Correspondence
A LITERARY LETTER FROM ROME.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sm,—The system of conferring prizes for literature, which is coming more and more into vogue in Italy, has brought some works of real literary interest into prominence. One of these prizes, destined for poetry, has recently been assigned by the Mondadori academy, a group of well-known men of letters centring round the publishing house of Mondadori, to the Calabrian poet, Vincenzo Gerace, for his recently published volume of verse La fontana nella foresta. The recipient of the other, known as the Bagutta prize, to be conferred by the unanimous vote of eleven authors, named by the founders, on a work of literature without further specification, this year is the young Lombard writer, Giovan Battista Angioletti, for his volume of prose essays and stories entitled It giorno del giudizio. These two works may be regarded as representing tendencies and tastes predominating to-day in the Italian world of letters.
Gerace is a man over fifty, and his literary development was undoubtedly influenced by Carducci ; he is therefore a classicist, a patient chiseller of style, a solitary spirit con- temptuous of the eccentricities and improvisations of the Futurists and other " poeti dell' avanguardia." This volume contains pages of sound traditional Italian poetry, but cannot be read right through without a certain sense of weariness. Its success suggests that the Italy of 1927 has gone back to the Carduccian Italy of 1900, wherefore some observers have concluded that the whole intermediate generation, that of La Voce, of the Futurists, of the revolutionists in literature and art, has been disowned by the men of to-day, who have returned to the tastes and beliefs which that intermediate generation believed it had wiped out. There is, it is true, a new respect for classical style, which had been long absent, but the years of anarchy and revolt have been useful to all. Croce's Estetica and the battles of the Futurists have achieved two important results : they have defined certain Ideas fundamental for criticism and have restored the con- nexion between life and literature`; the man of letters takes a keener interest in the life around him, while the man in the street is coming to consider the literature of his own country as a not indifferent element of his existence. Both now possess certain standards for distinguishing the significance of art from that of other products of the human mind. The present literary revival is in great part due to the intermediate generation of rebels, the generation of Croce, Papini and Marinetti.
Angioletti's book is a case in point. It contains prose Vries and tales, revealing the somewhat testy, delicate and disorderly sensibility of a young man, born and bred in Milan and inspired by the advanced symbolist literature of France and by the study of the Italian classics. Extreme sensibility and confusion on the one hand, orderliness, serenity and harmony on the other. Angioletti is a romantic yearning after classicism, a Northerner yearning after the South.
The novelists follow this same path. Riccardo Bacchelli is perhaps the most characteristic writer of this period. His recent novel 11 diavolo at Pontelungo, which has achieved considerable success in intellectual circle's, deals with a sort of Anarchist settlement established at Locaino, centring round the Russian Bakunin, but financed by the Italian millionaire Cafiero ; the second volume describes a preposterous, almost childish, attempt by Bakunin and his followers to raise a revolution at Bologna. There is no real plot, but the incidents are so quaint and the characters so vivid that the reader's interest never flags ; the book, in the main, is humorous and occasionally ironical, but without exaggerations or literary unfairness towards the characters of whom the author evidently disapproves. There is something Olympic and serene in Bacchelli's style and personality, which overcomes and veils his disapproval. The book is, however, somewhat too long and disconnected.
There is undoubtedly a revival of interest in historical work in Italy to-day. Those of an historian pure and simple, Gioacehino Volpe, perhaps the best living Italian historian, sell better than the novels of many popular authors. His latest volume of essays on the Middle Ages deserves to be better known in England than it is, and the same may be said of his L'Italia in Cammino, an admirable, philosophic summary of the development and history of Italy in the last fifty years. On the other hand, an English edition of .Benedetto Croce's Storia d'Italia del 1871 at 1915 is already announced.
Although best known as a philosopher, Benedetto Croce has already published many historical essays, the value of which is enhanced by his charm of style. The present volume, however, is chiefly of interest as a revelation of the author's mentality, and will add to his reputation as a very clever propagandist rather than as an historian. Signor Croce is undoubtedly one of the chief inspirers of Fascist thought, as was pointed out in the work of a French writer recently reviewed in these columns, but he happens to be an opponent of the present Italian regime, and while professing to deal with the history of Italy from 1871 to 1915, he has actually produced a glorified party pamphlet criticizing the policy of the men of 1922-28 by comparing them to their dis- advantage with their predecessors. His main thesis—the rehabilitation of Italian Liberalism—has some sound arguments to support it. The reaction against the degenera- tion of Italian Parliamentarism, which made Fascism a necessity, has led to a somewhat exaggerated criticism of pre-Fascist Italy, and Signor Croce shows how much of the work of the post-Risorgimento Governments had a lasting value and helped to build up the progressive Italy of to-day. But the ever-widening gap between Ministers and Parlia- ments and the real needs of the people is ignored, and Crispi, the one man of that period who showed some really states- manlike qualities, is presented as the villain of the piece ; is it partly because the Fascists exalt his memory ? Likewise the errors of the pre-War Socialists, their policy of keeping the country in a state of perpetual unrest, not unaccom- panied by bloodshed, and of systematically handicapping production, are lightly glossed over. The author's assertion that the Socialist leaders were not really antipatriotie, but only pretended to be so lest they should lose authority over the masses, would constitute a grave indictment against the Italian people if it were true, but it happens to be nothing of the sort, as subsequent events have proved. Nor is it accurate to exonerate the Socialists from having caused any trouble during the War, when it is notorious that the Caporetto disaster was largely, though of course not exclusively, the result of Red propaganda.
The hero of the book is Signor Giolitti, and the thirteen years in which he was the dictator of Italy arc presented as a sort of golden age, in spite of Signor Croce's denial that such ages ever existed. To all who have followed the course of Italian politics this picture of Giovanni Giolitti as the Chevalier Bayard of Liberalism will come as a surprise indeed. That statesman's unedifying share in the bank scandals of the 'nineties, the manner in which he debauched the bureau- cracy and distributed favours according to the various moves of his tortuous Parliamentary game, are almost ignored, in the book.—We are, Sir, &c., YOUR ITALIAN CORRESPONDENTS.
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