INTRODUCTION TO MASTRO-DON GESUALDO BY GIOVANNI VERGA (1927)
Giovanni Verga was born in the year 1840, and he died at the beginning of 1922, so that he is almost as much of a contemporary as Thomas Hardy. He seems more remote, because he left off writing many years before he died. He was a Sicilian from one of the lonely little townships in the south of the island, where his family were provincial gentlefolk. But he spent a good deal of his youth in Catania, the city on the sea, under Etna, and then he went to Naples, the metropolis; for Sicily was still part of the Bourbon kingdom of Naples.
As a young man he lived for a time in Milan and Florence, the intellectual centres, leading a more or less fashionable life and also practising journalism. A real provincial, he felt that the great world must be conquered, that it must hold some vital secret. He was apparently a great beau, and had a series of more or less distinguished love affairs, like an Alfred de Vigny or a Maupassant. In his early novels we see him in this phase. Tigre Reale, one of his most popular novels, is the story of a young Italian’s love for a fascinating but very enigmatical (no longer so enigmatical) Russian countess of great wealth, married, but living in distinguished isolation alone in Florence. The enigmatical lady is, however, consumptive, and the end, in Sicily, is truly horrible, in the morbid and deathly tone of some of Matilde Serao’s novels. The southerners seem to go that way, macabre. Yet in Verga the savage, manly tone comes through the morbidity, and we feel how he must have loathed the humiliation of fashionable life and fashionable love affairs. He kept it up, however, till after forty, then he retired back to his own Sicily, and shut himself up away from the world. He lived in aristocratic isolation for almost another forty years, and died in Catania, almost forgotten. He was a rather short, broad-shouldered man with a big red moustache.
It was after he had left the fashionable world that he wrote his best work. And this is no longer Italian, but Sicilian. In his Italian style, he manages to get the rhythm of colloquial Sicilian, and Italy no longer exists. Now Verga turns to the peasants of his boyhood, and it is they who fill his soul. It is their lives that matter.
There are three books of Sicilian sketches and short stories, very brilliant, and drenched with the atmosphere of Sicily. They are Cavalleria Rusticana, Novelle Rusticane, and Vagabondaggio. They open out another world at once, the southern, sun-beaten island whose every outline is like pure memory. Then there is a small novel about a girl who is condemned to a convent: Storia di una Capinera. And finally, there are the two great novels, I Malavoglia and Mastro-don Gesualdo. The sketches in Cavalleria Rusticana had already established Verga’s fame. But it was I Malavoglia that was hailed as a masterpiece, in Paris as well as in Italy. It was translated into French by Jose-Maria de Heredia, and after that, into English by an American lady. The English translation, which weakens the book very much, came out in America in the ’nineties, under the title The House by the Medlar Tree, and can still be procured.
Speaking, in conversation, the other day about Giovanni Verga, in Rome, one of the most brilliant young Italian literary men said: There is Verga, ah yes! Some of his things! But a thing like the Storia di una Capinera, now, that is ridiculous. – And it was so obvious, the young man thought all Verga a little ridiculous. Because Verga doesn’t write about lunatics and maniacs, like Pirandello, therefore he is ridiculous. It is the attitude of the smart young. They find Tolstoi ridiculous, George Eliot ridiculous, everybody ridiculous who is not ‘disillusioned.’
The Story of a Blackcap is indeed sentimental and overloaded with emotion. But so is Dickens’ Christmas Carol, or Silas Marner. They do not therefore become ridiculous.
It is a fault in Verga, partly owing to the way he had lived his life, and partly owing to the general tendency of all European literature of the eighteen-sixties and thereabouts, to pour too much emotion, and especially too much pity, over the humble poor. Verga’s novel I Malavoglia is really spoilt by this, and by his exaggeration of the tragic fate of his humble fisher-folk. But then it is characteristic of the southerner, that when he has an emotion he has it wholesale. And the tragic fate of the humble poor was the stunt of that day. Les Misérables stands as the great monument to this stunt. The poor have lately gone rather out of favour, so Hugo stands at a rather low figure, and Verga hardly exists. But when we have got over our reaction against the pity-the-poor stunt, we shall see that there is a good deal of fun in Hugo, and that I Malavoglia is really a very great picture of Sicilian sea-coast life, far more human and valid than Victor Hugo’s picture of Paris.
