Critical Studies Part 7

I believe that the novels of Mr Crawford of which the scene and the characters are Italian are not among those of his works which are the most generally popular. This fact, if it be a fact, must be due to the general inability of his English and American public to appreciate their accuracy of observation and lineation. Nearly all of them have qualities which cannot be gauged by those to whom the nationality of his personages in these works is unknown. In my own works, of which the scene is in Italy, I have dealt almost exclusively with the Italian peasantry. Mr Crawford has devoted his attention to the middle and the higher cla.s.ses. I do not think his portraiture of the Italian aristocracy always redolent of the soil, but that of the lower and middle cla.s.ses is faithful to a wonderful degree. That side of Italian life which is given in _Marzio's Crucifix_, for instance, is drawn with an accuracy not to be surpa.s.sed. The whole of this story indeed is admirable in its construction and execution. There is not a page one would wish cancelled, and nothing could be added which would increase its excellence. It is to my taste the _capo d'opera_ of all which he has. .h.i.therto done.

I think in his studies of the Italian aristocracy he has given them less charm and more backbone than they possess. He has drawn their pa.s.sions more visible and furious than they are, and their wills less mutable and less feeble than they are in general. He seems to have mistaken their obstinacy for strength, while, if he have perceived it, he has not rendered that captivating courtesy and graceful animation which are so lovable in them, and which render so many of their men and women so irresistibly seductive. According to him they are a savage set of _berserkers_, always cutting each other's throats, and he does not in any way render that extreme politeness which so effectually conceals the real thoughts of the Italian gentleman, and which never deserts him except in rare moments of irresistible fury. No one remembers so constantly as the Italian of all cla.s.ses that language is given us to conceal our thoughts, and no one lives so completely as the Italian does from the cradle to the grave in strict concealment of his thoughts even from his nearest and his dearest.

But in his Italian _genre_ pictures, and in portraiture of the people whom we meet every day in society, Mr Crawford has a delightful pencil; little side studies also of more humble persons, which many writers would neglect, are charming in his treatment; take, for instance, the old priest of Aquila in _Saracinesca_; with how few touches he is made to live for us. We only see him once, but he will always remain in our memory; in his whitewashed room with its sweet smell from the pot of pinks, and his touching regret that he has never seen Rome, and at his age cannot hope to do so.

His priests, by the way, are always excellently drawn, from the humble village vicar to the learned and imposing cardinal. He has penetrated alike their interiors and their characters with that skill which is only born of sympathy, and it is therefore perhaps only natural that he has not the faintest conception of the motives and views of the socialist and republican whom he dreads and hates.

All these charming little details, like the pot of pinks, can only be thoroughly appreciated by those who know intimately Italian character and habits; but they abound, and show so much of fine observation and delicate discernment in the author that one cannot forgive him for ever beating the big drum of florid sensation.

Let me not be understood to mean that crime, or the impulse of crime, is not a perfectly legitimate subject for the novelist; both can be made so, but they are only so when treated as Mr Crawford himself treats them in _Marzio's Crucifix_. When treated as he treats them in _To Leeward_ and _Greifenstein_ and _Casa Braccio_ they are merely coa.r.s.e and inartistic. He has a leaning towards melodrama which is chiefly to be regretted because it mars and strains the style most natural to him, and does not accord with his way of looking at life, which is not either poetic or pa.s.sionate, but slightly sad, and slightly humorous, modern and instinctively superficial, superficial in that sense in which modern society itself is so.

In _Marzio's Crucifix_ he is perfectly natural, and one cannot but wish that he had never left that manner of treatment. Every motive therein is natural, every character consistent with itself. This naturalness in his characters is Mr Crawford's greatest attraction, and when he departs from it, as he does in such detestable melodramas as the _Witch of Prague_ and _Greifenstein_, he is no longer himself. It is hard to understand that the same author can create the most delicate of aquarelles and the most glaring of posters, or why one who can draw so well and finely in silver-point can descend to daub with brooms in such gross distemper. If this be the price of versatility, it were best not to be versatile. But it is not versatility, because true versatility consists in possessing a many-sided power which flashes like a jewel of which all the facets are equally well cut. True versatility, moreover, does not consist in the mere change of subject, but in the change of style, of treatment of thought, in fact, the mutation of the entire mind of an author, such as brings it into entire harmony with its fresh field and its new atmosphere. There is no such change in these novels. Mr Crawford is Mr Crawford always. As he never loses himself in his creations, so he is always present in them to the reader; and his style never varies, whether he treats of horrible psychological mysteries in Prague or of pleasant carnival seasons in Rome.

