I could not have better ill.u.s.trations of the role played by autobiography in modern fiction than two recent novels-one by Michele Sapanaro, "Peccato" or "Six Months of Rustic Life"; the other by Frederigo Tozzi, "Con gli Occhi Chiusi" ("With Closed Eyes"). The first is a fresh, ingenuous book with a vein of romanticism which does not run into great effusion or great amativeness, in which is depicted the atmosphere, environment, and inhabitants of a small community in southern Italy, whither the writer has gone to visit his peasant brother and to recover from some of the wounds inflicted upon him in transformation from peasant to "gentleman." It is undoubtedly an elaborated, embellished chapter of the author"s life.
That "With Closed Eyes," a novel of provincial and peasant life in Tuscany, is wholly autobiographical, we have the testimony of a fellow Tuscan who says of Signor Tozzi that he first met him when he was a waiter in his father"s tavern. Lazy, slothful, unkempt, and of coa.r.s.e appearance, he had a pa.s.sion for reading Angiolieri and Verlaine. He was radical, socially and politically. After a colorless, misspent youth beyond authority, parental or communal, he began newspaper work, the stepping-stones of so many Italian writers of to-day. The discipline of military life and the environment of Rome effected a change in his outward appearance, and the composition of his book, "Bestie" ("Beasts"), which the church put on the Index, helped him spiritually. "With Closed Eyes" is a narrative of his life, sordid, ugly, commonplace, revealing, however, a gradual spiritual uplift and refinement. It was not until the publication of "Tre Croci" that he was much discussed. Competent critics such as Signor Borghese think that Italy"s most promising literary light was extinguished when Frederigo Tozzi died in Rome, in March, 1920. His literary output was not great for a man who had lived thirty-eight years, but it can truthfully be said that each succeeding volume from his pen showed that he was likely one day to be Verga"s successor in the literary primacy of Italy. His last romance, "Il Podere," ("The Farm,") has not yet appeared in book form.
One cannot always judge from first performances the potentialities of a writer. A few years ago Rosso di San Secondo, a young Sicilian, published "Io Commemoro Loletta" ("I Commemorate Loletta"), a series of short stories which in substance and in workmanship showed not only no talent but no promise of talent. In reality they seemed to show an absence of artistic capacity, architectural ability, and literary taste. A year later "La Bella Addormentata" ("The Sleeping Beauty"), a coloristic, mystic drama, a strange mixture of Plotinus and Dionysius, revealed real talent.
The Sleeping Beauty, of infantile mind and facial pulchritude, formerly a servant, yielded to the advances of a notary, the nephew of a senile, implacable shrew, whose miserly savings he and his sister hoped to inherit. After a few secure trips on the sliding-board of sensual indulgence, the Sleeping Beauty shot to the bottom of the pit and became the travelling harlot of a caravan which went from one country fair to another. The more frequently she yielded the body the greater became her spiritual detachment, until finally she lived in a world of unreality. Becoming pregnant, the spiritual flame gradually lighted up in her, and finally blazed under the ardent fanning of a new type of Lothario, Nero of the Sulphur Mines, half knight, half jail-bird, but withal a romantic and seductive figure. His flair for her was wholly spiritual. Not only did he encourage her to renounce her life, but he insisted that she return to the house of the notary. They go there and she charges him with her interesting condition, even though three years have elapsed. Water doesn"t flow in the brook of the valley if there is no spring higher up. The aunt who has sought in vain the opportunity to crush the cringing hypocrite whose outward life had seemingly been one of virtue and rigorous conventionalism, sees it now. She compels him to marry the Sleeping Beauty. He becomes the b.u.t.t of the taunts and derisions of the community, juvenile and adult, especially after the child is born. The strain is too much for him and he hangs himself when he realizes that the dying aunt has left her money to the child of another and to the church.
From the moment the Sleeping Beauty felt a new life within her a spiritual torch was lit in her soul, which illuminated the abyss into which she had fallen to such purpose that she found her way out, with the helping hand which Nero held out to her. Continuing to burn during her gestation and delivery, it conditioned her spiritual resurrection and the moral rehabilitation of Nero. The impression left in the mind of the reader is that they live together happily forever after, the summum bonum of earthly existence, because of the happiness that flows from it and because it insures eternal repose in Paradise. Although the play was received with groans and howls and shrieks of depreciation when it was first given in Rome, nevertheless some of the eternal verities are accentuated and carried home by Nero of the Mines and by the Sleeping Beauty.