The trouble with the Italians is, they do tend to take over other people’s stunts and exaggerate them. Even when they invent a stunt of their own, for some mysterious reason it seems second-hand. Victor Hugo’s pity-the-poor was a real Gallic gesture. Verga’s pity-the-poor is just a bit too much of a good thing, and it doesn’t seem to come quite spontaneously from him. He had been inoculated. Or he had reacted.
In his last novel, Mastro-don Gesualdo, Verga has slackened off in his pity-the-poor. But he is still a realist, in the grim Flaubertian sense of the word. A realism which, as every one now knows, has no more to do with reality than romanticism has. Realism is just one of the arbitrary views man takes of man. It sees us all as little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance, and doomed to misery. It is a kind of aeroplane view. It became the popular outlook, and so today we actually are, millions of us, little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance, and doomed to misery; until we take a different view of ourselves. For man always becomes what he passionately thinks he is; since he is capable of becoming almost anything.
Mastro-don Gesualdo is a great realistic novel of Sicily, as Madame Bovary is a great realistic novel of France. They both suffer from the defects of the realistic method. I think the inherent flaw in Madame Bovary – though I hate talking about flaws in great books; but the charge is really against the realistic method – is that individuals like Emma and Charles Bovary are too insignificant to carry the full weight of Gustave Flaubert’s profound sense of tragedy; or, if you will, of tragic futility. Emma and Charles Bovary are two ordinary persons, chosen because they are ordinary. But Flaubert is by no means an ordinary person. Yet he insists on pouring his own deep and bitter tragic consciousness into the little skins of the country doctor and his dissatisfied wife. The result is a certain discrepancy, even a certain dishonesty in the attempt to be too honest. By choosing ordinary people as the vehicles of an extraordinarily passionate feeling of bitterness, Flaubert loads the dice, and wins by a trick which is sure to be found out against him.
Because a great soul like Flaubert’s has a pure satisfaction and joy in its own consciousness, even if the consciousness be only of ultimate tragedy or misery. But the very fact of being so marvellously and vividly aware, awake, as Flaubert’s soul was, is in itself a refutation of the all-is-misery doctrine. Since the human soul has supreme joy in true, vivid consciousness. And Flaubert’s soul has this joy. But Emma Bovary’s soul does not, poor thing, because she was deliberately chosen because her soul was ordinary. So Flaubert cheats us a little, in his doctrine, if not in his art. And his art is biased by his doctrine as much as any artist’s is.
The same is true of Mastro-don Gesualdo. Gesualdo is a peasant’s son, who becomes rich in his own tiny town through his own force and sagacity. He is allowed the old heroic qualities of force and sagacity. Even Emma Bovary has a certain extraordinary female energy of restlessness and unsatisfied desire. So that both Flaubert and Verga allow their heroes something of the hero, after all. The one thing they deny them is the consciousness of heroic effort.
Now Flaubert and Verga alike were aware of their own heroic effort to be truthful, to show things as they are. It was the heroic impulse which made them write their great books. Yet they deny to their protagonists any inkling of the heroic effort. It is in this sense that Emma Bovary and Gesualdo Motta are ‘ordinary.’ Ordinary people don’t have much sense of heroic effort in l
ife; and by the heroic effort we mean that instinctive fighting for more life to come into being, which is a basic impulse in more men than we like to admit; women too. Or it used to be. The discrediting of the heroic effort has almost extinguished that effort in the young, hence the appalling ‘flatness’ of their lives. It is the parents’ fault. Life without the heroic effort, and without belief in the subtle, life-long validity of the heroic impulse, is just stale, flat and unprofitable. As the great realistic novels will show you.