He is not strong or forcible in tragedy. When it is incidental in his stories like the murder of Montevarchi, or the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of Ser Tommaso, it is admirably sketched in; but when it forms the structure and essence of a romance he fails entirely to give it sublimity; it becomes in his hands a mere scarecrow, which makes us only smile as its wooden hands beat the empty air. One feels that it is not his natural element, that he does not like it or feel at home in it, and has merely lent himself to it from some wrong impression that the public requires it; due, perhaps, to the suggestion of some unwise publisher or friend. The coa.r.s.e melodrama with which some of his novels ends is not in unison with the characters or the scope of his work. It is quite true that, as murder is, in some circ.u.mstances, justified in actual life, so in some circ.u.mstances it may be used as a _denouement_ in fiction with perfect accuracy; yet it is always a violent ending which fully accords with romance of wild life or peasant life, but always jars, unless introduced with the most perfect skill, in stories of men and women of the world; because the evil pa.s.sions of this latter cla.s.s of persons are of a different quality, and find different modes of relief, from the primitive and barbarous satisfaction of killing enemies or rivals. All the influences and habits of society make it almost impossible for men and women of society to become a.s.sa.s.sins.

Now Mr Crawford can draw men and women of the world so well that it is a pity he so often goes out of his way to spoil his portraits of them with the bowl and dagger taken from a different phase of life from that in which they move.

He is always a gentleman, and he is at his best when writing of gentlemen in the society which he knows so well. Duels are quite natural in good society everywhere, except in England, and no one since Charles Lever ever described them so well as Mr Crawford; but murders are not general in the world of well-bred people, indeed are not very often heard of out of the lowest strata of plebeian life.

In _Casa Braccio_ a fine motive, that of the peasant of Subiaco's long-cherished vengeance, with its final satisfaction, both based on a mistake, is wasted, because no one can care in the least for the man who is slain, and the original sin committed by this victim (marriage with a nun), although it seems so great to Mr Crawford, appears to us no sin at all; so that his tragic end neither moves us nor satisfies in us any sense of justice. What are admirably rendered and true to life in _Casa Braccio_ are not Griggs and Gloria, or Angus Dalrymple and Maria Addorata, but the peasants of Subiaco, Stefanone, with his long-cherished vendetta, and his wife, Sora Nanna, who wears her lost daughter's shoes because it would have been a sin to waste them. One regrets that two persons so perfectly natural and well drawn should be set on a pyre of flaring melodrama which obscures their portraits in its smoke and flame. Why could he not give us a story of Subiaco, pa.s.sionate but natural, in which the action would have pa.s.sed entirely in that interesting and little-known part of the Sabine mountains?

When I use the term melodrama, I mean by it that which mimics the tragic, but falls short of it; the tragic, imitated but so environed, that it loses dignity and has something of the inflated and grotesque.

The melodrama in _Pietro Ghisleri_, in _Taquisara_, and in _The Children of the King_ is this kind of melodrama; it does not move us for a moment; we are, on the contrary, impatient of it in a modern period and history, with neither of which it has any harmony. In the latter story the conception of Rughero, though by no means new, is fine; but the frame in which this mariner is set lacks all fitness for such a figure; and the man whom he murders is not sinner enough, nor serious enough in his actions, for the reader to be moved to pardon the act as the author himself pardons it. If violent delights have violent endings, violent endings need strong provocation and clear explanation; they should appear to the reader to be inevitable, the offspring of an unavoidable result. To the reader such a crime as this should appear to be the inexorable justice of an inevitable retribution. But in the violent _denouement_ of _The Children of the King_ the cause is trivial, the act under the circ.u.mstances improbable, and the rude shock of it is not in accordance with any of the other characters and with the light, careless modernity of the setting of this story.

This defect of consistency, which is grave in literature, would be ruinous on the stage where action is so much quicker, and where the idiosyncrasies of each personage are so visible to the audience; and such a fault is the more vexatious because it shows that the author was never really absorbed in his own creations, was never so possessed with them that they dominated him and made him do what they chose, as Bulwer Lytton has said that the characters of every true novelist must do, because a character once conceived is like a child, being once begotten, it becomes what it must, we cannot control the subsequent shape it takes.

