So the change, the endless and rapid change. In the sunny countries, the change seems more vivid, and more complete than in the grey countries. In the grey countries, there is a grey or dark permanency, over whose surface passes change ephemeral, leaving no real mark. In England, winters and summers shadowily give place to one another. But underneath lies the grey substratum, the permanency of cold, dark reality where bulbs live, and reality is bulbous, a thing of endurance and stored-up, starchy energy.
But in the sunny countries, change is the reality and permanence is artificial and a condition of imprisonment. In the North, man tends instinctively to imagine, to conceive that the sun is lighted like a candle, in an everlasting darkness, and that one day the candle will go out, the sun will be exhausted, and the everlasting dark will resume uninterrupted sway. Hence, to the northerner, the phenomenal world is essentially tragical, because it is temporal and must cease to exist. Its very existence implies ceasing to exist, and this is the root of the feeling of tragedy.
But to the southerner, the sun is so dominant that, if every phenomenal body disappeared out of the universe, nothing would remain but bright luminousness, sunniness. The absolute is sunniness; and shadow, or dark, is only merely relative: merely the result of something getting between one and the sun.
This is the instinctive feeling of the ordinary southerner. Of course, if you start to reason, you may argue that the sun is a phenomenal body. Therefore it came into existence, therefore it will pass out of existence, therefore the very sun is tragic in its nature.
But this is just argument. We think, because we have to light a candle in the dark, therefore some First Cause had to kindle the sun in the infinite darkness of the beginning.
The argument is entirely shortsighted and specious. We do not know in the least whether the sun ever came into existence, and we have not the slightest possible ground for conjecturing that the sun will ever pass out of existence. All that we do know, by actual experience, is that shadow comes into being when some material object intervenes between us and the sun, and that shadow ceases to exist when the intervening object is removed. So that, of all temporal or transitory or bound-to-cease things that haunt our existence, shadow or darkness, is the one which is purely and simply temporal. We can think of death, if we like, as of something permanently intervening between us and the sun: and this is at the root of the southern, under-world idea of death. But this doesn’t alter the sun at all. As far as experience goes, in the human race, the one thing that is always there is the shining sun, and dark shadow is an accident of intervention.
Hence, strictly, there is no tragedy. The universe contains no tragedy, and man is only tragical because he is afraid of death. For my part, if the sun always shines, and always will shine, in spite of millions of clouds of words, then death, somehow, does not have many terrors. In the sunshine, even death is sunny. And there is no end to the sunshine.
That is why the rapid change of the Tuscan spring is utterly free, for me, of any sense of tragedy. ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ Why, precisely where they ought to be. Where are the little yellow aconites of eight weeks ago? I neither know nor care. They were sunny and the sun shines, and sunniness means change, and petals passing and coming. The winter aconites sunnily came, and sunnily went. What more? The sun always shines. It is our fault if we don’t think so.
Germans and Latins (1927)
It is already summer in Tuscany, the sun is hot, the earth is baked hard, and the soul has changed her rhythm. The nightingales sing all day and all night – not at all sadly, but brightly, vividly, impudently, with a trilling power of assertion quite disproportionate to the size of the shy bird. Why the Greeks should have heard the nightingale weeping or sobbing is more than I can understand. Anyhow, perhaps the Greeks were looking for the tragic, rather than the rhapsodic consummation to life. They were predisposed.