I find greater difficulty in writing of recent Italian poetry than of fiction. In the first place, I have not read it so extensively, and, in the second, nearly every writer of fiction writes poetry as well. Some of the young poets are discussed in the chapter on Futurists in literature. Here I shall mention one or two others. Guido Gozzano, who recently died, in his twenty-eighth year, was a prolific writer of verse. It is confidently claimed by some critics that he earned the distinction of being called Italy"s most representative poet, the only one since Pascoli and D"Annunzio who made a new vibration to the poetic lyre and stamped verse with an individual conception which poetasters have more or less accepted. But he suffered from hyperfecundity, and many of his intellectual children are anaemic and rachitic. Even though they are endowed with some feature of beauty their vitality is so slight that no one wants to adopt them, and their parent being busy with the creation of others, neglects them after having given them one pa.s.sably decent suit of clothes in the shape of book-form publications, so they die.
Guido Gozzano was a melancholy figure. From life he appeared to have got only sadness. At twenty-five years it had deluged his soul. His true infelicity was then of not being able even to be sad. Scarcely had he entered youth before he felt old. He had no companions, he was often ill; nothing appealed to him, not even poetry. Literary life resembled death. He forsook the city for the country, and the novelty of it for a while diverted him. But it was not for long. He vacillated between doing nothing and dreaming, between contemplating the emptiness of a grotesque reality and the nostalgia of an unreal life, felt but not seen. He was never emotional, never exalted, never blasphemous. Nevertheless, he would seem to have written incessantly.
"Verso la Cuna del Mondo" ("Toward the Cradle of the World") consists of the impressions of a voyage in India made in 1912 and 1913. "I Colloqui" is a book of fables for children. In the "L"Altare del Pa.s.sato" ("The Altars of the Past") Gozzano takes as a rhythm the cry for the things that were; the past arises anew in the intimacy of his feelings to tempt him and to inspire him. It is the generous wine that he hopes will intoxicate him and fill him with joy. Its effects are transitory.
His last book, "L"Ultima Traccia" ("The Last Traces"), did not materially enhance his reputation as a story-teller. The story called "The Eyes of the Soul" is undoubtedly the best. A beautiful girl has to live her betrothed days alone; her fiance goes to the war. She contracts smallpox, which disfigures her. When she is called to his bedside in the hospital where he is lying wounded, perhaps dying, she is concerned what his feelings will be when he sees her face. When she gets there he is not mortally injured, he is blind.
Francesco Chiesa has already differentiated himself from the writing herd and his "Viali d"Oro" has had great popularity with the younger generation of his country. His style, imagery, and masterful synthesis is best seen in the volume ent.i.tled "Istorie e Favole," a collection of short stories.
Another young Italian writer who is likely to come to the fore is Piero Jahier. He wrote the best war story, "Con mi e con gli Alpini." "Ragazzo," a recent publication, shows him in an entirely different light.
Alfredo Bacceli was a young man of great promise in letters. His "Verso la Morte" ("Toward Death"), showed clear vision, deep feeling, and mastery of form.
Some of the most conspicuous of the present-day poets of Italy are Marradi, Pastonchi, Rapisardi, Siciliani, and Sindici. The first two are lyric poets, the last two masters of form in addition.
Luigi Siciliani, who became a member of Parliament in the last elections, is the one of this group who is most likely to be remembered. His "Canti perfetti," translations from the Greek, Latin, Portuguese, and English, published in 1910, showed him to be not only a student but a writer possessed of exquisite literary craftsmanship. He has written novels, criticisms, anthologies, but the volume by which he is best known is "Poesie per ridere," published in 1909.
Francesco Meriano, one of the group of young literary Italians that are known through the Brigata of Bologna, and who published some years ago a volume of Futuristic poetry ent.i.tled "Equatore Notturno," is the author of a volume containing his lyric compositions of the past four years, ent.i.tled "Croci di legno" ("Wooden Crosses"), which has been very well received by the critics.