Another defect of Mr Crawford's works is usually that their interest flags towards the close, that this close is too abrupt, and that it gives the reader the impression of the narrative being brought to an untimely end because the writer no longer cared about narrating it. This defect may be noticed in nearly all his stories, beginning with _Mr Isaacs_, in which it is conspicuous; and is startlingly and irritatingly visible in one of his latest, _Adam Johnstone's Son_; indeed, in the last-named story the conclusion is obviously totally different from what it was intended to be in the opening chapters. Now, a well-constructed novel may please you or not, may be attractive or offensive, but it will always be accurately conceived and harmoniously balanced; and nothing animate or intimate will be introduced into it which has not some bearing direct or indirect upon the plot. Nothing can be more incorrect than to excite the expectations of the reader by indications which result in nothing, sign-posts on a road which do but lead to a blank wall.

A grave violation of this rule is frequently to be found in the Crawford stories, no worse one than that in this story of Adam Johnstone's son, where a long chapter is occupied by an incident with a brutal Neapolitan carter on the Sorrento road. The man is knocked down by the hero, and endeavours in return to stab him; carabineers arrive and arrest the carter and not the Englishman (as in real life they unquestionably would have done). The whole incident, related with much spirit, is obviously only in its place, only pardonable as an episode, if the carter be destined to appear again and sate his thirst for vengeance on the hero.

But he disappears from the scene for ever as the carabineers handcuff him. We neither see nor hear any more of him, nor does the Englishman hear any more of the matter, which in actual life certainly would have caused him much annoyance at the local tribunal. The appet.i.te of the reader should not be tempted by dishes, which become a mere Barmecide's feast, in this manner. Some intention must have been in the author's mind when he created this scene. Why did he not carry out his intention?

In this manner many combinations and situations of the most interesting and uncommon kind are deliberately thrown away unused. He frequently introduces personages about whom he excites our liveliest interest, and whom he then forsakes or dismisses with an indifference which the reader does not share. It is as though a painter painted into his canvas numerous figures which he has never finished, though he sends out his picture as a finished work. The only novels of his which are entirely free from this defect are the _Cigarette Maker_, the _Three Fates_, and _Marzio's Crucifix_, and here I cannot resist (though it is not within the scope of this article, since its venue is America) pointing out how delicate, subtle, and clever is that story ent.i.tled the _Three Fates_.

There is little movement in it, no incident of any note, its interest lies entirely in the development of character and in the evolution of feeling, but these are so treated that they suffice to hold the reader's charmed attention, and the study of the man whose hesitations and tergiversations make the subject of it is one which may be caviare to the general, but which may be read again and again with sympathy and curiosity by those who can appreciate psychological problems. The persons in it are such as we may have known to-day or may know to-morrow; and the working of their minds and inclinations is traced with a masterly skill, and is as correct as a physiologist's diagram of the nervous system.

What to me is especially attractive in Mr Crawford's novels is the atmosphere of good breeding which one breathes in them. One feels in the company of a well-bred man. Their philosophy, their experiences, their views, are all those of a man of the world; and there is in them a tolerance and a total absence of prejudice (except in religious and political matters) which are refres.h.i.+ng, and which are a fair approach to, if not an actual attainment of, unbia.s.sed liberality. There is in them no enthusiasm for anything, no altruism, no deep emotion. They are unfortunately entirely lacking in any perception of those myriads of other lives not human, but as sentient as the human, such as vibrates in every line of Pierre Loti's works. We have never in his novels any profound tenderness like that with which the Freres Rosny speak of the semi-humanity of inanimate things, or show us the dog gambolling on the wayside turf in all the simple joy of its youth and its pleasure in existence. To Mr Crawford as to Peter Bell, a primrose by the river's side is a primrose, and it is nothing more, and the thrush or the linnet which sings in the hawthorn above the primrose roots for him has no existence. He has the American's indifference to all created things which are not human. There are no animals in his books except two poor terriers (who have their necks broken by the odious lover in _To Leeward_), and the unhappy cat, introduced only to be poisoned in _Taquisara_. There is nothing which indicates that he cares for nature in any of its phases, and he calls the cicala a locust.

