of his latest book with an enigmatical inscrip- GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 55 tion on the fly-leaf, but in reality he succeeds in cre- ating an atmosphere from which one senses with readiness that the real father is his brother. The book, in so far as it is concerned with the nobility of Giuliana, the sweetness of life in the country, the lovability of her mother and her children, the way in which Giuliana's emotions and thought after the advent of the child are shaped that she may grow to hate it as he hates it, as well as the mental elaborations that justify him in seeking to destroy it, and the accom- plishment of it, are done in a way that shows the author to be not only intimately familiar with the workings of the normal human mind but with the depraved human mind. From the beginning of his literary career D'Annunzio was at no pains to conceal that he was the model from which he painted his heroes. The reader who identi- fies him with Tullio Hermil is the perspicacious reader, in the eyes of the author; the reader who considers the conduct of Tullio, infracting as it does the canons of law, of morality, and of decency, as the conduct of a superman, is, in the judgment of the author, the sa- pient reader. He who sees in Tullio and his conduct a beast abnormally freighted with lubricity, lacking in inhibitory qualities of a man unguided and unin- fluenced by any obligation to God or man, and know- ing no other obligation than the pursuit of his own pleasures and desires, is a fool, a weakling, an inanimate mass of protoplasm moulded in the form of a human being unworthy of consideration. D'Annunzio con- ceived himself a superman long before he began to write romances, and I am not one of those who believe that he got his conception from Nietzsche. He got it 56 IDLING IN ITALY from the same indescribable source that that unbal- anced monster of materialism got his. Its roots if they could be traced back to the days of the Hebrew prophets would be found to have their germinal sprouts in some descendant of Samuel or David. D'Annunzio's romances are a mixture of material- ism, sensualism, and pessimism reduced in a pagan mortar to a homogeneous consistency, and then skil- fully admixed with honey so that it is acceptable to the Christian palate, but, once it has got beyond the taste- buds of the tongue, once it is taken into the system, its poisonous, corroding, and destructive qualities become operative. I doubt if D'Annunzio ever wrote a word or line in his plays or romances that any one was the better for having read or heard, and by better I mean that he added to his spiritual possessions, to his inherent nobility, or to his aspirations for a moral perfection, one iota. I doubt if any normal human being, normal physically, mentally, and spiritually, can read "II Piacere" without feeling ill and humiliated, not because of the picture that the author draws of himself in the guise of Andrea Sperelli, this finished expert in the employments of love, nor of Donna Maria, nor of the woman more infernally expert in those matters, nor the score of other characters which he paints with a master-hand, but because of the way in which he draws his bow across the overtaut strings of sensuousness until they scream and wail in frenzied fashion and then finally burst asunder. The way in which he makes an appeal to his perverted sensuality through vicarious overstimulation of the senses with which he was endowed for self-conservation and self- preservation, the senses of smell and sight and touch GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 57 and hearing, is in itself a perversion. He stimulates them until they shriek for mercy or for immersion in some benumbing balm. The true pervert is he who puts out of proportion and out of perspective the sources of aesthetic emanation, and who concentrates them upon the percipient apparatus of one or other of the senses so that it may be excited to a frenzied activity. The description of Andrea's room, in which he awaits Donna Maria, with its perfumes, lights, and colors, and the description of his toilet articles and his bedroom is one of the most nauseating things in all literature. Like Nietzsche, D'Annunzio looks upon women as creatures of an inferior race, instruments of pleasure and procreation who were created to serve. When they no longer are amusing, useful, or service- able they are to be brushed aside and with the same sang froid as one would put aside an automobile that had broken down, worn out, or because it's "corpo non e* piu giovane," as he kept saying of Foscarina in "II Fuoco," who belonged to him "like the thing one holds in his 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 draft that may be drunk or poured on the ground." In "Vergini delle Rocce" he expounds the theory that inequality is the essence of the state, and in this book as well as in "II Trionfo della Morte" we find all the passion of language and of sentiment that one finds in Nietzsche. It is no longer to be doubted that he had kept his word "noi tendiamo Torecchio alia voce del magnanimo Zarathustra e prepariamo nelP arte con sicura fede Tawento del Uebermensch del superuomo" — we listen to the voicing of the magnani- 58 IDLING IN ITALY mous Zarathustra and we prepare with unfaltering faith for the coming of the superman to the arts. In his life of Cola di Rienzo D'Annunzio again took occasion to lampoon and traduce the common people, describing them as the great beast which must be crushed and annihilated. "II Trionfo della Morte" is the very essence of Heraclitan philosophy and Dionysan ethics. The hero, who is a paragon of knowledge which he displays for the reader's edifica- tion, meets the young and pretty wife of a business man who bores her. He is successful finally in per- mitting her to pass a few weeks with him in his villa by the sea. During these weeks they run the gamut of every conceivable sensation and the reader gets a description of them and of the gradual hatred that develops in him for his subjection of her. "Every human soul carries in it for love a definite quality of sensitive force. This quality is used up with time and when it is used up no effort can prevent love from ceasing." But/ unlike the animal when his concupi- scence is satiated and he is still urged to greater display, the hero is not content with driving her from him; he must needs mete out the same fate to her that he did to the infant in "II Piacere," so he lures her to the edge of a sea cliff and hurls her into space. "She would in death become for me matter of thought, pure ideality; from a precarious and imperfect existence she would enter into an existence complete and defi- nite, forsaking forever the infirmities of her weak, luxurious flesh. Destroy to possess. There is no other way for him who seeks the absolute in love." The reader yields to the enchantment of his style, to the seductiveness of his lyrism, to the intoxications GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 59 of his descriptions of beauty; and the critic and fellow writer to his mastery of technic and consummate mastery of behavioristic psychology. From the critics' point of view "The Triumph of Death " and "The Fire" are the high-water marks of D'Annunzio as a stylist, and they mark his completest moral dissolu- tion. In "II Fuoco" we get the same ethics, philosophy, aesthetics, and glorification of sensuousness that we get in all his other books. Here the two leading char- acters are exact replicas of himself and of the world's greatest actress of her day portrayed in an environ- ment, Venice, that is redolent of beauty in decay, like a cracked Grecian vase overfilled with withered rose leaves which fall from it at every puff of wind. This environment makes an ideal palette upon which he blends the colors whose pigments he has been select- ing and experimenting with for a quarter of a cen- tury. The publication of it promoted his voluntary exile from Italy. His fellow countrymen could not condone the monstrous offense of depicting therein as the pliant mediator of his perverted sensuousness their beloved actress. And they have not yet forgiven him, nor are they likely to forgive him. After D'Annunzio had established a reputation as a neoromanticist with a classical tendency he turned to drama, and the year 1897 marked his advent into that field. His first efforts, three one-act parables — "The Foolish Virgins and the Wise Virgins," "The Rich Man and Poor Lazarus," and "The Prodigal Son" — were published in the Mattino of Naples, a newspaper controlled by the husband of his friend and fellow writer, Matilde Serao. They are noteworthy merely 60 IDLING IN ITALY to show the way in which a sensuous pagan can trans- form simple characters into decadent, perverted pros- elyters of pleasure. It was not until he wrote "The Dream of a Spring Morning" and "The Dream of an Autumn Sunset" that he displayed the same measure of lascivious imagery and capacity for description of the perverse manifestations of eroticism that he re- vealed in his romances. These were revealed in lines that truly may be said to be masterpieces of lyric beauty, and when the Mad Woman of the first and the Messalina of the second were interpreted by Eleanora Duse the musical sound of the words and the emo- tional force of the sentiment gained a quality of im- portance and grandeur which enhanced their inherent qualities. In "La Citta Morta," his most successful drama, he returned to his favorite topic, incest. Though his pur- pose in writing it, the most successful of all his dramas, was to revive in form, structure, and unity the Greek drama, it gave him an opportunity to display his knowledge of the classics and archaeology. The phi- losophy and mysticism of the play he got from Maeter- linck. Its theme is lust and crime. Lust is portrayed in almost every conceivable form of perversion, in poetic thoughts and graceful diction, especially in the delineation of Leonardo, the explorer, who lusts for his sister. The dreamy, meditative languor of the dramatis personse, their insensitiveness to every form of ethical conformation, their perversion of every form of moral relationship, constitute an atmosphere that the northerner does not breath pleasurably. It was thoroughly purged before it was put on the boards in this country. GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 61 His next play, u La Gioconda," is an exposition of the exemption which D'Annunzio thinks the artist of his own superman caliber should have from conforming to the laws of estate or custom. The contention is a simple one. He should do anything that he pleases — which means give himself over to the pleasure of the senses and the appetites until the indulgence is fol- lowed by satiety and thus his progress toward perfec- tion through gratification of desires will be accom- plished. After satiety comes disgust, and then a period of dementia, but this is merely the prelude to another fling of erotic fury in his conformation to the doctrine of purification through pleasure. The hero is a psychopathic individual, sensitive, aboulic, distractible, impressionable, impulsive, vacil- lating, and suicidal. He is married to a woman who apparently has every beauty of soul and body that a woman can have. But, alas, she is virtuous! She has not the key to the jewel-casket of his genius. That is possessed by his model Gioconda Dianti, the source of all his inspirations. One quiver of her eyelid causes his soul to dissolve like sugar in water, while two make him feel that he is lord of the universe. The tragedy of the play is the permanent mutilation of the wife's hands, the only somatic feature that has "appealed" to the artist. She attempts to save his masterpiece which the model pushes over in temper on being told falsely that she is to be banished. Her mutilated hands serve to remind her the rest of her life that virtue is its own reward. The two dramas of D'Annunzio which are best known to the English-speaking public are "La Figlia d'Jorio" and "Francesca di Rimini." "The Daughter 62 IDLING IN ITALY of Jorio" is a tragedy laid in the mountains of Abruzzi. D'Annunzio knows the customs, habits, and tra- ditions of the shepherds and mountaineers, their super- stitions and emotions, as he knows art, archaeology, and eroticism. The first act is a description of the be- trothal of the son of a brutal shepherd to a simple girl with whom he is not particularly in love. At the ceremony of betrothal the daughter of Jorio, who is suspected to have evil powers, claims protection from certain shepherds who had designs upon her. The first impulse of the joyous party was to cast her out, but when the betrothed young man was about to do so he saw behind her his lustful desire presented to his eyes in the guise of an angel, which made him hesitate, and the daughter of Jorio was allowed to re- main. In the next act he is seen as her lover. He quarrels about her with his father and kills him. The parricide's punishment is to be sewed into a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and a monkey and cast into the sea. The daughter of Jorio comes to the rescue and convinces the people that she is the real criminal. Eros is unconquerable. In "Francesca di Rimini/ ' a historical play filled with erudite archaeological details, he displays a knowl- edge of the thirteenth century and of the customs of the time which has never been excelled save by his- torical writers. It is a picture of war and bloodshed, of treachery and accusation. The central theme is the love of Francesca and Paolo. They may be taken as the typical human beings of the thirteenth-century Italy, fond of luxury and beautiful things but savage in their reactions. Perhaps Francesca is one of the best feminine figures that D'Annunzio has ever drawn. GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 63 In 1904 there appeared two volumes entitled " Praises of the Sky, the Sea, the Earth and of Heroes.' ' After that period his tragedies, "The Light under the Bushel," "The Ship," "Fedra," and "The Mystery of San Sebastian" appeared in French, and soon he adopted France as his home, having previously pub- lished a spiritual autobiography of eight thousand four hundred lines entitled "Laus Vitae," in which he sum- marizes the motives of his past and lays the basis of his new inspiration. D'Annunzio's war poems have all been inspired with the belief that Italy's future lies on the sea. It is much to be regretted that they have not yet been col- lected into a single volume. When it is done he will not unlikely be recognized as the most legitimate of Pindar's descendants. Undoubtedly he will want them to be the conspicuous, permanent wreath on his tomb. The Libyan War inspired him to the production of his noblest war poetry, "Canzoni della Gesta d'Oltremare" ("Songs of Achievements across the Sea"). In the "Canzoni di Mario Bianco" he foresaw the beginning of a new era for Italy, and he forecast the aspirations and promises of the third Italy. His "Canzone del Quarnaro" describes the raid of the three Italian torpedo-boats on the Buccari, a few miles to the southeast of Fiume. It is short and forceful. The introductory "beffa" describes the raid in detail. D'Annunzio is inordinately fond of using Christian imagery, and he reverts to it here in the distribution of his little tricolor flags, which has a mystic import. "It is a true eucharistic sacrament, the closest and most complete communion of the spirit with beautiful Italy. There is no need of consecrating words; the 64 IDLING IN ITALY tricolor wafer was converted through our faith into the living beauty of our country. We are purified, we are sundered from the shore and from our daily habits, separated from the land and all vulgar cares, from our homes and from all useless idleness, from profane love and all base desires; we are immune from the thought of return." The "Cantico per Pottava della Vittoria" is a wish fulfilment for him. As the boat enters the Quarnaro and runs up the coast of Istria it is, for D'Annunzio, the guarantor