In Marino Moretti"s "Poesie" we encounter things which make us think of the great poets-little perfections that much recent poetry almost no longer knows, lucidity, subtle vision and modesty. If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity some of these verses are real poetry.
Alfredo de Bosis, translator of Sh.e.l.ley"s Cenci and advocate of Walt Whitman, is the author of many lyrical poems, some of which have been highly praised.
The three most prolific writers for the stage of yesterday in Italy are Roberto Bracco, Sem Benelli, and Dario Niccodemi. They have all had much success outside of their own country, and their names are well known to readers and theatre-goers of our own country. They are now in the fulness of their mature years, but with the exception of the latter none has given evidence in recent productions of having sensed the change that has taken place in the likings of the theatre-going public in Italy.
Signor Bracco, a Neapolitan approaching sixty years of age, has for the past twenty years worn gracefully the mantle of Giacosa. His works have been published in ten fat volumes averaging three plays to a volume, mostly comedies. Of these the most important are "L"Infedele" ("The Unfaithful Woman"), and "Il Trionfo" ("The Triumph"), both published in 1895. The best of his dramas are "Tragedie dell" Anima" ("The Tragedies of the Soul") and "La Piccola Fonte" ("The Little Spring"), which becomes the fount of life in inspiration for those with whom the heroine comes in contact. The best of his tragedies is "Sperduti nel Buio" ("Lost in the Darkness"). This brief enumeration gives no idea of the versatility of Signor Bracco, who in reality has depicted in his twoscore plays the ravages of carnal love in peasant and prince, in maid and in mistress, in priest and professor, in the underworld and in the overworld, in the cradle and in the grave.
Had the display of love and the pa.s.sions that flow from it any confines, they would encompa.s.s Signor Bracco"s imagination. Although denied what is called a scholastic education, he has studied science and philosophy, literature and art, but always with one object in view: to learn what human beings think and do when swayed by s.e.xual pa.s.sion. Not that anything that he has written can be construed as exalting it or as licensing it. On the contrary, the moral of the majority of his plays is that continence, like virtue, is its own reward. Although Signor Bracco would be the last to admit that he has not had an uplift motive in his writings, it is difficult to discover it. Nor does he point the way that will lead to avoidance of the suffering that flows, apparently with so much directness, from social convention, from privilege, and from the almost mediaeval position of women in certain parts of Italy to-day. He is a realist of realists in fiction, but he is like a physician who is content to diagnose disease and leave to others its prevention and its cure.
A writer who dyes his products in Bracco"s vat, then for contrast colors them with Sardou and Dumas, which, exposed for sale in the market-place, find avid purchasers and bring high prices, is Dario Niccodemi, whose comedies, especially "Scampolo" ("The Remnant") and "L"Ombra" ("The Shadow"), have had great success. In his last two books, "Il t.i.tano" ("The t.i.tan") and "Prete Pero" ("Priest Pero"), he gives evidence that he is keenly discerning of the new social consciousness that has developed in Italy apparently as the result of the war. "Prete Pero," while depicting the subterfuges of the church to accomplish its ends and the arguments that it uses to convince that the ends justify the means, portrays one of those simple, faithful, honest, transparent souls, in the shape of Father Bragio, who have been the pillars of the Roman church which no Samson has ever been able to tear down. "I wrote "Prete Pero,"" he says, "as a journalist writes a series of articles or as a speaker makes a series of conferences-for a general idea; but I have had two, the first aesthetic, to sustain the principle that in Italy, as in France and in England, and, indeed, in every country agonized by this terrible war, one might make and make acceptably war comedies; second, moral, to prove that it is permitted to say from the stage in verse or in prose that which in the past four years has been said in journals, in speeches, in conferences, in parliament and in committees, which is: in the disorder of the social organization produced by the phenomena of war there have been sublime heroes and brazen-faced cheats and swindlers." "Prete Pero" showed that Signor Niccodemi has a nose for the favorite perfume of the modern reader, just as his "L"Ombra" showed it when he afflicted his heroine with hysterical paralysis and then cured her by the method which Freud originally called the cathartic method. Dario Niccodemi has not added materially to the dignity of Italian letters, but he has amused and diverted his countrymen and ourselves, and for that we are grateful.