In Italy he lives only for the people around him as he would live in Pall Mall, or Broadway, or the Champs Elysees. That pa.s.sion with which Italy has inspired Sh.e.l.ley, Byron, George Sand, De Musset, Owen Meredith, even the calm a.n.a.lytic mind of Taine, has never touched him.

He has never felt the ecstasy which is embodied in that single phrase of Taine's, 'On nage dans la lumiere.' One would say that the moonlight s.h.i.+ning on the waters of Tiber, under the bridge of St Angelo, is no more to him than a flash-light illumining a grain-elevator on the Hudson. All which is still Italy, of colour, of perfume, of light, of legend, of rapture, of emotion, has wholly escaped him; he has never felt its _hysterica pa.s.sio_; he has never known its eternal youth, he has never seen its lost G.o.ds rise and walk through its blossoming gra.s.s as the star rays s.h.i.+ne in the white cups of the narcissus of its fields.

But of the people who pa.s.s him in the Corso and on the Chiaja, who shake hands with him at Montecitorio and on the Lung' Arno, who lounge and talk with him at the cafes, and the legations, and the public gardens, he is an admirable student, and an admirable photographer.

One of the most admirable of his portraits is that of the young Don Orsino, the hero of the novel of that name. Sant' Ilario, like his gallant old father, might be a North German, a Hungarian, or a Scottish n.o.ble, his temperament is, indeed, much more northern than southern; but Don Orsino,[5] his son, is exactly that which he is represented to be, a youthful Italian of high rank, who has been educated at an English public school, and has all the vanity, and egotism, and _secheresse de coeur_ of modern youth in him. The type of the modern youngster of rank was never so well drawn as in this story of his _debut_ in speculation and his failure in it. His character is one very difficult to draw, that coldness, that self-reliance, that self-sufficiency, which are something at once harder and less contemptible than conceit, the qualities which will make him successful later on but will never make him lovable or tender; the instincts of race which hold him back from meanness but are not strong enough to raise him to n.o.bility, attenuated as they have been by modern education, all these are rendered with the utmost skill till the boy, in his sterile and self-satisfied modernity, lives before us, and vain and selfish though he be, we are loth to part from him, and curious to know what his future will become. In his history that one supreme charm of Mr Crawford's, of which I have previously spoken, his naturalness, is conspicuous; nothing can be more natural than the relations of Don Orsino with his mother and father and those who surround him, and the crafty _affaristi_ who get him into their meshes of speculation.

[Footnote 5: A novel called _Corleone_ reproduces Don Orsino, but was published after these pages had been printed. It has been very popular, but in it, unfortunately, Don Orsino is given away deplorably, and turned into a mere romantic lover, which in real life he never would have become.]

What is not natural in this story is the character of Madame d'Aranjuez.

She comes before us instinct with all which goes to make up an unscrupulous adventuress. She is that, or she is nothing. She does her uttermost to fascinate and capture the son of Saracinesca. She succeeds; and lo! with one of those _volte-faces_ which are so frequent and so irritating in Mr Crawford's works, she gives up the game when she has won it, does nothing that we expect her to do, and marries the speculator who has beggared Don Orsino on condition that this gentleman shall restore to Don Orsino all he has lost. Nothing more improbable or inconsistent, given the character of the woman, could possibly be conceived; nor is it more probable that the haughty and irascible young man would endure to be served by her mediation, however it might be veiled. Everything surrounding this lady promises us pa.s.sion, intrigue, perhaps tragedy, certainly peril, but we are balked of them all. The mysteries concerning her turn out to be very tame ones indeed, she appears a wholly innocent and harmless person, and even a very large paper-knife shaped like a dagger, which we are told always lies beside her and which has no _raison d'etre_, unless it is to be ultimately used in killing or defending somebody, does nothing whatever and disappears from the story, leaving us in tantalising ignorance of why we were ever introduced to it.

Now no French writer of any degree would have created that remarkable paper-knife, and kept it lying beside the heroine, and laid stress on its unusual size and splendour, unless he intended to turn it to account as a _deus ex machina_. To draw the reader's attention to a conspicuous object, and then to cheat the expectations raised concerning it, is a great fault in art; but it is one of which English and American writers are continually guilty. It is true we are told casually, towards the end, that her husband had hit her with this paper-knife, and that for this blow the famous fencer Spicca had killed him; but this is mentioned incidentally, and does not sufficiently account for the interest we have been excited to take in this weapon. Spicca is, on the contrary, admirably drawn, and the regard we feel for the merciless old duellist is roused in us with true art. We have that sense of Spicca having really lived, and really been that which he is described, which can only be aroused in a reader by life-like accurate and sympathetic portraiture.