of the treaty of London, and he sees all the cities and islands of this coast restored to Italy, and these cities and all the places hallowed by the war join in the paean of triumph. In " Songs of Achievements across the Sea" D'An- nunzio established an incontestable claim to be the great inspiring poet, even the prophet, of his genera- tion in Italy, and he produced work which has not been surpassed, but he was still the poet only, singer of the deeds of others, in which he had no share himself. The contrast between his pretensions and his achieve- ments made the affectations of his early years appear ridiculous to many people, and tended to obscure the true value of his work. He was still seeking and the years that followed in Paris showed that he had dis- covered no new world to explore, but when Italy joined the Allies he suddenly found himself. All the brooding sense of incomplete achievement of other days vanished in a moment. The speeches and addresses that he delivered between May 4 and 25, 1915, showed that he had been preparing for what he knew would be "The Day" for him. It was widely believed in Italy in 1917 and 1918 that GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 65 on the evening of May 4, 1915, when D'Annunzio addressed a meeting at Quarto to commemorate an anniversary of Garibaldi's departure with his faithful thousand to deliver Sicily and Naples from the Bour- bon yoke, and a few days later when he addressed them in the Costanzi Theatre in Rome and then went with the enormous crowd to ring the bell of the Campi- doglio, the signal was given for the declaration of war against Austria and Germany. The last books of D'Annunzio, illustrating his new attitude toward life, are "La Leda senza-cigno" ("Leda without the Swan"), "Per la piu grande Italia" ("For Greater Italy"), "La Beffa di Buccari" ("Buccari's Joke"), "LaRiscossa" ("The Rescue"), "Bestetti e Tiiminelli" ("Italy and Death"), "Contro Uno e contro Tutti" ("Against One and against All"), and a series of volumes under the title of "The Archives of Icarius," which are all concerned with incidents in the Great War. It is too soon to attempt to guess the pedestal that posterity will allot Gabriele D'Annunzio in the gallery of fame. The committee that will do it will estimate his qualifications of lyric poet and Hellenic dramatist — perhaps as warrior. D'Annunzio is a poet who abounds in lyrical ecstacies. His style is the most remarkable thing about him. He describes armor, architecture, archaeology like an ex- pert. He knows the dynamic point of view. He knows how to depict dramatic situations. His per- sonages are ail living personages. He is concerned with the neurotic, decadent, hectic, temperamental type of human beings. All his characters have a love of beauty. He is the true decadent of the nineteenth- 66 IDLING IN ITALY century literature, to whom the decadent French sym- bolists cannot hold a candle. After he had sucked the luscious orange of Italy dry and eaten of its pomegranates to satiety; after he had exhausted sensation in the search for sensation and he could no longer hope for stimulation from vision, from image, from sound, from color; when the nets of Eros were so lacerated and worn from having been dragged upon the rocks and crags of life; when Italian food, though appetizingly spiced and washed down with rare vintage of the Castelli Romani, would no longer nourish him, he abandoned his native land and went to France. His writings while in France were like those of a man who is dominated by a dementia following a protracted delirium, and as he emerged from this dementia he published a pietistic piece called "The Contemplation of Death." It seems to have been suggested to him by the death of the poet Pascoli, for whom he professed an admiration, but more par- ticularly by Adolfo Bermond, whom he had met after he went to France and who apparently had been able to depict the beauties of humility so that they were recognizable to D'Annunzio. In his fatigued, emo- tional, and enfeebled mental state he asked himself whether humility was not more desirable than pride, love not stronger than hate, spiritual aristocracy more ennobling than aristocracy of blood, of money, of brain, of privilege. In this state of mock humility he wrote : "I always feel above me the presence of the sacrifice of Christ. I see now that the glory of my life is not in the beauty of my possessions. I have never felt so miserable and at the same time so powerful. Never GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 67 since I lived have I had within me an instinct, a need so deep and so storming. I am aware that a part of my being, maybe the best part, is deeply asleep within me." But soon this spiritual awakening was throttled by the influence of Nietzsche. "What will become of me if I surrender wholly to the Saviour? Surely I want the world to know if in my life, filled with base instincts, there comes the moment of changing. Even if my glory be destroyed I will not be a prisoner to the worse that speaks within me." It was from that hour that he decided to be the Garibaldi of the third Italy. He would then be another Gabriel standing in the pres- ence of God and sent to speak to them and show them glad tidings. It was a strange awakement that D'Annunzio had when he went to Rome in the early '90's. Perhaps it was before that time that he encountered " L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles de Ruysbroeck V Admirable," and later "La Sagesse et la Destined," and he absorbed some of its aesthetic mysticism. He realized that it was another variety of search for wisdom because it is happiness, and he began to portray it in his poetry and tragedies. From the day he began to write he accustomed himself to take as it pleased him from others' writings, and not only lines and paragraphs but subjects, movements, cadences, thoughts, and images which determined the character and decided the nature of the production. Italian critics have taken the trouble to return to the original creators the borrowed constituents of some of his productions, "L'Asiatico," for instance; and that which then re- mained was the caressing modulation of the verses. 68 IDLING IN ITALY When his romances appeared in French many of the passages taken bodily from Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, de Maupassant, Peladan, de Goncourt, Huysmans, and many others were prudently suppressed. But no one can fail to recognize that he read these authors with a keen eye, a note-book by his side. But he has known how to use what he borrowed. The day came when the conduct of a corrupt people in a decadent fictitious world no longer sufficed to divert him; having drunk from the poisoned springs of lust not only to satiety but to disgust, he, like his prototype of Huysmans's creation, "Des Esseintes," the Thebaide raffinSe of "A Rebours," must hide himself away far from the world, in some retreat where he might deaden the dis- cordant sounds of the rumblings of inflexible life, as one deadens the street with straw where an important or beloved one is sick. This retreat was Paris and there we must leave him making scenic plays and erudite verse for a Russian ballerina, and working out his destiny in contemplation of death and in planning the selection of warriors for Valhalla. We are not concerned with his conduct or with his morals. We are concerned with his activities to divert and instruct us, and the influence that his efforts had upon the people of his time. He wrote artistically per- fect novels; his poetry is the highest form of lyric ex- pression; he made his dramas the revivification of the elements of Greek tragedy; and he strove to prove that Eros was unconquerable by priest, sage, or war- rior. Now, with the world in ferment, they are the only earnest for our acceptation of his assurance that he can shape the fate of Italy more acceptably than its statesmen. GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 69 Before the Great War he had practically passed from the stage of letters. That epochal occurrence resurrected him. We can wait to hear what posterity will say of him. CHAPTER IV THE FUTURIST SCHOOL OF ITALIAN WRITERS The Italians are a people of great emotional com- plexity, displaying a strange mixture of idealism and realism. They are at present engaged in constructing an edifice which shall be the admiration of the world for all time, to wit, a third Italy. Naturally the de- signers, the architects, the builders and the prospective inhabitants hope that it will be more ideal, more com- modious, more adapted to its purposes than its prede- cessors. To the sympathetic observer, however, they appear to limit themselves narrowly to old building material. There is nothing which mirrors the individual and composite mind of a country so illuminatingly as its literature. The man craving for power prefers the allegiance of a country's song-writers to that of its lawgivers. That a tremendous change has taken place to-day, not only in the songs of Italy but in all her literature, must be admitted. This change has been in process for a generation and is going on with increasing rapidity. Italian literature is now going through "a phase quite as distinct as that which characterized the romanticism initiated by Manzoni and which ended with the advent of Carducci. It would be difficult to find a word which would adequately express the spirit of it — perhaps the most descriptive one is protest The new writers protest against the social, political, and religious ac- 70 THE FUTURIST SCHOOL OF WRITERS 71 ceptances of the past fifty years. They object to the acceptance of alleged facts substantiated only by tra- dition; they refuse adherence to teachings, doctrines, modes of thought and expression merely because they are old; they reject dogma originating in self -constituted authority, no matter how long or by whom it has been sanctioned and privileged, no matter how securely rooted. They will have none of the conventionalism which is out of harmony with the present conditions of life and with the present yearning for liberty. They stand against the teaching that the flesh must be pun- ished in order that the soul may be purified, as they do against all slavish stereotypy, moss-covered con- vention, and archaic laws. They claim instead that the best of life is to be found in purposeful action; that life should be speeded up, and that every one should be encouraged to live fully for the advantage that may come to himself, to those to whom he is beholden, and to the world. They advocate the strenuous life and invite the new and unforeseen, while urging exploration of untrodden fields and especially determination of things called inaccessible and unrealizable. They advocate equal life for men and women, and seek to give to such words as "patriotism" and " idealism" a fuller significance, so that the former shall not mean the heroic idealization of commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a people but a love of liberty and a knowledge, recog- nition, and appreciation of what other people and other countries are attempting and accomplishing; and that the latter may be applied to the affairs of life and not to the affairs of the imagination. This movement, in Italy, was begun by a group of 72 IDLING IN ITALY men who called themselves Futurists and, if that name can be dissociated from the connotation that is given to it when applied to art, I see no objection to it. It has been influenced by the French Symbolists of the preceding generation, Baudelaire, de Goncourt, Villiers de risle-Adam, Mallarme, Verlaine, Huysmans, Rim- baud, whose work so profoundly influenced the course of French literature. Like this school the self-styled futuristic writers of Italy revolt against rhetoric and against tradition. Therefore they reject equally the ardent classicism of Carducci and D'Annunzio's de- cadent blend of idealism and realism, the crass, slavish Gallicism of Brocchi, the Scandinavian genuflections of Bracco and the Shavian imitations of Pirandello. In protest against all these they seek the full liberty of the written word, as the evangel of socialism seeks the liberty of the individual. Not from other writers but from reality itself, or from the depths of their own imaginations, they have received a vision and this vision they demand the right to evoke in others, by what words or what images they will. The art of expression should be speeded up, abbreviated, and epitomized, while the love of profound essentials is cultivated. To borrow from England's singer of ma- terialistic grandeur and promise, they "... want the. world much more the world; Men to men and women to women — all Adventure, courage, instinct, passion, power." And in addition, as true Futurists, they want us to have constantly in mind what happened to Lot's wife when she looked back to see how high the flames rose over Sodom and Gomorrah. THE FUTURIST SCHOOL OF WRITERS 73 The leaders of the Futuristic movement in Italy were Guillaume ApoUinaire, then editor of Les Soir6es de Paris, and F. T. Marinetti of Milan. One thing can be said of Signor Marinetti, the pope of Futurism, which no one, I fancy, will deny. He is the most amusing writer in Italy. His idea of beauty is a massive building of concrete in course of construction with the scaffoldings lovingly embracing it. His idea of ugliness is a curve of any kind — save in the feminine body. "Parole in liberta," words free from syntactical shackles are the words with which we shall fight the battle of the future. They are the dynamite which will blow asunder literary Monte Testaccio, in which are buried the useless literary labors of his forebears but which shall also prepare the soil for a fertility that it has never possessed. Dynamism is the master-key. No artificer of the past or wizard of the future can construct a lock that it will not readily open, and as for political manacles they are as fragile as rubber bands when confronted with the doctrines of his new book, "Democrazia Futurista." Signor Marinetti has no delusions of grandeur; he only pretends that he has. Nor is he the victim of a mental disorder which is characterized by loss of in- sight and megalomania. It is gratifying to be able to make this diagnosis of one of Italy 's literary leaders. It offsets the diagnosis of general paresis made of Woodrow Wilson by one of Mr. Marinetti's fellow citizens and published with such elaborate attempts of substantiation in the Giornale di Italia. He merely overestimates his intellectual and emotional possessions, but he says many clever things and makes some proph- ecies that are likely to come through. The last Eu- 74 IDLING IN ITALY ropean ruler who talked and acted as Signor Marinetti does got a bad spill, as is now fairly widely known. In reality, Marinetti is a Bolshevik who amuses him- self behind a mask, but not all the principles of Bol- shevism are bad by any means, nor even are they new. The most telling way of making a statement is to over- state it. The most successful way of getting a bad smell out of a house is to burn the house; then, if you have a good plan and plenty of time, money, and building material, you can construct yourself a house free from bad odors. However, there are other ways of making it a very livable and beautiful house, but why one should object to Mr. Marinetti's building his own house his own way is difficult to understand, unless in so doing it he makes himself such a nuisance to his neighbors that they cannot tolerate him. So far he has not done that, but when he joins force with Signor Bruno Corra, as he has in "LTsola dei Baci" ("The Island of Kisses")* he comes perilously near it. Apollinaire, a Pole whose real name was Kostro- witski, was born in Rome and lived in Italy until late childhood, when he went to France, where he remained until his death in 1919. He had a tremendous influ- ence upon many of the young symbolist writers of Italy, comparable to that exercised by Stephane Mal- larme* on the young writers in the '80's and Ws. One of them