Sem Benelli, who has recently had political life thrust upon him is, in common with many literary Jews in Italy, inclined to give himself a certain mystery of origin by concealing his antecedents. In reality he was born in 1877. Not only is he well known in Italy but in this country, where one of his early plays, "La Cena delle Beffe" ("The Supper of the Jests"), has had great success. He began his literary career as a journalist on a Florentine review, Marzocco. His first play was published when he was twenty-five years old. Although "La Tignola" ("The Moth") showed unusual quality of construction and contrasted with great force the artistic temperament with the world of the big business, it was not until "La Cena delle Beffe" that he arrived.
His great forte is to be able to put melodrama of the most lurid kind into verse, while depicting the lives and customs of the aristocracy of the Renaissance, whose standard of morals and canons of conduct were so unlike those of to-day. His heroes are always in search of revenge, his women of adventure. In his "Le Nozze dei Centauri" ("The Marriage of the Centaurs") he widens the field of his activity to display the conflict of christian and barbarian, but again it is the same thing, adventure and revenge. He does not trouble to be historically exact. It does not matter to him whether his characters are true to life so long as they are true to his conception of revengefulness. To accomplish his purpose he often strikes a note that reminds of his ancestors of the Old Testament.
The leader of all the younger Italian writers in drama and tragedy is Luigi Ercole Morselli, born at Pesaro in 1883. The commission nominated by the Ministry of Instruction to decide the most meritorious dramatic production of 1918 awarded the prize of six thousand lire to him. As a youth he studied medicine and later letters in Florence, but he soon deserted them and wandered in America and Africa. His first success, a pagan theme ent.i.tled "Orione," was recognized by competent critics to have originality and unusual dramatic qualities, but he was by way of being forgotten when nearly ten years later, 1919, a mystic drama based upon mythology, ent.i.tled "Glauco," appeared. It was produced in Rome and was greeted with every manifestation of approval. In reality it had an astonishing but merited success. Glauco, the amorous fisherman, in order to obtain his Scilla, braves the sea and seeks renown and riches. But, alas for human frailties, he falls under the enchantment of Calypso. When he returns to his native sh.o.r.e to claim his best-beloved he learns of the heart-breaking events that have transpired during his absence. Neither he nor Scilla can tolerate constant reminder of them and they disappear in the deep waves after one of the most remarkable farewells in modern literature.
Morselli does not follow either the mythological stories or their recent reconstruction very closely. On the contrary he makes the events of the legends harmonize with or conform to the laws that govern modern amatoriousness. His heroes react in their love and hate, ambition, realizations, in the same way as the people of to-day. His world is a mythological world, but it is scenery in which we live or visit, and it is peopled by men and women who love, hate, envy, portray, succor, and defend, quite like the modern world.
He has recently published two new dramas ent.i.tled "Belf.a.gor" and "Dafni e Cloe." His fiction is a volume of fanciful tales called "Favole per i Re d"Oggi" ("Fables for the Kings of To-day"), and short stories which have appeared in magazines and journals.
Another young writer for the stage is Nino Berrini. The success of "Il Beffardo" ("The Jester") was so great that one may confidently look forward to his career without fear of disappointment.
Other successes in the theatrical world of 1919 in Italy were "La Vena d"Oro" ("The Vein of Gold"), of Zorzi, and in much lesser degree "La nostra Ricchezza" of Gotta.
The author of the latter is a man of thirty-three years who returned from the war with new ideas regarding the rights of the people, liberty, or whatever one calls that which underlies the present social unrest. He has written many short stories, several romances, of which "Ragnatele" ("Cobwebs"), "Il Figlio Inquieto" ("The Restless Son") and "La piu Bella Donna del Mondo" ("The Most Beautiful Woman in the World") are the most important.
Not only is he a man of ideas, but he has disciplined himself to a chaste and virile way of expressing them. In "Our Riches" he has given an admirable picture of the honest, high-principled aristocrat-farmer of his native territory Ivrea, who has the same feeling for his acres that the ideal patriot has for his country: reverence and love, and a paternal interest in the welfare of those who gain their livelihood in serving him. In contrast with him is his grandson, who has the same reverence and affection for the ancestral home and acres but who sees life, its entailments and its privileges, in an entirely different light, who is a socialist in the correct sense of the term. Then he draws with great distinctness the daughter of the former and the mother of the latter, who is confronted with the conflict of choosing between her son, father, and husband, the latter a profiteering shark in the world of affairs. The weakness of the play is the author"s failure or unwillingness to define his own state of mind concerning property rights and property distribution, or to define the relationship that should exist between product and producer, capital and labor.