There are many pathetic touches in this portrait of Spicca, and little incidents entirely true to the life of an Italian gentleman of aristocratic race and straitened means, as when in his distress of mind his servant persuades him to eat 'a little mixed fry' with a fresh salad, 'the salad is very good to-day'; and Spicca, touched and refreshed, examines his meagre purse and takes out a ten-franc note which he gives to the man, remarking that it will buy him a pair of boots, and this ten-franc note is, when his purse lies on the table at night, slipped back into it by the servant, who knows that his master 'never counts.'

I think the most exquisitely drawn of all Mr Crawford's many characters is this Count Spicca; because the character of a noted duellist who invariably kills, and kills how and in what way he chooses, with profound indifference and unerring accuracy, is one very hard to make sympathetic to the general reader, and especially to the English reader, by whom duelling is abhorred. But Spicca is so perfect a gentleman, so sad and simple and calm, so natural and una.s.suming despite his deadly power, that no one can regard him without interest and even affection, and see him without sorrow ill-treated by a woman so extremely unpleasant as Consuelo Aranjuez, for whom he has done and suffered so much.

The fencing of Mr Crawford is always very accurate, and we hold our breath when Leone Saracinesca acts as his son's second. All this is quite true to life in Italy, where duels with the sabre or rapier are still of daily occurrence, and are resorted to after any insult, and after a mere difference of opinion or trivial impoliteness.

It is wonderful that these stories have not been appropriated for the stage by those unscrupulous thieves the London dramatists, for they are full of dramatic situations and of duologues in which the give and take is brilliant. Some have indeed the dramatic effect of inconsistency of which I have spoken, but all are full of fine suggestions for the theatre. _Saracinesca_, or _Sant' Ilario_, for instance, would be transferable to the stage with scarcely any alteration. It is full of incidents which would be most effective on the stage; and the strong emotions and sensational scenes which it offers would most certainly thrill and charm an audience.

One wonders also that their author himself does not write for the stage, for his command of incident and of intricacies of circ.u.mstance would raise him high above many playwrights of the London theatre. There are scenes in nearly all his works which might be put upon the boards with scarcely any alteration, such as the duel between Don Giovanni and Del Ferice in _Saracinesca_, and the death scene of the librarian Meschini in _Sant' Ilario_, while the whole story of _The Children of the King_ would furnish matter for a romantic drama were the causes for the crime in it made more credible.

Here let me note a small but irritating fault in these works, _i.e._, the childish habit (common to writers of the last century) of naming characters after their calling, or after some moral characteristic.

Meschini is the plural of the Italian adjective mean, cowardly, or contemptible, and is given to a man with these defects; while a very interesting person, a French artist famous in portraiture, is unfortunately burdened with the ridiculous and impossible name of Gouache. Mr Crawford is indeed frequently infelicitous in names. In _Casa Braccio_, the American lover of Gloria, a stagey sort of person, but one whom we are invited to regard with admiration and sympathy, is weighted with the shocking name of Griggs. Mr Crawford does not see that were Oth.e.l.lo or Hamlet called Griggs, either would try to move the souls of men in vain. If a name does not matter to a rose, it does matter immensely to a character in a book; and there are so many euphonious names in use in the world that it is wholly unpardonable to select a ludicrous or ugly one. The poor little natural child of Gloria in this same novel is also burdened at its birth by the name of Walter Crowdie, which, for a baby, has such a comical effect that the very pathetic position of this poor infant is rendered ridiculous by it. It is perhaps under the idea of being realistic that these droll names are selected to jar on tragic circ.u.mstances, but then Mr Crawford's stories are not realistic, and cannot be made so by this one expedient.