wrote at the time of his death: "Hero of thought and of art, idealist, philosopher, genuine poet, prophetic theorist and critic, sublime soul, comrade, joyous, generous, he was also in the last years of his life a hero of humanity." The most important figure of the school has been Giovanni Papini, who has gathered about him in THE FUTURIST SCHOOL OF WRITERS 75 Florence a coterie which includes Ardengo Soffici, the painter, critic, and novelist; Aldo Palazzeschi, poet; Alberto Savinio, wanderer, musician, and litterateur; and a long list of names more or less ancillary to Marinetti, some of which I shall mention later. Papini, who is considered at length in another chapter, does not admit that he is a Futurist. As he puts it, he did not marry Futurism; it was for him one of many intellectual adventures, a mistress that left an indelible impression on him. He simply passed through Futurism's influence and at the same time gave momentum to the best of that school, to Palazze- schi, Govoni, Boccioni, Folgore. Then he proceeded alone, after having become persuaded that it had be- come too popular and consequently less refined and se- lect, and after the hazardous and aristocratic little group had become a species of low, bigoted democracy into which any one could enter who dangled a rosary of incomprehensible words. He left it in company with Soffici and Palazzeschi and soon Carra and others followed his example. Thus, on the death of Boccioni, the first generation of Futuristic writers reformed or disappeared. Then there are many young men carrying the banner of literature in Italy to-day who do not call themselves Futurist, and whose writings contain less of the grotesque, which has been made familiar to Italian readers by Marinetti's "Zang Tumb Tumb." They are men of the stamp of Antonio Beltramelli, Mario Mariani, Luigi Morselli, Gino Rocca, Salvator Gotta, Lorenzo Montano, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Raffale Calzini, Enrico Cavacchioli, Alfredo Grilli, and a score of others who not alone have ideas but who keenly 76 IDLING IN ITALY sense the composite world-thought, who believe that the era of Big Business will reach its apogee when it weds Big Justice, and who know how to express their ideas with explosive rhythmic eloquence and with distinction of form. It would be presumptuous on my part to attempt to select the winners entered in the great sweepstakes of literary fame in Italy, with no qualification for prophecy or judgment than a love of literature and a lifelong ardent consumption of it. I shall, therefore, content myself with brief discussion of the work of some of these younger writers with the particular end in view of'suggesting to others the pleasure uld have made 260 IDLING IN ITALY him acceptable. The sentimentalist is often guided in his decisions and in his conduct relative to others by the fear that, if he apprises the individual of the reason why he no longer wishes to keep up business or pro- fessional relations with him, the individual thus treated will devote some time afterward to tarnishing the lustre of his halo. The sentimentalist fears especially the criticism, dis- paragement, and possibly one might say the malignity of those from whom he chooses to separate after they have been weighed and found wanting. It is not that he fears that injury will be done him, because not in- frequently his career is so successful that it can with- stand an enormous amount of disparagement and criticism without detrimental impression. The dis- paragement of such individuals can do him no harm save in the humiliation to his pride when it is brought home to him that he has not been able to make the leopard change his spots. Self-interest is the sub- conscious motive that often leads to a display of sentimentality. The sentimentalist realizes that alle- gations of merit and of capacity are " things that are graceful in a friend's mouth but blushing in a man's own," and as such praise is the breath of his nostrils he will go to great lengths to achieve its accomplish- ment. But, though he may be deceived by flattery, there are others who know that "on ne trouve jamais Texpression d'un sentiment qui Ton n'a pas; Tesprit grimace et le style aussi." He is the easy prey for those who appeal to his vanity or to his susceptibility to flattery, to advance their own or others' projects and interests, and he may be led into doing things which his sober judgment tells him are not desirable, SENTIMENTALITY AND THE MALE 261 because he feels that he must not run the risk of lower- ing himself in the estimate of the individual from whom he has accepted adulation, reverence, or adoration. When the male sentimentalist habituates himself to this worshipful attitude from the other sex he becomes covered with points which Achilles had only immedi- ately above the heel. The sex which has long been popularly known as the weaker has an inherited or acquired code of morality which permits them to make demands of the sentimental man which a mere man, unless base, would scorn, and now that the sex has been emancipated we begin to feel that they should come out in the open and play fair. If they want to rely for their successes upon the weapons that have been vouchsafed them heretofore, they should not have the privileges which they are asking for and receiving to-day. Heaven knows no one is more desir- ous that they should have what they ask for in that direction than I am, but they should not use their sex quality to take an unfair advantage. Thus oftentimes one who merits the designation of " pillar of strength and tower of fire" becomes a reed in the emotional wind that blows from the designing woman. She may not be designing in a malignant sense; she may merely enjoy the display of power. It is remarkable what a sentimentalist will put up with in the shape of indig- nity and inefficiency rather than run the risk of being impaired in the esteem of one who has this kind of influence over him. Emerson, one of our deepest thinkers, said: "Man is the will and woman is the sen- timent. In this ship of humanity will is the rudder and sentiment the sail; when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only the masked sail." 262 IDLING IN ITALY There is nothing more Jove-like than virility and continency, but a man saturated with sentimentality produces a sensation akin to that which the child experiences when she finds her doll is stuffed with sawdust. Sentiment in a man is like scent in a rose. It is the finishing touch to perfection; when it is deficient it thrills one no more than the painted flower; when it is excessive the heaviness of its enervating odor is op- pressive. CHAPTER XVI THE PLAY INSTINCT IN CHILDREN Italy's greatest recent patriot is Cesare Battisti, who suffered martyrdom for love of his native land. He was an Austrian subject, professor of biology and geography in the University of Trent and a deputy in the Austrian House of Parliament. In the beginning of the war he returned to Italy to fight against the country of his adoption and to favor the fortunes of his native land, and his efforts were crowned with great success. He entered the Italian Army as a lieu- tenant of the Alpini, and in 1916 fell into the hands of the Austrians, who quickly and cruelly despatched him by the most barbarous methods that they could conceive. Streets and piazzas have been named for him, hospitals and monuments have been raised in his honor, and his name is known to every man, woman, and child in the kingdom. But it is not of Battisti that I would write, but to record a train of thought that was initiated by the sight of the orphans who were occupying the building which Italy's most distinguished physician, Ettore Marchiafava, aided by generous friends of the sick poor, has taken over for a tuberculosis hospital, and which will be called after Cesare Battisti. There were about two hundred girls, ranging in age from six to fourteen, in the charge of an order of nuns. The building is situated on a hill in the outskirts of Rome known as Monte Verde, which is the southern con- 263 264 IDLING IN ITALY tinuation of the Janiculum. In former days it was a palatial villa belonging to some dignitary of the church and latterly church property. It commands a mag- nificent view of Rome, of the Tiber, of the Campagna, the Castelli Romani, and the Alban Hills. When I arrived the children were in the grounds about the house and more or less segregated in a broad walk or alley lined by trees which led from the street to the villa. They were walking up and down in twos or threes or singly, apparently without other objective or display of desire than to walk. They looked like children of many nationalities, healthy and clean; but, more than that, they looked happy, contented, satis- fied. As I passed amongst them, nearly every one greeted me with a smile and "Buon giorno" There was no show of embarrassment, shyness, bashfulness, or artificiality. I looked over the grounds of the place, several acres, and saw not the slightest sign of games, swings, play- grounds, sand-piles, or other feature with which chil- dren divert themselves or are diverted in other lands, I went through the house from cellar to garret, and rarely have I seen an inhabited building with fewer signs of habitation. The dormitories contained long rows of beds with no sign of tables, chairs, stands, comfort-bags — nothing save the beds. The refectory was equally barren. The schoolroom was desolation itself — benches, long desks, and a solitary blackboard. The only indication that anything was taught save that which could be imparted by word of mouth was a typewriting machine. Examine as carefully as I might, I wasn't able to detect the smallest object for the diversion, entertainment, distraction, occupation THE PLAY INSTINCT IN CHILDREN 265 of the little ones that the place was utilized to harbor, to nurture, to develop, and to instruct. When I re- turned to terra firma, there they were, walking up and down the alley as they were when I went in. A gentle- eyed sister was among the groups of the smaller ones, but they seemed not to need care. They were self- sufficient. For the first time I felt the sensation of oppression in the presence of a crowd of joyous children. I felt they were in a prison-house narrower and more restrict- ing than that which closes in upon the budding man, and I went away without thought of Cesare Battisti, but big with solicitude for these lusty young beings whose best and most potential quality, the play in- stinct, was being stultified, or at least not cultivated. I marvelled that the country which made the most constructive contribution to child pedagogy of the nineteenth century fails to see or to realize that the most potent, directly God-sent possession of a child is its imagery or fancy, which externalizes itself in every child in the desire to play — to play parent, con- struction, warfare, games, or ape the activities of their elders. The explanation cannot be that Italy is ig- norant of the cultivation of the child's instinct for play in other countries or of the immense provision that is made to enhance it both in public and in private life. I can readily understand that there might be wilful opposition to it in church institutions, as its elaborate display is considered inimical to that hu- mility which is the essence of the Christian religion. Punish the flesh, have a contempt and a disdain for any of its clamorings, treat it as if it were a vessel unworthy of its sacred cargo the soul, scourge it and 266 IDLING IN ITALY humiliate it, and you will find favor in His sight. It is extraordinary and inexplicable that man should feel himself free to suggest to himself and to others that a suppression, even abnegation, of God-given instincts which are as much an integral part of the genus homo as his speech capacity, is necessary in order that the individual should find favor in God's eyes and be worthy of reward when he is called to join Him. It seems so much more consistent with reason that the species were provided with instincts that they might be utilized, and therefore that the duty of the teacher and the guide is to foster these instincts, to develop them, and to direct them toward the channels where they may be utilized to the advantage of the individual, the community, and the state. If it were only the church that displayed an opposition to the develop- ment of the play instinct in children I should not con- cern myself particularly with it, as I am not inclined to take issue with the church, either in its propaganda or in its teachings. I consider that it takes an unfair advantage of infants and children, but I solace my indignation with the thought that when the child comes to man's estate mentally he is free to liberate himself from its enthralments and inhibitions. It may be said that it has shaped his mental processes, activities, and inclinations to such purpose that he does not see straight, and that accusation is true, pro- viding they have sterilized his mind to such a degree that he is no longer capable of constructive thought. There is no doubt that they often bring about such mental eunuchoidismus, but it is probable that the great majority of those thus sterilized would have been dead-wood in the stream of evolutionary progress had THE PLAY INSTINCT IN CHILDREN 267 they been left intact. But insensitiveness to the child's needs is not confined to parochial schools and other church institutions where children are harbored and taught. In Italy it is displayed in nearly every public and private institution where the young are segregated for purposes of instruction and mainte- nance. I would not be understood to say that there are not playgrounds of any kind connected with Italian schools, but the few that exist are scarcely worthy of the name. The plain truth of the matter is that the play instinct has been thwarted so long in the Italian that it doesn't seem to exist any more. One of the things that strikes the stranger who penetrates far enough into family life to permit him the opportunity of observation is that the parent doesn't play with his children as does the Anglo-Saxon, and children do not play with each other. I cannot conceive that the child, left to itself, does not "Hold unconscious intercourse with beauty Old as creation," and give evidence of it and of the activity of its de- veloping mind which reveals itself constructively in that which we call play. But the observation and experience of children in Italy lead me to believe that when they grow up and recall "Those recollected hours that have the charm Of visionary things, those lovely forms And sweet sensations that throw back their life, And almost make remotest infancy A visible scene, on which the sun is shining," 268 IDLING IN ITALY they do not expose a treasure-house in which are stored the recollections of the most envied times of their lives. The little villino that I occupy is cared for by a couple whose only child is a little girl of eight. From my window I survey her activities and I have never yet seen her in play, "Seen no little plan of chart or fragment From her beam of human life Shaped by herself with newly learned art." When I look out in the morning she is likely to be sitting outside the gate as if awaiting something to transpire that would be worthy of observation, atten- tion, or participation. When I return in the middle of the day and again in the evening and when Sundays or other times I am in my rooms for a protracted period, I see her ever busily engaged in doing nothing. The only imaginative or emotional activity that I have ever witnessed her display is that sometimes I find her humming and she always smiles and greets me most affably. At times I see other children make a visit to her, but it is obviously a ceremonious one, for there are no shrieks or yells, no tumbling or rolling, no scampering or chattering, none of that display of phys- ical vitality and joy of living that lambs or colts or calves or even puppies or kittens make. They are like a miniature group of