Were I obliged to characterize the fictional output of Italy during the past few years, I should say that it was imaginatively sterile and emotionally fecund. Whereas much of it displays technical efficiency in form, construction, and finish, it lacks originality and does not reveal comprehensive imaginativeness, which the renowned fiction of every country has always had and must continue to have. It must be said, however, that it portrays human nature: that is, thoughts and emotional reactions incited and elicited by new conditions and new aspirations in such a way as to pique the reader"s curiosity and sustain his interest.
The Italian novelists of to-day are not story-tellers; they are incident-relaters, narrators of personal experiences, observers armed with cameras.
CHAPTER VIII FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Often I find myself thinking of the justification of autobiographical writing in fiction. The modern Italian writer is devoted to it. D"Annunzio set the example a generation ago and carried it to such a point that he outraged all sense of decency. So long as he confined himself to revelation of his own alleged amatory potency and mastery of the arts of love, even though he trampled upon sacred ideals, the public tolerated it. When he strained the sensualities of well-known and beloved notabilities through the percolators of his perverse imagination they sickened of him and denounced him. It is an exquisite form of self-appreciation-the belief that the commonplace events, deliberate thoughts, and vagrant fancies of an individual who has in no way distinguished himself will divert and instruct others, and that they are worthy of record. The fact that such writings are bought is the justification they allege. But the public is like the editor of a magazine. He has to read reams of trash to find one worthy and acceptable contribution. The purpose of fiction may be manifold, but it is read chiefly for distraction and diversion. The critic and interpreter read it to get the temper of the public mind and the trend of its projection, but the purchaser of it reads it to get surcease of the woes of life, whether they be the ruts worn by operating the daily treadmill or the despondencies thrust upon him by circ.u.mstances more inexorable than the tigers of Hyrcania. It is not likely that the occurrences in the life of another commonplace individual even though they are pieced with fiction will suffice to provide this. Therefore those who turn to the narration of the lives of others in which there have been stirring events, picturesque phases, and romantic incidents are likely to have greater success. Whether it is a legitimate procedure is another question. It is a matter of taste. It was as justifiable for Mr. Somerset Maugham to portray Paul Gauguin in "The Moon and Sixpence" as it was for Mr. Morley Roberts to describe George Gissing in "The Private Life of Henry Maitland," and even more so, for the latter had revealed himself adequately in his books. Nothing was to be gained by raking up a past that led through prison any more than the prison days of O. Henry is an a.s.set of immortality. Sometimes such writings have a meritoriousness apart from their literary qualities. The "Green Carnation" did much to inform Britishers how prevalent and pernicious was the vice which its prototype was afterward locked in Reading Gaol for practising and apotheosizing. To take a man whose fame has mounted steadily since his death and make a monster of him is a hazardous and, many will think, an iniquitous thing to do, even though the individual during his lifetime was unmoral and immoral. This is what Mr. Somerset Maugham has done for Paul Gauguin, master of the Pont Aven school of painting; dislocater of impressionism and neo-impressionism; liberator of art from stereotyped, slavish copyists of nature; apostle of intellectualism and emotionalism versus aestheticism, and from it he has created Charles Strickland, victim of a strange disease resulting in dissociation of personality. The critics tell us "The Moon and Sixpence" is a "great" book. From the standpoint of literary construction it may be ent.i.tled to such designation. From the standpoint of one who desires in fiction some verisimilitude of life as it is, or as it should be if it were ideal, it is disgusting and nauseous, atavistic in implication, primitive in delineation, b.e.s.t.i.a.l in its suggestion, and it tends to undermine faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature. It is radicalism in realism carried to the nth degree.