He has also another fault which is visible in nearly all his works, and is a grave one. He forgets at times the attributes which he has given to his chief characters. Thus Giovanni Saracinesca is described as a man of strong, n.o.ble, and reticent nature, and of intellect so superior that his wife tells him he will be very great some day; and he resembles, indeed, precisely, one of those men who become great leaders of other men. But in the sequel (where he is called Sant' Ilario) all this changes, and he behaves like an idiot, and of his great qualities we hear no more and certainly see nothing. And where we still farther follow his fortunes in the subsequent sequel of _Don Orsino_, he has sunk into complete self-effacement, so complete that he allows his son to be the a.s.sociate and the debtor of that very Del Ferice whose utter baseness and vileness he knows so well, and who tried in the famous duel to murder him by foul play. Sequels are always ill-advised trials of the author's consistency and the reader's memory, and it would have been unquestionably better to have made Don Orsino stand alone in his history and not figure as the son of Giovanni Saracinesca and of Corona d'Astrardente. When a reader has followed with interest and sympathy the fortune of an impa.s.sioned lover it is trying to see him standing in St Peter's 'a middle-aged man,' talking to a son taller than himself. Great art is required to make a character 'grow' quite consistently. The continuation of histories, thus, greatly pleased Anthony Trollope and Thackeray, but I cannot consider it a desirable thing in fiction.

Mr Crawford misses many opportunities of developing the capacity for a.n.a.lysis and deduction which he undoubtedly possesses. He is very observant but he is content to note a fact, he does not trouble himself to seek its origin or the influences which have made it the fact it is.

When the two young people who wish to marry in _Marzio's Crucifix_ discuss what their house shall be like, and what colour the walls and furniture, their biographer adds, 'Italians have lost all sense of colour.' This is true, but it is one of the most amazing, grievous, and extraordinary truths that exist; it is one for which I search in vain and in perplexity for an explanation. But Mr Crawford does not seek for any explanation. He states the fact and pa.s.ses to another subject.

Again, in this sentence he begins well: 'It is of no use to deny the enormous influence of brandy and games of chance on the men of the present day. Something might be gained indeed if we could trace the causes which have made gambling especially the vice of our generation.

But I do not believe this is possible.' That is to say, he does not care to be at the trouble of such an investigation, even though he adds the acute sentence that most of the men and women of the world of pleasure in our times exhibit 'the peculiar and unmistakable signs of physical exhaustion, chief of which is cerebral anaemia. They are overtrained and overworked, in the language of training they are "stale."'

He says in another place, 'Italians have no imagination.' This is but partially true; I am not sure that it is true at all. Their modern poetry is beautiful, more beautiful than that of any other nation. Their popular songs are poetic and impa.s.sioned as those of no other nation are, and one may hear among their peasantry expressions of singular beauty of sentiment and phrase. A woman of middle age, a contadina, said to me once, 'So long as one's mother lives, one's youth is never quite gone, for there is always somebody for whom one is young.' A rough, rude man, a day labourer, who knew not a letter, and spent all his life bent over his spade or plough, said to me once, one lovely night in spring, as he looked up at the full moon, 'How beautiful she is! But she has no heart. She sees us toiling and groaning and suffering down here, and she is always fair and calm, and never weeps!' Another said once, when a tree was hard to fell, 'He is sorry to come away, it has been his field so long.' And when a flock of solan geese flew over our lands, going from the Marches to the mountains on their homeward way, and descended to rest, the peasants did not touch them: 'They are tired, poor souls,'

said one of the women; 'one must not grudge them the soil for their lodging.' Surely such ideas as these in people wholly uneducated indicate imagination in the speakers?

And what can he possibly mean by no poets, which he says in another place? Has he never read a line of Carducci? Much as we may mourn and resent Carducci's turncoat and reactionary politics, no one can deny that he is a poet of the purest kind. Has he never heard the ringing stanzas of Cavallotti which sound like a clarion through the land? Has he never studied the exquisite if too erotic odes of D'Annunzio, or the touching verse of Stecchetti? There are others besides these who are true and fine poets also; and even in the ordinary verses written for newspapers (which in other countries are so poor and tawdry) there is frequently in Italy a true and delicate feeling and an adorable lyrical harmony which make one mourn to see things so fair wasted on so ephemeral a life.