Tomorrow, however, is the first of May, and already summer is here. Yesterday, in the flood of sunshine on the Arno at evening, I saw two German boys steering out of the Por Santa Maria onto the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. They were dark-haired, not blonds, but otherwise the true Wandervögel type, in shirts and short trousers and thick boots, hatless, coat slung in the rucksack, shirt-sleeves rolled back above the brown muscular arms, shirt-breast open from the brown, scorched breast, and the face and neck glowing sun-darkened as they strode into the flood of evening sunshine, out of the narrow street. They were talking loudly to one another in German, as if oblivious of their surroundings, in that thronged crossing of the Ponte Vecchio. And they strode with strong strides, heedless, marching past the Italians as if the Italians were but shadows. Strong, heedless, travelling intently, bent a little forward from the rucksacks in the plunge of determination to travel onwards, looking neither to right nor left, conversing in strong voices only with one another, where were they going, in the last golden light of the sun-flooded evening, over the Arno? Were they leaving town, at this hour? Were they pressing on, to get out of the Porta Romana before nightfall, going southwards?
In spite of the fact that one is used to these German youths, in Florence especially, in summer, still the mind calls a halt each time they appear and pass by. If swans or wild geese flew honking, low over the Arno in the evening light, moving with that wedge-shaped, intent, unswerving progress that is so impressive, they would create the same impression on one. They would bring that sense of remote, far-off lands which these Germans bring, and that sense of mysterious, unfathomable purpose.
Now no one knows better than myself that Munich or Frankfort-am-Main are not far-off, remote, lonely lands: on the contrary: and that these boys are not mysteriously migrating from one unknown to another. They are just wandering for wandering’s sake, and moving instinctively, perhaps, towards the sun, and towards Rome, the old centre-point. There is really nothing more remarkable in it than in the English and Americans sauntering diffidently and, as it were, obscurely along the Lungarno. The English in particular seem to move under a sort of Tarnhelm, having a certain power of invisibility. They manage most of the time to efface themselves, deliberately, from the atmosphere. And the Americans, who don’t try to efface themselves, give the impression of not being really there. They have left their real selves way off in the United States, in Europe they are like rather void Doppelgänger. I am speaking, of course, of the impression of the streets. Inside the hotels, the trains, the tea-rooms and the restaurants, it is another affair. There you may have a little England, very insular, or a little America, very money-rich democratic, or a little Germany, assertive, or a little Scandinavia, domestic. But I am not speaking of indoor impressions. Merely of the streets.
And in the streets of Florence or Rome, the Wandervögel make a startling impression, whereas the rest of the foreigners impress one rather negatively. When I am in Germany, then Germany seems to me very much like anywhere else, especially England or America.
And when I see the Wandervögel pushing at evening out of the Por Santa Maria, across the blaze of sun and into the Ponte Vecchio, then Germany becomes again to me what it was to the Romans: the mysterious, half-dark land of the north, bristling with gloomy forests, resounding to the cry of wild geese and of swans, the land of the stork and the bear and the Drachen and the Greifen.
I know it is not so. Yet the impression comes back over me, as I see the youths pressing heedlessly past. And I know it is the same with the Italians. They see, as their ancestors saw in the Goths and the Vandals, i barbari, the barbarians. That is what the little policeman with his staff and his peaked cap thinks, as the boys from the north go by: i barbari! Not with dislike or contempt: not at all: but with the old, weird wonder. So he might look up at wild swans flying over the Ponte Vecchio: wild strangers from the north.
So strong is the impression the Wandervögel make on the imagination! It is not that I am particularly impressionable. I know the Italians feel very much as I do.
And when one sees English people with rucksacks and shirtsle
eves rolled back and hob-nailed boots, as one does sometimes, even in Tuscany, one notices them, but they make very little impression. They are rather odd than extraordinary. They are just gli escursionisti, quite comprehensible: part of the fresh-air movement. The Italians will laugh at them, but they know just what to think about them.
Whereas about the Wandervögel they do not quite know what to think, nor even what to feel: since we even only feel the things we know how to feel. And we do not know what to feel about these Wandervögel boys. They bring with them such a strong feeling of somewhere else, of an unknown country, an unknown race, a powerful, still unknown northland.
How wonderful it must have been, at the end of the old Roman Empire, for the Roman citizens to see the big, bare-limbed Goths, with their insolent-indifferent blue eyes, stand looking on at the market-places! They were there like a vision. Non angli sed angeli, as we were told the first great Pope said of the British slaves. Creatures from the beyond, presaging another world of men.