Giacondas, older than the rocks upon which they sit, who have tasted all the joys to satiety. The doll that I gave her has apparently been put away, not at all unlikely with a scapular or holy beads. At least, I have never seen her with it in THE PLAY INSTINCT IN CHILDREN 269 her arms since the day she received it. There is no sign of miniature wheelbarrow or shovel or sandpile, no little wooden geegee, no bicycle or miniature loco- motive, no blocks or other material from which to construct a castle or a kitchen, no indication what- soever that she attempts to portray any of the vagrant thoughts or fleeting fancies that arise in her budding mind. When I go on a Sunday to the little villages in the Campagna or in the Castelli Romani to which the proletariat repair with their families in villeggia- tura, I see hundreds of children, but never once have I seen any of them playing, nor are they noisy and boisterous. If they are clamorous and restless, it is for food or for appeasement of some other physical need. Even the little boys do not play in the streets. Their one source of amusement is for a number of them to gather around a pile of small stones used for repair of the road and to divert themselves by hurling them at one another when a carriage or an automobile is not passing, at which time they concentrate their ef- forts on attempts to slay the occupants of these vehi- cles with the deadly missiles at hand. On the Janiculum where I live there is a paradise for children, a little park with the roaring, splashing fountain of St. Paolo at one end of it and the entrance to the broad, shaded driveway that traverses the Janic- ulum to St. Onofrio at the other. On either side of this drive are broad lawns interspersed with flower- beds and shaded with most seductive trees, amongst which is Tasso's oak, now fallen into such a state of decrepitude that it has to have artificial support and braces. The place is often alive with children, pain- fully decorous and silent. They often remind me of i 270 IDLING IN ITALY Millet's "Man with the Hoe," bowed down with the weight of ages. Not infrequently I meet in the morn- ing and in the evening whole troops of children going and returning from the accessible fields of Monte Verde, always lined up like soldiers, two abreast, and the only manifestation of externalized emotion I have ever seen in them is that occasionally their keepers — priest, nun, or sour-visaged guardian — permit them to break into song — patriotic anthem or lyric wail. It is notorious that games play no such part in the diversion of the adult Italian as they do in the coun- tries peopled by our own race. Golf, tennis, football, cricket, baseball are practically unknown except as they have been established by foreigners for their own use. Naturally they have attracted some Italians, but there is no general interest in them. Contests of endurance, such as bicycle races and rowing, they have, and horse-racing has a certain vogue, but chiefly because it facilitates taking chances on the winner. This is the more remarkable, for when they do go in for games they often excel, showing aptitude, endur- ance, and daring. There is no nationality that com- pares with them in their riding, for instance. It is not true to say that they do not play games. The Spanish game of ball known as pelota is played in some centres where the jeunesse doree segregate, and another game of ball called pallone is played a little, but with no en- thusiasm, and it arouses no considerable interest. In fact, nothing included under the head of sport plays a great role in Italy. Fortunately it is being en- couraged, and within a generation we may confidently anticipate a decided change. It would, of course, be ridiculous to say that they do not shoot and fish. You THE PLAY INSTINCT IN CHILDREN 271 often encounter in tramping through the country a man with a gun on his shoulder, but usually he is a pot-hunter, and now and then your rambles bring you face to face with a Nimrod, but in nine cases out of ten he likewise is animated by the desire for succulent food. On superficial examination it seems extraordinary that this state of affairs should exist in a country which for many centuries seemed to have had its chief en- joyment in murder, sense-gratification, games, and contests of courage, strength, and endurance. No one can read the history of the days of Roman supremacy without being struck with the fact that the chief amusement of the populace of those days was play, display of strength, skill, dexterity, and inventiveness. Archaeologists and others interested in unearthing and interpreting archaic remains tell us that the aphorism that there is nothing new under the sun is true so far as games are concerned, and I expect any day to hear that they have disinterred a golf course at Ostia, a diamond or a football field at Salerno. However, after reflection, it occurs to me that there are many reasons why the Italians, young and old, do not play spon- taneously and intentionally, or as naturally and pleasurably as those of other nations. It is easy enough to understand why all play ceased in those days of intellectual apathy, artistic sterility, and emotional decay which, beginning with the fourth century A. D., continued for nearly a thousand years. I have never looked into the matter with sufficient care to be able to say whether or not there was a renaissance of the play instinct or any elaborate and wide-spread manifestation of it beginning with the fourteenth cen- tury, but my impression is that there was. We have 272 IDLING IN ITALY records of tournaments and jousts and games of various kinds in certain cities of Italy, such as Salerno; there still exist the physical features or foundations of such play. Any one who has read Italian history until the successful movement of nationality of 1870 will not be astonished that play in any form did not have a great vogue during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies. The people were too busy devising plans to outwit their neighbors and to get possession of their lands and their treasures to have time for play. The Italian nature or temperament is not favor- able to development of the play instinct. The Italian likes to act, or to display histrionic possession, more than anything else; it has often been remarked that they are born actors, and not only do they produce more great actors and actresses than any other coun- try but you see more finished and artistic acting in Italy than in any other country of the world. They are devoted to mimicry, adepts in pantomime, and their " marionettes" have reached a high degree of artistic development. As for the cinema, they go to it with the ardor of a lover to his mistress. The theatre and gambling is the Italian idea of diversion, relaxation, and amusement. The display and satisfaction of the play instinct spell work, oftentimes most laborious work carefully planned and elaborately carried out. The success- ful pursuit of games of all sorts requires not only work but oftentimes protracted physical training and pro- found physical effort. The Italians do not take kindly to them. In the south of Italy there are six months of the year and often more when no one is keenly dis- posed to active physical effort and at no time in the THE PLAY INSTINCT IN CHILDREN 273 year is there that atmospheric incitation to physical activity that exists in England or in our own country. It may well be that children of the South do not take kindly to play because of the great and protracted heat, during which they are taught to remain within doors several hours in the middle of the day, and children of the lower classes are often obliged to work during the cool hours. Italian children mature very early, and the emo- tional disequilibrium that comes with the supremacy of a new internal secretion makes them self-conscious, bashful, retiring, and inimical to play. I am not in- clined to lay much stress on any of these occurrences as an explanation for the apathy for play shown by Italian children. Jewish children, who live in coun- tries quite as hot as Italy, and who certainly mature as early as Italian children, are naturally playful, and not only playful but inventive of games. If one reads the biographies of some of the literary Hebrews of America who have set forth in print their renuncia- tions and their successes, it will be seen that despite their most unfavorable surroundings the play instinct in childhood — which, after all, is the imaginative fac- ulty — is often very strong. Another thing that is very curious in Italy is that children of both sexes do not play together. It is true that no particular effort is made to keep them apart when they are very young, but there is no more un- usual sight in Italy than a boy from ten to fourteen with a girl of the same age, unless it is to see a young man with a young woman who is not his wife. There is no open and fraternizing relationship between the sexes. If you say in Italy that a young woman is the 274 IDLING IN ITALY arnica or friend of a man, you mean what is signified in French by chere amie. In certain parts of Italy, and particularly in the South, the position of women in society and in relationship to men savors very much of the Oriental. Every one is agreed that play does two things for the young child — it promotes its physical welfare and it facilitates its budding imagination. More than this, it contributes materially to its education and, particu- larly, it develops its constructive faculties. It teaches older children and youths who participate in games of skill and control the principles of give and take, bear and forbear, and it shows them how to be victors with- out arrogance and losers without venom. It instils principles of honesty, favors frankness and directness, and generally paves the way for successful dealing with their fellows socially, commercially, and politically in mature life. When one considers the pains and money that are expended in our own country and in England to teach young people how to play, it is astonishing how apathetic the Italians have been toward the matter. My belief is that Italy is awakening to the fact that play is one of the most important factors in the devel- opment of the people, and if this war had not come on I should most likely not have had occasion to make these observations and to draw conclusions from them. I am told that a few years ago they began to have mixed schools, that is, schools where children of both sexes are assembled during school hours, and in many cities there were stadia where sports of all sorts were encouraged and fostered. There are many factors that have tended to im- THE PLAY INSTINCT IN CHILDREN 275 pede the development of play in this country and the recognition of its importance, but aside from that there is something in the Italian temperament or nature that is antipathic to the play instinct and inimical to sports. Pedagogy has recognized its im- portance but it has not succeeded in promoting and developing it. I have often wondered whether the suppression of the play instinct practically to the point of abnegation is not manifest in the energies and success of a people. Aside from the field of mechanical application as rep- resented by that in the profession of engineering, I do not know of any realm in which the Italian of the past three or four generations has signally distinguished himself. There have been poets, artists, architects, physicians, priests, statesmen, philosophers, explorers, or interpreters of life and events whose names have taken permanent places in the world. I mean to say that in this period there have been many Italians who have attained eminence and earned immortality, but there has been no one from whom an epoch dates: no Pasteur, no Deisler, no Thompson, no Devries, no Stanley, no Edison, no Langley, no Wright, no Mor- gan, no Eddy — to enumerate only a few of those that are legitimately put in the class of supermen. This paucity of genius may be no more than a coincidence, but it strikes me, nevertheless, as ex- traordinary that a country which has enjoyed free- dom as this country has for the past fifty years, has not manifested the fruits of its liberation from tyranny and oppression »uch as were manifested in France after the French Revolution, when once its devasta- tion had been cured. 276 IDLING IN ITALY If the child is father to the man, it stands to reason that indulgence and training during childhood will manifest their effect during maturity, and success in any activity of human life stands in direct relation to imagination or vision and industry. It likewise fol- lows that if we neglect to facilitate the development of the former and to develop the appetite for and form the habit of the latter during the early years of life, it is too much to expect the display of them in later years. It is quite possible, it seems to me, that the reputation for lack of directness in their dealings with the peoples of other nationalities, their circuitousness in the business affairs of life, their secrecy or lack of frankness and candor, their ceremoniousness, their failure to cement a solid friendship with other nations of Europe, may, in some measure at least, be linked up with the suppression of the play instinct in child- hood and the subservient place which they have given to women. CHAPTER XVII "IF A MAN WALKETH IN THE NIGHT, HE STUM- BLETH BUT IF HE WALKETH IN THE DAY HE SEETH THE LIGHT OF THIS WORLD" My morning walks take me the length of the Janicu- lum. In the early light of these autumn days Rome and its settings take on an expression of seductive resig- nation due largely to the clouds which rob it of that glare which is the most trying feature of summer in Rome. The clouds permit streams of light to filter through, as if from a monstrous search-light, especially over the Castelli Romani and the Alban Hills. Ordi- narily Monte Cavo is on the horizon line, but to-day, after the sun had been nearly an hour on its diurnal way, hundreds of parallel bundles of light were directed perpendicularly upon it, so that another chain of mountains came into view beyond, and the decaying villa surmounting it seemed to be in a valley atop of a mountain peak backed by other peaks. The way from my villino to St. Peter's is past the Garibaldi monu- ment, and I am well acquainted with the countenances of his generals and his guard, whose life-size busts in marble flank the monument in long, parallel rows, constituting an alley leading up to it. If their effigies do them justice, they were fine-looking, intelligent, and resolute. It takes me also past the hideous lighthouse which Argentina thrust upon the Italians, and which has been erected upon a spot from which one has peihaps 277 278 IDLING IN ITALY the most commanding view of Rome, its near and distant environment. This morning I determined that I would spend a half-hour in the Church of S. Onofrio and refresh my recollections of the frescoes of Baldassare Peruzzi and of Pinturicchio, and pay a tribute to the memory of the greatest poet of the late Renaissance, Torquato Tasso. On the side of the steps that lead down to the shoulder of the hill surmounting St. Peter's is an oak- tree, long since dead, but securely banded and spliced and propped by indestructible metal. Here, it is said, Tasso sat and contemplated, too forlorn and ill fur- ther to poetize, during those months of 1594 while he was awaiting his call to the capitol to be crowned poet laureate. When the illness to which he succumbed increased to such extent as to incapacitate him he repaired to S. Onofrio "to begin my conversation in heaven in this elevated place, and in the society of these holy fathers." It is strange enough that Tasso is a very real and living force in Italy to-day. Not only are many of his poems, and selections from them, read in the schools, but "Jerusalem Delivered" on the screen has recently had a remarkable success in Rome and in other cities of Italy. The Convent of S. Onofrio is now scarcely more than a reminder of what it was in its