A middle-cla.s.s Englishman of unknown antecedents, of commonplace somatic and intellectual possessions, of emotional barrenness and shut-in personality, marries, procreates, and serves-on the London Stock Exchange, after the manner of his kind, until he is forty. If artistic impulses had peeped from his unconscious mind to his conscious he had not betrayed them. Then, when constructive incubal activity had pa.s.sed its height, he becomes big with the idea that his unsightly hulk harbors the soul of an artist. He forsakes his family without warning and without making the smallest provision for their maintenance or welfare, goes to Paris to study art, to scorn convention and decency, and to treat mankind with contumely. He knows no French, and gradually his English vocabulary shrinks to "You are a d.a.m.n fool" when a man makes proffer of service or supper, and "Tell her to go to h.e.l.l" if the offer of self or succor comes from a woman. When he writes, however, his mental elaborations encompa.s.s the degree that permits him to pen this chaste message: "G.o.d d.a.m.n my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she was in h.e.l.l."
Like all victims of dementia praec.o.x, when the disorder conditions bizarre conduct for the first time in mid-maturity, he becomes profoundly egocentric, neglectful of his appearance and of his person, and callously insensitive to the feelings and rights of others. As the components of personality dissociate the G.o.d disappears, the beast remains, puissant and uncontrollable when under the dominion of primeval appet.i.tes or instincts. He has no pride to swallow when he feeds from the hand that still stings from slapping him, no more than does the lion who devours the meat thrust into his cage on the p.r.o.ng that a moment before prodded and wounded him.
"Haven"t you been in love since you came to Paris?" is Mr. Maugham"s euphemistic question, in his effort to find out for Mrs. Strickland if her husband has been faithful to his marriage vows. After noting Strickland"s "slow smile starting and sometimes ending in the eyes, which was very sensual, neither cruel nor kindly, but suggested rather the inhuman glee of the Satyr," he got this answer: "I haven"t got time for that sort of nonsense. Life isn"t long enough for love and art." This is not what Michaelangelo said to Vittoria Colonna. It is what Tom Cat says when not in the throes of concupiscency. Then Mr. Maugham gives a new verbal dress to the devil, who was sure when ill he would like to be a monk, but who in good health didn"t fancy monastic life. "You know that all the time your feet have been walking in the mud. And you want to roll yourself in it, and you find some woman, coa.r.s.e and low and vulgar, some beastly creature in whom all the horror of s.e.x is blatant, and you fall upon her like a wild animal. You drink till you"re blind with rage."
Poor Strickland, in the throes of mental dissolution, obsessed, enmeshed in stereotypy, is still capable of sufficient mental reaction to realize that "You are a d.a.m.n fool" or "Go to h.e.l.l" was not an appropriate rejoinder or comment to such a speech, so "He stared at me without the slightest movement. I held his eyes with mine. I spoke very closely." "When it"s over you feel so extraordinarily pure; you feel like a disembodied spirit, immaterial, and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing; and you feel an intimate communion with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the iridescence of the river. You feel like G.o.d." The antivivisectionists should get after Doctor Maugham. It is cruelty to humans to hold unfortunate Strickland with hypnotic eye, and then thrust a record of experience so obviously personal upon him-or was it only a recollection of some published experiences of George Sand and Alfred de Musset-garnered from those days when he "idled on the quays, fingering a second-hand book that I never meant to buy," after he settled down in Paris and began to write a play?
Every Johnson has his Boswell, though he may be mute, unrecording, and sterile, and every s.a.d.i.s.t has his m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t. The young Dutchman, Vincent Van Gogh, a const.i.tutional psychopath, whose mental aberrations took him into spiritual exhortation, social reformation, and finally "art," often tried to kill Gauguin. When the latter showed himself versed in mayhem Van Gogh made his bed, lit his pipe, wrapped himself in serenity and shot himself in the abdomen, as lunatics often do. Not so d.i.c.k Stroeve, Strickland"s fidus Achates. He worshipped Strickland, who reviled him, kicked him, spat upon him; Stroeve, who navely asks, "Have I ever been mistaken?" in his estimate of artists, knew that Strickland was a great artist, greater than Manet or Corot, more puissant than El Greco or Cezanne, and that he had been sent to complete the cycle which Delacroix and Turner ushered in. Stroeve, a pa.s.sive, as.e.xual creature, had married a temperamental English governess in Rome, where he had earned the soubriquet of "le Maitre de la Boite a Chocolats" after she had had a disastrous experience with the son of an Italian prince whose children she had been hired to instruct.