So it was then. So it is, to a certain extent, even now. Strange wanderers towards the sun, forerunners of another world of men. That is how one still feels, as one sees the Wandervögel cross the Ponte Vecchio. They carry with them another world, another air, another meaning of life. The meaning is not explicit, not as much as it is even in storks or wild geese. But there it lies, implicit.
Curious how different it is with the well-dressed Germans. They are very often quite domesticated, and in the sense that Ibsen’s people are ridiculous, just a little ridiculous. They are so bourgeois, so much more a product of civilization than the producers of civilization. They are so much buttoned up inside their waistcoats, and stuck inside their trousers, and encircled in their starched collars. They are not so grotesquely self-conscious and physically withered or non-existent as the equivalent English bourgeois tourist. And they are never quite so utterly domesticated as the equivalent Scandinavian. But they have so often the unsure look of children who have been turned out in their best clothes by their mama, and told to go and enjoy themselves: Now enjoy yourselves! That is a little absurd.
The Italians, whatever they are, are what they are. So you know them, you feel that they have developed themselves into an expression of themselves, as far as they go. With the English, weird fish as they are very often, you feel the same: whatever they are, they are what they are, they can’t be much different, poor dears. But with the Germans abroad, you feel: These people ought really to be something else. They are not themselves, in their Sunday clothes. They are being something they are not.
And one has the feeling even stronger, with many Russians. One feels: These people are not themselves at all. They are the roaring echoes of other people, older races, other languages. Even the things they say aren’t really Russian things: they’re all sorts of half-translations from Latin or French or English or God-knows-what.
Some of this feeling one has about the Germans one meets abroad: as if they were talking in translation: as if the ideas, however original, always had a faint sound of translations. As if they were never quite themselves.
Then, when one sees the Wandervögel, comes the shock of realization, and one thinks: There they go, the real Germans, seeking the sun! They have really nothing to say. They are roving, roving, roving, seeking themselves. That is it, with these ‘barbarians.’ They are still seeking themselves. And they have not yet found themselves. They are turning to the sun again, in the great adventure of seeking themselves.
Man does not start ready-made. He is a weird creature that slowly evolves himself through the ages. He need never stop evolving himself, for a human being who was completely himself has never even been conceived. The great Goethe was half-born, Shakespeare the same, Napoleon only a third-born. And most people are hardly born at all, into individual consciousness.
But with the Italians and the French, the mass-consciousness which governs the individual is really derived from the individual. Whereas with the German and the Russian, it seems to me not so. The mass-consciousness has been taken over, by great minds like Goethe or Frederick, from other people, and does not spring inherent from the Teutonic race itself. In short, the Teutonic mind, young, powerful, active, is always thinking in terms of somebody else’s experience, and almost never in terms of its own experience.
Then comes a great unrest. It seems to show so plainly in the Wandervögel. Thinking in terms of somebody else’s experience at last becomes utterly unsatisfactory. Then thought altogether falls into chaos – and then into discredit. The young don’t choose to think any more. Blindly, they turn to the sun.
Because the sun is anti-thought. Thought is of the shade. In bright sunshine no man thinks. So the Wandervögel turn instinctively to the sun, which melts thoughts away, and sets the blood running with another, non-mental consciousness.
And this is why, at times of great change, the northern nations turn to the sun. And this is why, when revolutions come, they often come in May. It is the sun making the blood revolt against old conceptions. And this is why the nations of the sun do not live the life of thought, therefore they are more ‘themselves.’ In the grey shadow the northern nations mould themselves according to a few ideas until their whole life is buttoned and choked up. Then comes a revulsion. They cast off the clothes and turn to the sun, as the Wandervögel do, strange harbingers.
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 hai
led 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.
Life with a Capital L Page 33