Gesualdo Motta has the makings of a hero. Verga had to grant him something. I think it is in Novelle Rusticane that we find the long sketch or story of the little fat peasant who has become enormously rich by grinding his labourers and bleeding the Barons. It is a marvellous story, reeling with the hot atmosphere of Sicily, and the ironic fatalism of the Sicilians. And that little fat peasant must have been an actual man whom Verga knew – Verga wasn’t good at inventing, he always had to have a core of actuality – and who served as the idea-germ for Gesualdo. But Gesualdo is much more attractive, much nearer the true hero. In fact, with all his energy and sagacity and his natural humaneness, we don’t see how Gesualdo quite escaped the heroic consciousness. The original little peasant, the prototype, was a mere frog, a grabber and nothing else. He had none of Gesualdo’s large humaneness. So that Verga brings Gesualdo much nearer to the hero, yet denies him still any spark of the heroic consciousness, any spark of awareness of a greater impulse within him. Men naturally have this spark, if they are the tiniest bit uncommon. The curious thing is, the moment you deny the spark, it dies, and then the heroic impulse dies with it.
It is probably true that, since the extinction of the pagan gods, the countries of the Mediterranean have never been aware of the heroic impulse in themselves, and so it has died down very low, in them. In Sicily, even now, and in the remoter Italian villages, there is what we call a low level of life, appalling. Just a squalid, unimaginative, heavy, petty-fogging, grubby sort of existence, without light or flame. It is the absence of the heroic awareness, the heroic hope.
The northerners have got over the death of the old Homeric idea of the hero, by making the hero self-conscious, and a hero by virtue of suffering and awareness of suffering. The Sicilians may have little spasms of this sort of heroic feeling, but it never lasts. It is not natural to them.
The Russians carry us to great lengths of introspective heroism. They escape the non-heroic dilemma of our age by making every man his own introspective hero. The merest scrub of a pickpocket is so phenomenally aware of his own soul, that we are made to bow down before the imaginary coruscations of suffering and sympathy that go on inside him. So is Russian literature.
Of course, your soul will coruscate with suffering and sympathy, if you think it does: since the soul is capable of anything, and is no doubt full of unimaginable coruscations which far-off future civilizations will wake up to. So far, we have only lately wakened up to the sympathy-suffering coruscation, so we are full of it. And that is why the Russians are so popular. No matter how much of a shabby little slut you may be, you can learn from Dostoevsky and Tchekov that you have got the most tender, unique soul on earth, coruscating with sufferings and impossible sympathies. And so you may be most vastly important to yourself, introspectively. Outwardly, you will say: Of course I’m an ordinary person, like everybody else. – But your very saying it will prove that you think the opposite: namely, that everybody on earth is ordinary, except yourself.
This is our northern way of heroism, up to date. The Sicilian hasn’t yet got there. Perhaps he never will. Certainly he was nowhere near it in Gesualdo Motta’s day, the mediæval Sicilian day of the middle of the last century, before Italy existed, and Sicily was still part of the Bourbon kingdom of Naples, and about as remote as the kingdom of Dahomey.
The Sicilian has no soul, except that funny little naked man who hops on hot bricks, in purgatory, and howls to be prayed out into paradise; and is in some mysterious way an alter ego, my me beyond the grave. This is the catholic soul, and there is nothing to do about it but to pay, and get it prayed into paradise.
For the rest, in our sense of the word, the Sicilian doesn’t have any soul. He can’t be introspective, because his consciousness, so to speak, doesn’t have any inside to it. He can’t look inside himself, because he is, as it were, solid. When Gesualdo is tormented by mean people, atrociously, all he says is: I’ve got bitter in my mouth. – And when he is dying, and has some awful tumour inside, he says: It is all the bitterness I have known, swelled up inside me. – That is all: a physical fact! Think what even Dmitri Karamazov would have made of it! And Dmitri Karamazov doesn’t go half the lengths of the other Russian soul-twisters. Neither is he half the man Gesualdo is, although he may be much more ‘interesting,’ if you like soul-twisters.
In Mastro-don Gesualdo you have, in a sense, the same sort of tragedy as in the Russians, yet anything more un-Russian could not be imagined. Un-Russian almost as Homer. But Verga will have gods neither above nor below.
The Sicilians today are supposed to be the nearest descendants of the classic Greeks, and the nearest thing to the classic Greeks in life and nature. And perhaps it is true. Like the classic Greeks, the Sicilians have no insides, introspectively speaking. But, alas, outside they have no busy gods. It is their great loss. Because Jesus is to them only a wonder-man who was killed by foreigners and villains, and who will help you to get out of Hell, perhaps.