golden days. Long before the Italian Government had abolished the right of monasteries to hold property, and therefore delivered the death-blow to the parasitical grasp which they had upon this country, the Ospedale Bambini Gesu had taken possession of a large part of it and converted it into a work of mercy and of salvation which finds, I fancy, more favor in the eyes of people "IF A MAN WALKETH" 279 to-day than does conventual life. The church, rather impressive from without and particularly when ap- proached from below, is small and dainty and has dis- tinctly a spiritual atmosphere. It is what the Italians call molto carina. When I entered the church there was one solitary female prostrate before an image. I fancied that she had had a troubled night and had repaired to this sacrosanct environment early in the morning to purge herself of her sins and to ask forgive- ness. For a long time she remained in an attitude of profound contrition, and I was curious to see if, on arising, she displayed in feature or in form any evi- dences or manifestations of indulgence in those trans- gressions which we are taught are so offensive to the Lord. My vigil was rewarded by the sight of age, deprivation, and poverty. Had pulchritude or pas- sion ever been a part of her, all sign of them had passed; had sins of commission ever brought to her riches or the semblance of riches, she had long since forfeited them; had her transgressions been translated into fugitive pleasures, no signs of them remained. Like Tasso, she had repaired there to begin the con- versation she hoped to continue in heaven. It is much more likely, however, that she had gone to church without definite antecedent thought or determination. It seems to be as much an act of nature for women in Italy when they reach a certain age to haunt the churches as it is for their hair to turn gray. They do it quite as mechanically as they do their housework. I often doubt that there is any spiritual or emotional feeling accompanying it whatsoever. I am certain that the recitation of prayers which were learned in infancy, and which have been repeated thousands of 280 IDLING IN ITALY times without the smallest attention to the significance of the words, as children recite them, is not associated with any spiritual alteration, neither humility nor ex- altation. It is part of the meagre, barren daily life of these old women, and they get from it something which for them constitutes pleasure and satisfaction. As I sat in contemplation of the frescoes surround- ing the high altar, and which set forth the coronation of the Virgin, the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt, a middle-aged monk or priest came forward and volun- teered to draw the curtain that more light might fall upon them. He was incredibly dirty and dishevelled, and he had lost an eye, but he was gentle and simple and friendly. He told me what he knew about the frescoes; he bemoaned the evil days upon which the world had fallen, and he expressed the hope that peace and tranquillity would soon again be ours; but when I attempted to talk to him about the significance of the war and the universal awakement to man's rights that would flow from it, I found that his comments were ejaculatory and that his reflections had no root in thought or reason. It is incredible that a person so naive and so lacking in every display of intelligence, culture, and perspicacity can be a spiritual teacher or guide. Perhaps it is that faith alone is necessary that one shall satisfactorily fulfil his duties as priest. He called my attention to an oil graphite on the side walls of the chapel which had been uncovered in recent times. In early days its artistic merit or value was not appreciated and it had been covered over with other pastels or paintings thought to be more appropriate or more fitting. The composition is a figure standing in what seems to be a square box and "IF A MAN WALKETH" 281 on either side a number of closely massed masculine figures, each one having a different facial expression, one of astonishment, another of incredulity, another of humility and satisfaction. It depicted the Resur- rection of Christ, my little friend thought, but when he saw a figure outside the box that resembled Christ, he thought it must be the resurrection of Lazarus, and then in the most childlike way he remarked that the figure in the box seemed to be a female one, and as that didn't seem to fit in with the resurrection of Lazarus he gave it up. I fancy that he had never read that when Martha and Mary made their success- ful appeal Lazarus had been dead four days, and that after Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me," Lazarus came forth bound hand and foot with grave-clothes and his face was bound about with a napkin. These accoutre- ments of the grave would successfully conceal sex, even from the eyes of a sacerdotal Sherlock Holmes. I persuaded him to take me into the convent that I might see Leonardo's lovely fresco of the Virgin and the Child, and standing before it he spoke of the sweetness of the mother's expression and of the dig- nity and nobility of her pose and carriage in a way that made me forget his ignorance and his unattrac- tive exterior. In the northwest chapel of the little church is the grave and monument of Tasso. There is nothing par- ticularly meritorious about the monument, and there is nothing even suggestive of poetry. The effigy rep- resents the poet in the costume of a Spanish cavalier as he appeared at the age of his greatest activity. The chapel opposite is a jungle of frescoes depicting scenes 282 IDLING IN ITALY in the life of S. Onofrio, who lived like an animal in the desert for more than half a century, and who, for thus outraging nature's laws, was brought to Rome to teach others how to live acceptably in God's eyes. After he had gone to his final reward, which we trust was the opposite of a desert, the church in its wisdom made him a saint. I did not attempt to visualize the desert-dweller or his activities as I descended the steps that lead from this lovely hill to the Tiber, for I was soon lost in con- templation of a view with which I was very familiar but which now presents itself at a different angle, for I had never been down this well-worn stone staircase. The little street led first past the fine old Salviati Palace, a vast, massive structure built apparently to provide a sumptuous piano nobile and a great impres- sive court. It has, I suppose, a definite architectural beauty, but to me it looks merely massive, cumber- some, and overgrown. It reminds of nothing so much as of a lady whose figure, once worthy of admira- tion, had become altered by the adipose that is fatal to beauty. From here it is but a few steps to the Villa Farnesina, with its priceless possessions from Raphael's hand, but my way leads me across the rickety iron suspension bridge immediately in front of the Salviati Palace, to cross which one must pay a penny. From the middle of this bridge one gets a stunning view of the Castle of S. Angelo and the Holy Ghost Hospital. The latter, an enormous Renaissance structure, accommodates upward of five thousand pa- tients. It looks to-day much as illustrations of it show that it looked five hundred years ago. In those days it was the last cry in hospitals, but it is far from "IF A MAN WALKETH" 283 that to-day. In fact, as a hospital it leaves much to be desired. I go there sometimes to visit the library, which has one of the largest collections of incunabuli in the world. As you look over it from the end of the Ponte Ferro, the dome of St. Peter's seems as if it were suspended from the heaven and its marvellous symmetry is most impressive. When you look at the dome of St. Peter's and the church together, there is something a little incongruous. I do not attempt to define it, but it is the same thing that you get when you look at a man whose hat doesn't fit. After crossing the Tiber I strike into the heart of the densely populated city through a succession of narrow streets without sidewalks, and flanked on either side with never-ending little shops, now and then crossing a piazza which gives space and light to some massive mediaeval palace. But none of them solicits me to stop until the Palazzo Braschi comes into view. I have seen its wondrous staircase, with its many columns of Oriental granite, so often that I would pass it by without a thought were it not for the brutally hideous figure of Pasquino, who greets me from his pedestal like an old acquaintance. I realize quite well that he has been called one of the most beautiful remains of antique sculpture, and that the expert eye, guided by a knowledge of Hellenic art supremity, may see charm and wondrousness in it, but I have bid him good-morning and good-day many times, and, like some old acquaintances, he does not get nearer my heart as I learn to know him better. There have been innumerable conjectures as to what the figure represents. The one most generally ac- cepted is that it represents Menelaus supporting the 284 IDLING IN ITALY dead body of Patroclus after the vile Trojan had stabbed him in the back while Hector was engaging his attention. You have such a feeling of pride in Patroclus and the wonderful things that he did with his Myrmidons that your heart goes out to him. When the Trojan War was going badly, he was per- suaded to take up the direction of the forces against the enemy, and one cannot help feeling grateful to Menelaus for having played the good Samaritan to him at the end. But if this old King of Sparta had made Helen behave better when Paris came to visit them, she might never have eloped with that hazard- ous youth after he had made the memorable decision on Mount Ida, spurning power promised by Juno, and glory and renown tendered by Minerva, in order that he might have the fairest woman in the world for wife. But one should not be too hard on the old king. There is no telling just how far Helen acted on her own initiative and how far Venus was responsible for the flight. Still, were it not for this little irregularity in the conduct of the royal household, we would have been denied a knowledge of the greatness of Greece and a record of its accomplishments in one of the greatest poems, which has been a solace and a stimu- lation to countless lovers of literature the past two thousand years. Though I bring no trained eye or accurate informa- tion to the discussion of Pasquino's identity, I am con- vinced, since seeing the bronze statue of a boxer which Lanciani unearthed in excavating the Baths of Con- st antine in 1885, that this statue is no other than an early marble setting forth the same subject. To me it is the effigy of a fighting brute. Whatever his name "IF A MAN WALKETH" 285 or his profession may have been, he has become known the world over as Pasquino, and satires and sarcasms similar to those which he is supposed to have uttered to the amusement and edification of the Romans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have become known as pasquinades all over the world. Italians like to write stories concerning historic in- cidents and to embellish them with a veneer of veri- similitude. They like particularly to give them a per- sonal note, deprecatory or laudatory. When the Egyptian obelisk was being forced to a perpendicular position in the Piazza of St. Peters, the crowd had been admonished under penalty of death to be silent. The stillness of the piazza, broken only by the creak- ing of the ropes, was suddenly torn asunder by a shout of "Wet the ropes." Thus the famous obelisk was preserved intact, and the man whose discernment had accomplished it, instead of having his head cut off, was allowed to furnish the palms for St. Peter's every Palm Sunday. Incidentally he was ennobled, and since that time his reward has been the family's chief asset. In the same way, one of the river gods of the fountain set up in the middle of the Piazza Navona seems to be drawing a mantle up over his head while the others, those of the Danube, the Ganges, and the Rio della Plata, are looking straight ahead. Bernini, who built the fountain, says that Nile was so shocked by the facade which Borromini, a contemporary archi- tect, added to the Church of St. Agnes, which is imme- diately in front of it, that he had to veil his face. The story of Pasquino is that he asked questions concerning the conduct of the reigning power, which, of course, in those days was the pope, and made reflec- 286 IDLING IN ITALY tions which Marforio, the river god which stood be- tween the horse-tamers in the Piazza della Quirinale, answered. Pasquino, in short, became the organ of public opinion, and it was not subject to the censor, for the authors prudently kept out of sight. His most poisonous venom and destructive wrath were directed against popes and cardinals. If he said the things that he is alleged to have said about Alexander VI and Innocent XI (the holy man who started the Inquisition), it is easy to understand that one of their successors wished to throw him into the bottom of the Tiber, the resting-place of countless priceless objects of art for many centuries. As a matter of fact, how- ever, the stories about Pasquino to be found in every guide-book are, like many other stories when run to earth, largely fiction. Thirty years ago there was published in the Nuova Antologia an article by Domenico Gnoli which sets forth the real history of Pasquino. When Cardinal Carraffa went to live in the Braschi Palace he had the statue set up at one of the corners, and there it has since remained. In those days religious proces- sions were as common as automobiles and bicycles are to-day. The priests in them often rested at this corner, and it became the custom to make up the statue to represent different personages, and the man who was intrusted with this task happened to be a professor in the adjacent university. He encouraged his boys to write epilogues, elegies, and epigrams which they pasted or stuck on the statue. At first these were purely literary efforts, juvenile flights to Parnassus, but later they took on a political and social flavor, while still later they became concerned with "IF A MAN WALKETH" 287 the doings of the Curia. These pasquinades have been collected in book form, and some of the volumes exist at the present time. The majority, however, have been lost — perished in flames, destroyed as having no value, or disappeared in other ways. Thus the statue was initiated as a news-bearer or organ of public opinion. Immediately across the road from the statue there was a tailor or barber shop, and the name of the chief operator was Pasquino. It was in this shop that the messages stuck on the statue were collected, deciphered, and discussed, and when the witty tailor died they gave his name to the statue and thus immortality was thrust upon him. In reality, after the cessation of the publications, "Carmina quae ad Pasquillum fuerunt posita in anno," and the murder of the professor who had encouraged his students to put forth their youthful efforts, men groaning under the oppression of their rulers, men big with ideas of what we now call liberty, men in whom the germs of freedom and equality had been implanted, saw a fairly safe way of getting their sentiments before the public, and they utilized Pas- quino as a forum from which they could radiate their ideas and their sentiments. During the entire six- teenth century these men conveyed to the Borgias and to Julius II and Paul III and Innocent X and Inno- cent XI and Pius VI an expression of their feeling and conviction concerning their conduct, individually and collectively. Whether these contributions had any- thing to do with shaping public opinion and leading up to the great Reformation, it is impossible to say. Whatever Pasquino accomplished or didn't accom- plish seems not to concern him, for there he sits tran- 288 IDLING IN ITALY quiily upon six blocks of volcanic stone, indifferent to the passing show and to the transpirations of the world. A few paces beyond the Palazzo Braschi I suddenly come upon