not as a whole rise above the average; and had not the Sicilian author awoke, we doubt if the world in general would ever have cared to hear of Verga. We will at once dismiss these novels, to leave ourselves space for the more worthy emanations of his genius. They are named respectively 'Eros,' 'Eva,' 'Tigre Reale,' 'Il Marito di Elena,' stories of ballet-dancers, forsaken or faithless wives, untrue or deceived husbands. In a fine preface to 'Eva,' Verga appears to anticipate the objections that will come from serious critics.
"Do not," he writes, "condemn the art that is the manifestation of your tastes. The enamoured Greeks left us the statue of Venus; we shall leave the lithographed cancan on our match-boxes. Do not let us even discuss about proportion: art then was a civilisation; to-day it is not only a luxury, but the luxury of the idle. Civilisation is wellbeing; and at its foundation, when it is exclusive, as to-day, you will find nothing else, if you have the courage and truth to be logical, but material enjoyment. In all the seriousness with which we are invaded, and in our antipathy for all that is not positive – let us put there also idle art – there is at last nothing but the table and woman. We live in an atmosphere of companies and industrial enterprises, and the fever of enjoyment is the exuberance of that life. Do not accuse art, whose only fault is that it has more heart than you, and that it weeps for you the pains of your pleasures. Do not preach morality, you who only have enough of it to close your eyes upon the spectacle of the miseries you create, – you who marvel that others can leave their hearts and honour where you only leave your purse, – you who let your varnished shoes creak gaily where bitter ebriety plays the fool, or where groan the unknown pains which art gathers up and throws into your face."
Verga's 'Apologia' is eloquent and true, but he pleads the cause of the weak and miserable far more usefully when he moves away from perfumed boudoirs and their wearisomely same and colourless inmates, and takes us instead to the fields and mountains of the South, striking at once the natural note here lacking. And where could a writer find more hidden treasures than amid the many provinces of Italy, in which, from political divisions, speech and customs have developed independently? A rich harvest lies here waiting to be gleaned, and it is the merit of modern Italian writers, and at their head Giovanni Verga, that they have recognised this, and are busy garnering their treasures.
Verga, as contrasted with Farina, is an objective rather than a subjective writer. In every page of the Sardinian's works we recognise his amiable personality; while Verga is reserved, and stands outside his books. Little, too, is known of his life, except that he was born in Catania, 1840; that he spent a portion of his youth in Florence and Milan, where he wrote his first society novels; that he returned to Catania, where he experienced grievous family losses; and that for some years past he has fixed his abode in Milan. "But my best inspirations," he says very truly, "come thence where I passed my childhood and early youth." His first book (1873) was 'La Storia di una Capinera,' a rather sentimental tale, narrating the history of a young girl destined against her will to a convent life, who pours out her woes and struggles, her desires after freedom, happiness, and love, in a series of letters to a friend. Her mental conflicts end in madness; and the struggle between the mighty voices of nature and of a false, pharisaical morality, are told with pathological truth, although