In the true sense of the word, the Sicily of Gesualdo is drearily godless. It needs the bright and busy gods outside. The inside gods, gods who have to be inside a man’s soul, are distasteful to people who live in the sun. Once you get to Ceylon, you see that even Buddha is purely an outside god, purely objective to the natives. They have no conception of his being inside themselves.
It was the same with the Greeks, it is the same today with the Sicilians. They aren’t capable of introspection and the inner Jesus. They leave it all to us and the Russians.
Save that he has no bright outside gods, Gesualdo is very like an old Greek: the same energy and quickness of response, the same vivid movement, the same ambition and real passion for wealth, the same easy conscience, the same queer openness, without ever really openly committing himself, and the same ancient astuteness. He is prouder, more fearless, more frank, yet more subtle than an Italian; more on his own. He is like a Greek or a traditional Englishman, in the way he just goes ahead by himself. And in that, he is Sicilian, not Italian.
And he is Greek above all, in having no inside, in the Russian sense of the word.
The tragedy is, he has no heroic gods or goddesses to fix his imagination. He has nothing, not even a country. Even his Greek ambitious desire to come out splendidly, with a final splendid look of the thing and a splendid final ring of words, turns bitter. The Sicilian aristocracy was an infinitely more paltry thing than Gesualdo himself.
It is the tragedy of a man who is forced to be ordinary, because all visions have been taken away from him. It is useless to say he should have had the northern inwardness and the Russianizing outlet. You might as well say the tall and reckless asphodel of Magna Græcia should learn to be a snowdrop. ‘I’ll learn you to be a toad!’
But a book exists by virtue of the vividness, the aliveness and powerful pulsing of its life-portrayal, and not by virtue of the pretty or unpretty things it portrays. Mastro-don Gesualdo is a great undying book, one of the great novels of Europe. If you cannot read it because it is à terre, and has neither nervous uplift nor nervous hysteria, you condemn yourself.
As a picture of Sicily in the middle of the last century, it is marvellous. But it is a picture done from the inside. There are no picture-postcard effects. The thing is a heavy, earth-adhering organic whole. There is nothing showy.
Sicily in the middle of the last century was an incredibly poor, lost, backward country. Spaniards, Bourbons, one after the other they had killed the life in her. The Thousand and Garibaldi had not risen over the horizon, neither had
the great emigration to America begun, nor the great return, with dollars and a newish outlook. The mass of the people were poorer even than the poor Irish of the same period, and save for climate, their conditions were worse. There were some great and wealthy landlords, dukes and barons still. But they lived in Naples, or in Palermo at the nearest. In the country, there were no roads at all for wheeled vehicles, consequently no carts, nothing but donkeys and packmules on the trails, or a sick person in a mule litter, or armed men on horseback, or men on donkeys. The life was mediæval as in Russia. But whereas the Russia of 1850 is a vast flat country with a most picturesque life of nobles and serfs and soldiers, open and changeful, Sicily is a most beautiful country, but hilly, steep, shut-off, and abandoned, and the life is, or was, grimly unpicturesque in its dead monotony. The great nobles shunned the country, as in Ireland. And the people were sunk in bigotry, suspicion, and gloom. The life of the villages and small towns was of an incredible spiteful meanness, as life always is when there is not enough change and fresh air; and the conditions were sordid, dirty, as they always are when the human spirits sink below a certain level. It is not in such places that one looks for passion and colour. The passion and colour in Verga’s stories come in the villages near the east coast, where there is change since Ulysses sailed that way. Inland, in the isolation, the lid is on, and the intense watchful malice of neighbours is infinitely worse than any police system, infinitely more killing to the soul and the passionate body.
The picture is a bitter and depressing one, while ever we stay in the dense and smelly little streets. Verga wrote what he knew and felt. But when we pass from the habitations of sordid man, into the light and marvellous open country, then we feel at once the undying beauty of Sicily and the Greek world, a morning beauty, that has something miraculous in it, of purple anemones and cyclamens, and sumach and olive trees, and the place where Persephone came above-world, bringing back spring.
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