one of the most attractive and alluring piazzas in Rome, the Piazza Navona, or, as it is some- times called, the Circo Agonale. By its oblong form, its seductive symmetry, its elaborate decorations— three beautiful fountains, the central one surmounted by an Egyptian obelisk which once stood in the Circus of Maxentius; by its boundaries, which include the Pa- lazzo Pamfili, the Church of S. Agnese, and the Church of S. Giacomo of the Spaniards, and innumerable small and large houses — it succeeds in conveying to the observer, who is susceptible to aesthetic impressions, sensations which are as purely pleasurable as anything can possibly be. Were it not for the distinctively Italian architecture one might easily imagine that he was in the centre of some provincial large city of France. It has, more than any other public square that I have ever been in, that quality which we speak of as foreign. No two buildings are alike, and, mean though many of them are, and especially toward the northern end, they blend in such a way as to produce a perfect harmony of color and architectural effect. In olden times they held races here, and I can imagine how marvellous a sight it must have been with the palaces and houses gayly decked with flags and drapery, rich rugs hanging from the window-sills, on which leaned beautiful ladies, frail and strong, attended so- licitously, perhaps watchfully, by cavaliers and ad- mirers, and the square below filled with the pleasure- loving crowd whose conduct betrayed nothing else save "IF A MAN WALKETH" 289 a desire to be amused and diverted. During the sum- mer I often sat for a half-hour on my way home in this square, and, while watching the countless children from the surrounding tenements in those simple indul- gences which they call play, tried to fancy some of the events that had taken place in the square and in the palaces and churches bordering it. It was in the Pamfili Palace, built by Innocent X in 1650 for his predatory and dissolute sister- in-law, Olympia Malacchimi, that the fortunes of the Pamfili family began. Here she sold bishoprics and beneficences, and here she externalized that con- duct which brought infamy on her name. What a story an account of the intimate doings of that family would make ! Their palace in the Corso is one of the most beautiful Renaissance residences in the world, and their villa on the Janiculum is an approximation to a rural paradise. All that is left of the family is a faded, sad, suggestible, middle-aged princess, whose English appearance and manner betray a lifelong habit of emotional suppression, and one son who is eking out his miserable days in the mountains of Switzerland. Immediately adjacent to the palace is the Church of St. Agnes, built about the same time and on the spot where the girl whose name it commemorates was sup- posed to have had miraculous delivery from humilia- tions and outrages similar to those to which the Bel- gian nuns were subjected by the Germans. I say " Germans' ■ advisedly, for I am unable to understand why any one should think for a moment that the term "Hun," so widely applied to them, carries with it any such obloquy or opprobrium as the simple name "Ger- man." I venture to say that in years to come, when 290 IDLING IN ITALY any one wishes to describe abominations, cruelties, savageries for which no name is adequate, he will use the term "Germanic." Then even the most inexperi- enced in crime and sin will get a glimmering of what is meant. It is related that when Agnes was about fourteen years old she was taken to a lupanalia and there, bereft of all her clothing, became the target of the word and the conduct of a group of lubricitous monsters. Over- whelmed with shame, her head fell upon her chest and she prayed. Immediately her hair took on such mirac- ulous growth that it concealed her nakedness. But there were other more startling experiences in store for her. For her rebelliousness and general contumacy she was condemned to be burned alive. When the flames were about to devour her they suddenly became possessed of a dual quality, one radiating refreshment upon her, the other destruction upon her executioners. The lady had many other experiences which have long since been denied her sex, but it is popularly believed that she devotes much attention in her heavenly home to seeing that maidens who request her in a proper frame of mind and body, which for the latter is twenty- four hours' abstinence from everything but pure spring water, are provided with husbands. It would be trivial of me to add that she probably is overworked these days when so many prospective husbands are at the front, but I have no real information on the mat- ter, and I sincerely hope that the nubile Italians have no serious difficulty in finding spouses. From here my route is to the Corso, which at this early hour is nearly deserted. There are many streets that I may take: one that leads to the Pantheon; "IF A MAN WALKETH" 291 another that goes past the Palazzo Madaraa and other interesting public and private buildings. As a rule I take the latter, for it leads me to the Via Condotti, which ends in the Piazza di Spagna. Before the war this piazza was the rendezvous of American tourists. The vendors of objects of art and of Roman pearls, the antiquarian who had his wares fabricated around the corner or in the Trastevere, the dealer in genuine Raphaels and Tintorettos, the rapacious dealers in old books are all there, but most of them are on their knees in their shops with half-closed shutters, praying for the war to end so that the gullible rich Americans may come again. Their prayers are heard and their supplications will soon be answered. Meanwhile I cast a glance at the wretched monument erected a half-century ago to commemorate the promulgation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, look lov- ingly at the semi-sunken boat-shaped fountain just in front of the steps, and begin slowly to mount the most impressive steps in Rome, which seem to lead up like heavenly stairs to the massive, double-belfried Church of Trinita dei Monti, with the graceful Egyptian obe- lisk in front of it. Nowadays the steps are not so picturesque as I have often seen them in peace time, when lovely artists' models, picturesque loafers and the exponents of the dolce far niente collected on the steps and made, in conjunction with the flowers and plants that were exhibited there for sale, an almost unique picture. It is now deserted save for some hazardous Greek or Italian who attempts to eke out a living by disposing of flowers that have been cam- ouflaged to look fresh. Nevertheless the staircase and its environment make an appeal which repeated visits 292 IDLING IN ITALY serve only to increase. From the top of it, in the little square in front of the church, one gets an attrac- tive, though limited, view of the city and of Monte Mario, but it is a view that convinces him that he is in a city quite unlike any other in the world. A picturesque old woman who sells papers at the bottom of the stairs has made a regular customer out of me, and I scan the morning news as I ascend the steps, and by the time I have reached the top I find thoughts of beauty and of the good old days are be- ing replaced by thoughts of work and of the war. As I walk across the Pincian Hill I am conscious that I am big with joy at what the past twenty-four hours have accomplished at the battle-front, and throbbing with anticipation of what the following day will bring forth. That it will soon bring victory, complete and absolute, even the professional warrior is now forced to admit, and soon we shall bask again in the light of a livable world. CHAPTER XVIII THE AMERICAN EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH The shrieks of the American eagle have been joyous sounds to American ears since 1776, when we discov- ered his capacity to render our hymn of freedom. Heretofore our national bird has been in best voice on his native soil. When brought to Europe by statesman or hero, by citizen or delegate, it was found that cer- tain conditions there impaired his vocality and the flap of his wings. Suddenly in 1918 all this changed. Conditions were not only favorable — they were ideal. Perched upon a parapet of Guildhall, sitting majesti- cally on the Eiffel Tower, alight on the campanile that crowns the Capitoline Hill, his shrieks conveyed a message to the people of Europe whose ears have awaited it longingly for centuries, and the flapping of his wings created a current that stimulated and ener- gized them. Floating majestically through the em- pyrean, he was to those human beings, weary of war, of tyranny, and of privilege, what the dove was to the occupants of the ark — the emblem of salvation. Noth- ing could then convince the peoples of Italy that this harbinger of hope had not been liberated by Woodrow Wilson. I cannot believe that the American eagle has permanently forsaken the United States of America. I anticipate hearing there again the familiar scream. One tolerates him better at home than in Europe, but I must accord the bird great sapiency in having selected 293 294 IDLING IN ITALY the autumn of 1918 to give the European people the opportunity to judge of the quality and quantity of his vocal production. It is a platitude to say that no prophet or potentate, no king or conqueror was ever greeted with such spon- taneous, whole-hearted, genuine enthusiasm as Presi- dent Wilson was greeted in Italy, and, if I may judge from newspaper accounts, the reception which was offered him there was not unlike that which he received in England and France. He went to Italy when its people were incensed by the conduct of the newly fledged Jugoslavs, and when the press was in the throes of inflammatory polemics over the fate of the Treaty of London. It was widely known in Italy that President Wilson was not in sympathy with the Son- ninian alleged imperialistic policies and that he was fully in sympathy with the Jugoslav aspirations. Nevertheless, the Italians, from royalty to peasant, welcomed him with a spontaneity and warmth, an enthusiasm and whole-heartedness, a genuineness and devotion that was as moving as anything I ever wit- nessed. The hour of his arrival in Rome was not defi- nitely known until shortly before he arrived. But despite this hundreds of people remained in the street all night, and thousands of them gathered there before sunrise in order that they might not miss the oppor- tunity of looking upon him whom they firmly believed to be the apostle of liberty and freedom, the herald of light and brotherly love. It was not curiosity alone that prompted them to this effort and sacrifice of com- fort. Curiosity undoubtedly entered into it, but the potent reason for the outpouring that took place that memorable January was that their presence might con- THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 295 vey to our President an expression of their esteem and an earnest of their appreciation of his efforts. No American, though he had the heart of a frog and the emotional caliber of a lizard, could suppress the succession of thrills that mounted from his bowels to his brain on seeing with what dignity, suavity, and self-respecting composure their Chief Magistrate com- ported himself as he was transported through the Via Nazionale, seated beside the most democratic and be- loved king in the world. Though the American spec- tator had spent his time impregnating with venom darts which he believed he would gladly drive into the President, he had to admit that there was a man who more than satisfied all of Kipling's "Ifs." When he encountered him later in the Palazzo del Drago acting as host at the table of his country's charming ambassa- dress, or at Montecitorio, where he told the Solons of Italy of his country's hopes, ideals, aspirations, and willingness, or in less solemn moments on the Capitol- ine, when he received the honorary citizenship of Rome, he knew that his first impressions were founded in verity and he lent a willing ear to the screech of the American eagle which revealed itself throughout the entire Italian press. Every city of Italy clamored for a visit, and though he spent but a few minutes in Genoa and a few hours in Milan, the outpouring of the people to welcome him was no less remarkable than it was in Rome. The tribute which Europe gave Mr. Wilson seemed to depress many of his countrymen on the other side of the Atlantic. It is an extraordi- nary thing that while Europe rocked with his fame America reeked with his infamy. After having lived two years in Italy I found many 296 IDLING IN ITALY things about the Italians difficult to understand. After having lived fifty years in the United States of America I find some things about the Americans beyond com- prehension. Nothing is so enigmatic as their attitude toward Woodrow Wilson, the man who was accorded higher esteem in Europe than was ever vouchsafed mortal man, and who gave and has since given earnest of such accord. From the day he decided to repre- sent our country in the Peace Conference the papers and magazines began to contain the material from which could readily be formulated a new hymn of hate. What was the genesis of this display? What was the cause of this distrust ? From whence did this venom emanate? How could a man whose life was a mirror of integrity, whose ideals were of the loftiest, and who attempted to conform his conduct to them excite such contempt? Why should the only states- man who had revealed the ability to formulate a plan which, put in operation, led to cessation of hostilities, who was the leader in formulating the terms of peace, and who insisted, and had his insistence allowed, that it should incorporate a covenant whose enforcement would make for perpetual peace, be hated and dis- trusted, vilified and traduced, thwarted and misrepre- sented by so many of his countrymen? What had he done, by commission or omission, that such treatment should be accorded him? I propose to attempt to answer these questions and thus to suggest why he has been a failure as President. I know the replies usually given to these questions by his depredators and de- famers. "His nature is so imperious and his temper so tyrannical that he cannot co-operate with others; he neither solicits advice nor heeds counsel; he selects his THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 297 coadjutors, aides, and advisers from those whom he knows he can dominate; the passport to his favor is flattery, and intimacy with him is maintained only by the cement of agreement; he neither made preparation for war when there was ample time for doing so nor did he wage war until months after repeated casus belli; he is hypocritical in having sought and accomplished election under the slogan 'He kept us out of war/ and immediately on being elected he 'thrust' the country into war; he was 'too proud to fight' in 1916, but keen to fight in 1917; he has hebrewphilia and popophobia; he is a socialist masquerading as a liberal; he is a Bol- shevik beneath the mask of a radical. In brief, he is temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States; intellectually and morally unfit to represent its people; and withal so completely under the dominion of an insatiate ambition to be the greatest man the world has ever known that every kindly human feeling has been crowded from him." Intelligent, educated men who have never seen him, who know little of his career save that he was presi- dent of Princeton University and governor of the State of New Jersey and twice President of the United States, elected by the Democratic party, hate him as if he were a bitter personal enemy, malign him as if he had injured their reputation for honesty and probity, calumniate him as though he were a man without character, depreciate him as though his career were barren of signal accomplishment, and distrust his motives and procedures as though he had once, or many times, betrayed them. Men who are unable to give the smallest specificity to their dislike of him feel that they add to