It is through their imagination still more than by their vanity that Italians are led by unscrupulous political flattery and cajoled into disastrous political enterprises. They will believe anything if it be sufficiently captivating to their self-admiration and their fancy, and will dance blindfold on the brink of a bottomless pit. It is only an imaginative people who love so wildly, and kill themselves so madly for affection's sake, as the Italian people do. The other day, because a young soldier was sent to Africa, his brother killed himself in despair, and the father of the two youths then killed himself also. It is an inflammable imagination which makes the nation so easily led away by the promises and the phantasmagoria of glory with which unscrupulous statesmen have enticed it to the brink of ruin. It was its imagination which made it so credulous that when told by its victors that the disgraceful surrender of Makale was a victory, it believed and rejoiced, illuminated and hung out flags, and never saw what a dupe it was being made until cruelly awakened from its delusions by the _deroute_ of Abbu Carima.

Mr Crawford has lived chiefly in cities, and in the cities, even in Rome, the Italian is much debased by contact with foreigners; the influence of foreigners on Italians is excessively bad, especially American and English influence; and in the cities also the preponderance of Jews is great. Innumerable persons who call themselves by Italian names and speak of Italy as their country are Jews and nothing else. A Finnish Jew known to me buys an Italian estate, and with the estate a t.i.tle, which, by the payment of a large sum to a complaisant Government, he is allowed to adopt; he is decorated by the king for his munificent 'charities' in the land of his adoption; he marries an English woman, and their children masquerade as Italian n.o.bility with not a single drop of Italian blood in their veins. Such 'Italian n.o.bles' are numerous, unhappily, in modern Italy, and do immeasurable discredit to the nationality which they a.s.sume. In a generation or two their origin will be forgotten, and they will be taken by society in general to be what they pretend to be. Thus, unhappily, are great nations caricatured, old t.i.tles prost.i.tuted, and Italy accredited with sons not her own, with pretended offspring who are not even her b.a.s.t.a.r.ds; persons who impudently affect her name and boast of her blood, when not one single hair of their head or fibre of their flesh has any affiliation to her.

What stifles Italian imagination, and kills the Italian soul, is the pa.s.sion for money; pure acquisitiveness or avarice, for the desire is to get, little or no pleasure is taken in spending. It is often alleged that this pa.s.sion is due to their poverty; but poverty is not necessarily accompanied by avarice; the Irish people are very poor, but they are extremely generous; the Spanish people are so also. A comical instance of this stinginess occurred the other day at Milan: a rich tradesman had built himself a fine set of new premises, and opened his new establishment with much feasting; he sent fifteen francs to the munic.i.p.ality to be divided among the poor, and everyone applauded his liberality! This love of money, acquisitiveness, n.i.g.g.ardliness, or whatever we call it, is too general not to be injurious to the Italian character; and it enters into all daily life and personal acts, and is frequently the chief motor power of marriage, of career, of education.

And then added to this injurious power there is another which is more deleterious still, which weakens, debases, and falsifies the character from infancy: it is the direful influence of the Church. But to treat of this matter would occupy too much s.p.a.ce, and would lead too far away from the stories of Mr Crawford, in which there is an unfortunate tendency towards approval of what he calls hierarchical government, although a tendency not strongly enough insisted on by him for it to demand minute examination. The powers of Mr Crawford, however, are limited by the narrowness of what is called religion, and the inability to see the higher side of these subversive opinions which he dreads, and which he has done his best to turn into ridicule by putting them into the mouth of the half-mad artist Marzio.

Indeed, his bigotry on religious subjects is very droll to see in these days; and he speaks of 'unbelievers' in a tone worthy of Puritans in the days of the _Mayflower_ pilgrims. It does not agree with the tone of his books, which is invariably the tone of a man of the world; as such he should possess that liberality of thought which is the chief, perhaps the only, virtue of his generation; and if he had possessed it he would undoubtedly have reached a much higher level, a much finer ideal, than he has actually done. It would seem as if he distrusted and checked the larger intelligence in him, as an over-cautious rider distrusts and checks a horse which only asks to be given a free rein to go at speed over a wide pasture; it would seem as if some extraneous 'influence'

were always at his elbow to keep his reason cribbed, cabined and confined.