their stature by detracting from 298 IDLING IN ITALY his accomplishments and defaming him. Not one of them with whom I have talked has been able to state the facts of his disagreement and rupture with the trustees of Princeton University. My understanding was that he insisted that the university should sub- mit to certain reforms that would make it democratic in reality as well as in name, and that would enhance its pedagogical usefulness, and that there should not be a privileged class in the university, viz., members of exclusive clubs whose portals were opened by money. He maintained that his training as an educator, his experience as an administrator, his accomplishment as a student of history and as an interpreter of events, his experience with men, entitled him to a judgment concerning the needs of such an institution that should be given a hearing, and he contended that his recom- mendations, rather than those of trustees whose train- ing had been largely in the world of affairs, be put in operation and at least be given a trial. He had the courage to jeopardize his very bread and butter, and that of his family, at a time in his life when his physical forces had reached their zenith rather than sacrifice what he believed to be a principle. The men who were permitted to take Woodrow Wilson's measure in that contest had no more idea of his stature than if they were blind. They would have laughed to scorn the idea that five years later the people of the United States would select him for their president. It was in this episode that his repute not to be able to do team-work with his equals and his inferiors originated. Time has shown that it isn't only a question of being able to do team-work, he cannot do his best work in an atmosphere of friction and dissent. It is as impossi- THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 299 ble for him to yield a position which he has taken, and which we will assume he believes to be right, as it is impossible for the magnet to yield the needle that it has attracted ; therefore he adopts the only course for him — he doesn't enter contests, save golf with his physician. His cabinet meetings are a farce, so say they who have nerer attended one and who have never even spoken to a cabinet member. He selects pygmies for his cabinet and for his aides in order that they may proffer him no advice, resent no contradiction or pro- test indignities to their offices. This in face of the fact that he and his cabinet and his aides have con- ditioned the only miracle of modern times, namely, throwing a whole country, millions of whose people were adverse to war, into a bellicose state which was never before witnessed; conditioning and transporting the men and material resources of that country across the Atlantic and into the fighting lines at a crucial moment, at a time when the backs of the Allies were against the wall, according to the statements of their own authorized spokesmen; who succeeded in en- gendering in the composite mind of the American people a determination to win the war that was more potent than men or weapons; who impregnated the composite soul of the Allies with a faith that the world would be an acceptable abode for the common people once the enemy was crushed, that transcended in its intensity the faith of the Christian martyrs; who filled the heart of every statesman of the Allied nations with a hope and belief that there was within him the master- ful mind that would conduct their legions to victory and salvation. If he and his pygmies accomplished 300 IDLING IN ITALY this, I am one who maintains they are myrmidons and giants. But they didn't do it, his detractors say. The rejoinder to which is: "I know, a little bird did it!" If we had entered the war after the sinking of the Lusitania, when the wise men of the West say we should have gone in, countless lives and inestimable expendi- tures would have been spared. Where is the man in the United States of America to-day who has revealed the Jove-like mind that entitles him to make such sen- tient statement ? When he is found, how can he possi- bly know? What delivery of thought, idea, concep- tion, execution has he ever made that entitles him to be heard, not to say believed? How can any one possibly know what would have been the result of our entrance into the war at that time? If any one thing is responsible for America's efficiency in the war, it is that it had the American people fused into one man with one mind, determined to win the war. I am sure that I encountered nothing in the United States in my travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again in the spring of 1916 that made me believe that the people of our country wanted war, or that there could be developed in them at that time a sentiment which would make for such internal resistance of the people as they displayed in the spring of 1917 and con- tinued to display until November 11, 1918. I can- not speak from personal knowledge, for I was not in the United States during the year of its war effi- ciency, but I am told that there was never a whisper of disloyalty or a syllable of disparagement of the Presi- dent personally during that time. But many of those who were silent then are strident now. Their enforced silence has enhanced the carry-power of their voices, THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 301 and their clamor prevents the harmony that the world is seeking. They not only defame Wilson, but they contend that the part we played in the war has been overestimated. It has been, but not by us. It has been evaluated by those whom it was our most sacred privilege to aid. They neither minimize our efforts not underestimate our accomplishment. The British know that they were steadfast; the French realize that they were resolute; the Italians appreciate that they were brave. We know it, but that does not prevent us from realizing the magnitude of the role we played, and the man who was responsible for it is the man to whom the world, save a political party in the United States, gives thanks and expresses appreciation. His name is Woodrow Wilson. Americans do not boast of the part they played in winning the war, but they do encourage that which is far worse than boasting — lying about it, particularly when the motive for such perversion of truth is deprecation of their Chief Executive. He is an idealist and theorist. He is the kind of idealist who destroyed the Democratic machine in the State of New Jersey, which had been the synonym for corruption in politics for a generation; the kind of idealist who put through the Underwood Tariff Bill, which at one stroke did more to strangle the unnatural mother of privilege than any measure in the past twenty years; the kind of idealist who, when the trans- port system of the entire country threatened to be hopelessly paralyzed by reason of the determination of the railway magnates to refuse the demands of loco- motive engineers that their working-day should consist of eight hours, sent for representatives of the pluto- 302 IDLING IN ITALY crats and the proletariats and told what they were to do and when they were to do it, and the whole civilized world approved. He is the idealist who has done more to make our government a republican govern- ment representative of the people and not of party bosses than any one in the memory of man. He is the idealist who is a scholar, a thinker, a statesman, a creator, an administrator, and a man of vision. More than that, he is an efficiency expert in the realm of world-ordering. It is to our inestimable misfortune that his personality has successfully obstacled his projects. His secretary of war is a failure; his secretary of state is a figurehead; his secretary of finance is his family, and so on ad nauseam. I am not a competent judge whether Mr. Baker has been a good secretary of war or not, but I am sure that he is not so unfit as Simon Cameron was. No one has said of him: " Cameron is utterly ignorant and re- gardless of the course of things and probable result. Selfish and openly discourteous to the President. Obnoxious to the country. Incapable either of or- ganizing details or conceiving and executing general plans" (Nicolay). President Wilson has never had to say of any of his cabinet what Lincoln said of Seward : "The point and pith of the senators' complaint was that they charged him, Seward, if not with infidelity, with indifference, with want of earnestness in the war, with want of sympathy with the country, and especially with a too great ascendancy and control of the President and measures of administration. While they seemed to believe in my honesty, they also appeared to think that when I had in me any THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 303 good purpose or intention Seward tried to suck it out of me unperceived." So far as I know, no one has characterized President Wilson's mentality as " painful imbecility/' as Stan- ton characterized Lincoln a few months before the latter appointed him secretary of war. He has been accused of not surrounding himself with the ablest men of his party or of the country, in the conduct of the affairs of the nation during the period when the country was emerging from the posi- tion of aloofness from world politics which it had main- tained from the time Washington warned of the danger of "entangling foreign alliances." But it does not convince me that a man is not competent to do the job that the President has given him because his train- ing has been as a stockbroker and his activities on the bear side of the market. That is not the kind of train- ing that one would give his son whom he wished to see become a statesman, but it occurs to me that the task entrusted to him may be one which a statesman is not best fitted to handle. It may be a job that a man with the mentality and training and moral pos- sessions that he selected could do better than any one else. What earnest of superior constructive, intellectual powers has any public man in the United States dis- played that justifies self-constituted critics in saying that the men selected by President Wilson are not their peers ? It is universally admitted that President Wilson has a more masterful and comprehensive grasp of politics in America, using that word in its conven- tional, every-day sense and meaning, particularly a familiarity with bosses and the " machine," than any 304 IDLING IN ITALY President ever had. No one denies his statesmanship. He is, therefore, a competent judge of who was best fitted to do the work which it was necessary to do in order that the programme which he formulated for the benefit of humanity might be executed, and particularly that the yoke might be lifted from the necks of the oppressed nations and that another world calamity in the shape of war might be avoided. His choice of aides and representatives was not acceptable to men who put party interests before public interests, who are willing to sacrifice world weal for worldly advance- ment, and who lash themselves into a frenzied state by repetition of the admonitions of Washington or Monroe. It does not detract from the glory of the father of his country, or from the lustre of great interpreters of national law, to say that the principles that they enunciated and the practices that they initi- ated centuries ago are not necessarily those that should guide us now. It would be just as legitimate to say that physicians should follow the teachings of Hippoc- rates or Galen, because the one was the father of medi- cine and the other its greatest expositor, as it would to say that we must follow slavishly the teachings of Washington and Monroe. That the American Peace Commission did not con- tain men of the mental caliber of Mr. Root or Mr. Lodge, that the reservoirs of expert knowledge were not drained and taken to Paris, that our Commission as a whole was less sophisticated, less perceptive and apperceptive, than that of Great Britain, let us say, is to be regretted, just as we regret the effects of some fallacious judgment or specious decision of our youth. There were ways of offsetting them, however, and in THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 305 this particular instance Congress was the way. The President did not go beyond his prerogative in selecting the Peace Commission. The public elected him to make these selections, as well as to do other things. If the people do not want that such selection should be his privilege and power, they have only to say it at the polls. The Eighteenth Amendment was not diffi- cult of accomplishment. Perhaps time will show that Mr. Wilson " guessed right" oftener in the selection of his cabinet than any predecessor. Mr. Josephus Daniels was the target of scorn and the butt of ridicule from the time he went into the cabinet until he began to make preparations for war, but the rumor has reached me that his efforts were fairly satisfactory to the hypercritical American pub- lic. The President's critics are jealous of the prodig- ious powers which an unauthorized representative of the government has in the affairs of the country, and they do not understand why, if he is the paragon of virtue that his position seems to indicate he is, the President did not put him on the commission. But again I say the President knows his limitations and the public has only recently discovered them. He may short-circuit some of them by means of Colonel House. He may find him " great in counsel and mighty in work/' or he may have habituated himself to buy only gold that he has tried in the fire himself. It is his privilege and no one can gainsay it. He is silent and ungetatable. Silence has been con- sidered a sign of strength in man since the days of Hammurabi, and the greater the man the more soli- tary he is. If Mr. Wilson were twice as great, even Mr. Tumulty would not be allowed to see him ! 306 IDLING IN ITALY Wilson has been accused of pilfering his idea of the League of Nations from the Due de Sully and from the Abbe* of Saint Pierre. Enemies animated by malice and fired by envy have striven to show that the famous fourteen statements or principles were his only by the right of possession or enunciation; that he resurrected the doctrines of Mazzini, dressed them up and paraded them as his own. It would be difficult to be patient with such critics if one did not know the history of epoch-making events in the world's progress. In truth, the public is resentful that it was not con- sulted. It is umbraged that it was not allowed to make suggestions. It is spiteful because it was treated with contempt. The public manifested the same quality of spleen toward Lincoln, only the quantity was greater. In brief, the public professes not to have any confidence in Mr. Wilson's wisdom, and this in face of the fact that up to date he has displayed more wisdom than all the Solons in America combined, and I can say this the more unprejudicedly as a Repub- lican than I could if I were a member of the party that elected Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson is disliked for emotional, not intellectual, reasons. Although he has probably done more to engrave the graving upon the stone that will remove the iniquity of the land than any man who has ever lived, "we don't like'* him. There must be some good reason for this other than envy, jealousy, and resentment, and I propose to inquire for these reasons in Mr. Wilson's emotional make-up. Whether I "like" Mr. Wilson or not does not enter into it. I never knew Pascal or Voltaire or Benjamin Franklin, and still I am sure I could make a statement THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 307 of their qualities and possessions that would elicit com- mendation from one who had known them. As a mat- ter of fact, personal contact with men from whose activities the world dates epochs is not conducive to personal liking. I cannot fancy liking Rousseau. I am sure I should not have liked Voltaire. I can even understand why Lincoln was despised and scoffed at by his contemporaries. I am one of those who believe Mr. Wilson is a great man, but I am not concerned to convince others of it. I am concerned alone to ex- plain why he is not beloved of the people. The esteem or disesteem in which Mr. Wilson is held in this country is due to his personality, and this does not seem to me to be enigmatic. He has the mind of a Jove but the heart of a batrachian. It is to the former that he owed his rise, it is the latter that conditioned his fall. If we were not satisfied to have such a man sail our ship of state in smooth as well as in turbulent seas, in calm and in tornado, we had op- portunity to drop him from the bridge gracefully in 1916. Although his possessions and deficits were not so universally known then as now, still they were gen- erally recognized and widely discussed. Instead of dropping our pilot we re-elected him. This could only be construed by him as approval of his conduct. When he continued to display his inherent qualities he ex- cited our ire. We called him names and neither for- gave nor wished to forgive him. Perhaps no one has ever had the opportunity to fix his position so indestructibly at the apogee of human accomplishment by permitting himself kindly indul- dences or what is commonly called human feelings as Woodrow Wilson had. If when Roosevelt sought to 308 IDLING IN ITALY raise a regiment or division to take to France the President had been sympathetic to the project and had wiped out with a stroke of the pen the obvious difficulties that stood in the way of such project, it would have thrilled the people of this country of every color, or every complexion, political and somatic, as nothing else could possibly do. It would not have taken from his prestige as commander-in-chief of the army one jot or tittle, nor would it have interfered in the smallest way with the disciplinary unity which is the vital spark of the army. If he had said of General Leonard Wood, "Father, forgive him, for he kneweth not that which he did," and had the emotional exaltation which every one has when he forgives an enemy, and given him a com- mand to which his past performances entitled him, a few soreheads and soulless pygmies wearing the uni- form of the United States Army and their congressional wire-pullers might have resentedTit, but the people by and large would have said: "Our President is a big man: he is magnanimous, he is a man who walks in the pathway of the Lord, he forgives his enemies." General Wood would have received the recompense for having prepared the way for the selective draft that he deserved, for even though he did it in a tactless and tasteless way, he made a contribution of incal- culable value to the victory of our arms. Had he sent for the chairman of the committee on foreign affairs and conferred with him on the selection of the Peace Conference personnel, had he shown some signs of deference to that committee, had he dis- cussed with them his peace plan proposals and taken note of their suggestions, modifying his proposals in THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 309 accordance with their convictions when to do so did not yield a fundamental point, we should not have been on the horns of the dilemma we were for a year following the President's last return from Paris, and the world would have been spared discomfiture — yea, even agony. Mr. Wilson knows the rules of the game, but he does not know how to play fair. He knows that con- tests and strife elicit his most deforming qualities — in- tolerance, arrogance, and emotional sterility; hence he hedges himself about in every possible way to avoid them. He knows that the sure way for him is to play the game alone. Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow men. He loves them in the abstract, but not in the flesh. He is concerned with their fate, their destiny, their travail en masse, but the predicaments, perplexities, and pros- trations of the individual or groups of individuals make no appeal to him. He does not refresh his soul by bathing it daily in the milk of human kindness. He says with his lips that he loves his fellow men, but there is no accompanying emotional glow, none of the somatic or spiritual accompaniments which are the normal ancillae of love's display. Hence he does not respect their convictions when they are opposed to his own, he does not value their counsels. His determina- tion to put things through in the way he has con- vinced himself they should be put through is not sus- ceptible to change from influences that originate without his own mind. He has made many false steps, but none of them so conditioned the fall from the exalted position the world had given to him as his de- termination to go to Paris and represent this country 310 IDLING IN ITALY at the Peace Conference. If one may judge what the verdict of all the voters in this country would have been, had the question of his going been submitted to them, from the expressions of opinion of those one encounters in his daily life, it would be no exaggera- tion to say that three-fourths of the voters would say he should not have gone. I think I may say truthfully that I never encountered a person who approved his decision. It is possible that his entourage or cabinet and counsellors did not contain a daring soul who vol- unteered such advice, but it is incredible that both they and the President did not sense the judgment of their countrymen as it was reflected in the newspapers. However, it is likely that he would have gone had he known that the majority of the voters of this country were opposed to it. In contact with people he gives himself the air of listening with deference and indeed of being beholden to judgment and opinion, but in reality it is an artifice which he puts off when he returns to the dispensing centre of the word and of the law just as he puts off his gloves and his hat. Nothing is so illustrative of this unwillingness to heed counsel emanating from authority and given wholly for his benefit as his con- duct toward his physician during the trip around the country in September, 1919. The newspaper repre- sentatives who accompanied him say that he had often severe and protracted headache, was frequently ner- vous and irritable, sometimes dizzy, and always looked ill. These symptoms, conjoined with the fact that for a long time he had high blood pressure, were danger signals which no physician would dare neglect. It is legitimate to infer that his physician apprised him and THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 311 counselled him accordingly. Despite it Mr. Wilson persisted, until nature exacted the penalty and by so doing he jeopardized his own life and seriously disor- dered the equilibrium of affairs of the country. Indeed, obstinacy is one of his most maiming characteristics. The President attempts to mask with facial urbanity and a smile in verbal contact with people, and with the subjunctive mood in written contact, his third most deforming defect of character, namely, his inability to enter into a contest of any sort in which there is strife without revealing his obsession to win, his emo- tional frigidity, his lack of love for his fellow men. These explain why he did not win out to a larger de- gree in Paris, and why he did not win out with Con- gress. When he attempts to play such game his arti- ficed civility, cordiality, amiability are so discordant with the real man that they become as offensive as affectations of manner or speech always are, and in- stead of placating the individual toward whom they are manifest, or facilitating a modus vivendi, they offend and make rapport with him impossible. Probably nothing would strike Mr. Wilson's in- timates as so wholly untrue as the statement that he is cruel, yet, nevertheless, I feel convinced that there is much latent cruelty in his make-up, and that every now and then he is powerless to inhibit it. He was undoubtedly wholly within his rights in dismissing Mr. Lansing from his cabinet, but the way in which he did it constitutes refinement of cruelty. He may have had a contempt for him because he had not in- sisted on playing first fiddle in Mr. Wilson's orchestra, the part for which he was engaged, but that did not justify Mr. Wilson in flaying him publicly because he 312 IDLING IN ITALY attempted to keep the orchestra together and tuned up as it were during Mr. Wilson's illness. Selfishness is another conspicuous deforming trait of the President. He is more selfish than cruel. Un- doubtedly his friends can point to many acts of gener- osity that deny the allegation. Some of the most selfish people in the world give freely of their counsel, money, and time. Selfishness and miserliness are not interchangeable terms. He is the summation of selfish- ness because he puts his decisions and determinations above those of any or all others. It matters not who the others may be. Until some one comes forward to show that he has ever been known to yield his judgments and positions to those of others I must hold to this view. He is ungenerous of sentiment and unfair by implication. Nothing better exemplifies his un- generosity than his refusal to appear before the Senate or a committee of them previous to his return to Paris after his visit here and say to them that he had de- termined to incorporate all their suggestions in the Treaty and in the Covenant. He did incorporate them, but he did not give the Senate the satisfaction of telling them that he was going to do so or that the instrument would be improved by so doing. It has been said of him that he is the shrewdest politician who has been in the presidential chair in the memory of man. That is a euphemistic way of saying he knows mob psychology and individual weakness, but his rep- utation in this respect has been injured by his failure to be generous and gracious to Congress. The receptive side of his nature is neither sensitive nor intuitive, nor is his reactive side productive or creative. He is merely ratiocinative and constructive, THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 313 consciously excogitative and inventive. In other words, he has talent, not genius. Genius does what it must, talent what it can. The man of genius does that which no one else can do. His work is the essen- tial and unique expression of himself. He does it with- out being aware how he does it. It is as much an in- tegral part of him as the pitch of his voice and his unconscious manner. He is conscious only of the throes of productive travail; of the antecedents of his creation he is ignorant. Many artists essay to paint their own portraits and many succeed in portraying themselves spiritually and somatically as no one else can. Mr. Wilson did with words for himself in describ- ing Jefferson Davis what artists do with pigments. "What he did lack was wisdom in dealing with men, willingness to take the judgment of others in critical matters of business, the instinct which recognizes ability in others and trusts it to the utmost to play its independent part. He too much loved to rule, had too overweening confidence in himself, and took leave to act as if he understood much better than those who were in actual command what should be done in the field. He let prejudice and his own wilful judgment dictate to him. ... He sought to control too many things with too feminine a jealousy of any rivalry in authority." True, too true; but not nearly so true of Jefferson Davis as of Woodrow Wilson. Posterity profited by the limitations of the former, and we are paying and mankind will continue to pay for those of the latter. Mr. Wilson is a brilliant, calculating, and vindictive man: brilliant in conception, calculating in motive, and vindictive in execution. From the time of his 314 IDLING IN ITALY youth he instructed himself to great purpose. He has made a careful review and digest of the world's his- tory and he has attempted to survey the tractless forests and untrodden deserts of the future. From the activities in the former fields he has evolved a plan which he believes will make the latter a favorable place for the human race to display its activities, and he has striven to put that plan into practice. He concedes that others have looked backward with as compre- hensive an eye as his own; he grants that others have had visions of the future that are even more penetrating than his own; but he has the opportunity to try out his plan, and they have not, and he is unwilling to take them into partnership in the development of the claim that he has staked out. He cannot do it. It is one of his emotional limitations. Were he generous, kindly, and humble it would be difficult to find his like in the flesh or in history. He must be reconciled to the frowns of his contemporaries, the disparagements of his fellows, and the scorn of those who have been scorned by him. The world has always made the possessor of limitations pay the penalty. In his hour of hurt, if sensitiveness adequate to feel is still vouch- safed him, he may assuage the pain with the knowledge that posterity will judge him by his intellectual posses- sions, not by his emotional deficit. If we are not satisfied with his conduct as chief magis- trate we must do one of two things. We must either curtail the powers of future presidents, or we must se- lect presidents for their qualities of heart as well as mind. Perhaps future candidates for the presidency should be submitted to psychological tests to determine their intellectual and emotional coefficients. Those THE EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH 315 who do not measure up to a certain standard shall be eliminated. One of the most unsurmountable obstacles to ad- vancement of an officer in the army or navy is an anno- tation of his record by a superior officer as " tempera- mentally unfit. " From the day that appears under- neath his pedigree there is scarcely any power that can advance him. It may be that Woodrow Wilson has been " temperamentally unfit" to be President of the United States, but for any one to say that he has been intellectually unfit for that office is to utter an ab- surdity and an untruth. Had he been baptized in the waters of humility, had his parents or his pedagogues inoculated him with the vaccine of modesty, had he during the years of his spiritual growth come under the leavening influence of love of humanity, had he by taking thought been able to develop what are consid- ered " human qualities," — kindliness, sympathy, and reverence for others, — had he included in his matutinal prayers, "Let me accomplish, not by might, nor by power, but by spirit," had he had Lincoln's heart and his own brain, he would be, not one of the greatest men that America has produced, he might be the greatest. As it is, his emotional limitations have thwarted his career and dwarfed his spiritual stature. The Ameri- can people speak of this as his fault. It is in reality his misfortune. We laugh at the child who cries when she finds that her doll, with outward appearance of pulchritude, is filled with sawdust, but we wail when we find our gods are only human, and we resent it when our humans err. Woodrow Wilson is better liked by the people of the world to-day than any prophet or reformer the 316 IDLING IN ITALY world has ever had. He has fewer enemies and fewer detractors. He should consider himself particularly- fortunate, for he owes his life to it, that he lives in the twentieth century. It is only a century or two ago, in reality, that they gave up burning at the stake prophets and reformers, and it is only a few dec- ades ago that they allowed them to remain in their native land or even to visit it. Critics and self- constituted judges of his conduct will continue to pour their vials of wrath upon his head and purge themselves of their contempt for him, but these are the fertilizers of his intellectual stature. Woodrow Wilson has had meted out to him more considerate and respectful consideration than any man who originated stirring impulse that has led to world renovation. There is a choice between calumniation and crucifixion. )i!A^u>^^^^r- 3 7 f2>K^e^0 /