His religious prejudices have contributed to arrest his intellectual development, for they are puritanical and antiquated in a singular and lamentable degree. He speaks of _liberi pensatori_ as the Church elders of Maine or Ma.s.sachusetts might have done in the days of witch-torturing and atheist-burning. He thinks that the future great war will be between what he calls believers and unbelievers; and he looks forward with joy to the coming conflict when men shall again fly at each other's throat for the glory of G.o.d. This kind of mental cecity has its inevitable results: it makes him step lamely where he would otherwise walk with manly alacrity, and it makes him afraid to face the light of facts which his truer instincts tell him are existing and incontrovertible. Is this the result of early education, of hereditary inclinations, of female or ecclesiastical influence? I do not know; but come whence it may, this taint of bigotry obscures his intelligence and stops his progress, and is matter of profound regret to those who see what he would have been without it.

Many pa.s.sages in his works show that he has perceived and grasped the universal dominance of that corruption which so fatally exists in all Italian life, and one could wish that he would make a more complete exposure of it. Take this account of how the banker, Del Ferice, obtained the decoration for a syndic who was one of his political supporters:--

'Del Ferice, left to himself, returned to the question of the mayor's decoration. If he failed to get the man what he wanted, the fellow would doubtless apply to someone of the opposite party, would receive the coveted honour, and would take the whole voting population with him at the next general election, to the total discomfiture of Del Ferice.

It was necessary to find some valid reason for proposing him for the distinction. He could not decide what to do just then, but he ultimately hit upon a successful plan. He advised his correspondent to write a pamphlet upon the rapid improvement of agricultural interests in his district under the existing Ministry, and he even went so far as to compose and send some notes on the subject. These notes proved to be so voluminous and complete, that when the mayor had copied them he could not find a pretext for adding a single word or correction. They were printed upon excellent paper with ornamental margins under the t.i.tle of _Onward, Parthenope!_ The mayor got his decoration and Del Ferice was re-elected, but no one has ever inquired into the truth of the statements contained in the pamphlet.'

These pa.s.sages and others similar give one the conviction that Mr Crawford, if he had 'let himself go,' might have been a satirist of no slight force. He has preferred to write charming stories, ingenious in construction, but slight in development, to amuse his generation; yet there is, I think, abundant evidence that he might have done stronger things, perhaps may do them still. He has preferred to lead a seagull's life, skimming the surface of the deep and shunning its storms. But he might have led the petrel's. Probably all the influences of an agreeable social existence have tended to make him indolent and unwilling to raise tempests in it. Few resist the pressure of a social atmosphere. His book called _With the Immortals_, marred as it is by the incongruity and impossibility of its setting, shows that he can reflect if he likes, and can express his reflections. If this work had been cast in such a form as Mr Mallock's _New Republic_, or Sir Arthur Helps' _Friends in Council_, or Christopher North's _Noctes Ambrosianae_ it would have been remarkable for the arguments and dialogues contained in it. But the ghost-element, the supernatural scenic effects, kill its excellence. Dr Johnson, Heine, Pascal, Bayard, Francois de Valois and Caesar are too ill-a.s.sorted for us to accept them in each other's company, and the idea of these dead men being all able to converse in English, and all doomed to wear through ages the clothes they wore in life, is so comical that it destroys all interest and illusion which their conversation otherwise might excite. There is a regrettable inability in Mr Crawford to perceive the ridiculous. He lacks humour, and the perception of the incongruous is not alive in him; nor is there either any poetic feeling in his way of regarding life. He is essentially a citizen of the world as the world exists in this last quarter of the fast-fading century, and the Sirens sing not for him, though he dwells upon their sh.o.r.es.

Let him, therefore, appreciate more thoroughly his own very admirable powers, and confine himself to painting the men and women of his time and cla.s.s, with all that cosmopolitan knowledge of them which he possesses. I should like to see from him an Italian novel of modern political life. He has, I make no doubt, had ample opportunities of studying its machinery and its intrigues. He can dissect with so much subtlety and correctness the brain and the temper of such a man as Del Ferice, that there can be no doubt a political novel from him, placed in Rome, would have alike accuracy and interest and irony. But he must clear his mind of some of its cobwebs, and he must realise that the 'unbelievers' and revolutionists, who at present horrify him, const.i.tute the keenest intellectual element in Italy, indeed, the only healthy one, and contain the only hope there is, if this be but a feeble one, of any attainment by the nation in the future to any true liberty and cleanliness in political aims.

I cannot conclude these few remarks upon his Italian stories without a word of thanks to him for the pleasant hours he has often given me, and the gallery of interesting portraits with which he has enriched the memory of all those who read his novels.