When Strickland falls desperately ill from the combined effects of insufficient food, touting for prurient Anglicans, and translating the advertis.e.m.e.nts of French patent medicines that "restore" Doctor Maugham"s countrymen to such a degree that they may go to Paris with pleasurable antic.i.p.ation, Stroeve takes him to his house, despite the strenuous opposition and pathetic protests of Mrs. Stroeve, whose previous fleeting contacts with Strickland echoed the call of the wild in her and presaged disaster. From the moment he arrived the fat was in the fire. No affinities are so difficult to keep from blending as s.e.x affinities, facetiously called soul affinities by the newspapers. Strickland"s spark was fanned lovingly into glow by Stroeve, and when it flamed he threw Stroeve out of his house, possessed complaisant Mrs. Stroeve violently, and then put her on canvas, nude, "one arm beneath her head and the other along her body, one knee raised, the other leg stretched out." After nature"s cataclysm had spent itself, Mrs. Stroeve committed suicide in approved feminine fashion by taking a corroding acid, without condoning her husband"s offense-that of being virtuous. When she died Stroeve, a true m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t, looked up Strickland, forgave him, invited him to go with him to Holland, because "we both loved Blanche. There would have been room for him in my mother"s house. The company of poor, simple people would have done his soul a great good." But Strickland, becoming for the moment verbally more expansive, replied: "I have other fish to fry." When Mr. Maugham spoke to him about Stroeve"s visit he said: "I thought it d.a.m.ned silly and sentimental."
The author doesn"t attempt a synopsis of the mental process that took Strickland to Tahiti, via Ma.r.s.eilles, though he depicts experiences that parallel those of Gauguin. Instead he animadverts on love and the s.e.xual appet.i.te to such purpose as to reveal that he is not expert in biology, psychology, or art. "For men love is an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid upon it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life." But what about the emphasis laid upon it by countless thousands who find in it a quality of that enn.o.bling spiritual peace called faith, and which will be their reward when they repose in Abraham"s bosom and live forever with G.o.d in paradise? "As lovers the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times." And the difference between male and female animals is that the female of the species permits contact at certain definite times, while the males are all Barkises. "Art is a manifestation of the s.e.xual impulse. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the "Entombment" of t.i.tian." After the author delivered himself of a statement so pregnant of plat.i.tude he must have experienced a sense of lightening, and a conviction that he would not have to consult the Drei Abhandlungen zur s.e.xualtheorie at least until he wrote his next book.
That art has a definite purpose to perpetuate the creative will and that G.o.d endowed his image with a genesic instinct that he might create and thus reproduce his kind every one knows, but to contend that one is a manifestation of the other is puerile, unenlightened, and harks back to barbarism. One might think that there is no such thing as the psychology of art or the science of aesthetics. Art has an intellectual significance as well as, or more than, an emotional significance, and the unfortunate, unhappy, disequilibrated man who is parodied in this book contributed his substantial mite in the twentieth century to make us see it.
Any one who reads the "Lettres de Paul Gauguin," which are prefaced by a brief survey of his life by Victor Segalen, or his life by Jean de Rotonchamps, which was published at Weimar at the expense of Count von Kessler, will see how closely Maugham described Gauguin"s life in the Polynesian cannibal islands. Strickland marries the native girl Ata, who had a "beguin" for him, but Gauguin had Tioka in his maison de joie without benefit of clergy. Doctor Coutras, who gives Mr. Maugham so much valuable information (via Rotonchamps and Segalen) is M. Paul Vernie, who attended Gauguin and wrote an account of his last days.
Despite the fact that in July, 1914, the London Times lifted the veil of secrecy from the face of the most prevalent disease in the world, and thus announced that the name of the disease which Fracastorius, the poet-physician of Verona, borrowed from the shepherd Syphlus should be no longer taboo by "nice people," the prevalence of the disease and the efforts to combat it have been widely discussed, though they are not topics of conversation at dinner-parties or at "welfare meetings" in churches, as tuberculosis is. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the author prefers to kill his "hero" with leprosy. But Doctor Maugham has been devoting so much of his time in latter years to novels and dramas that he finds the differentiation between them difficult, and, too, Gauguin"s disease has been diagnosticated leprosy, elephantiasis, syphilis. "La derniere de ces avaries est exacte, mais ne doit pas etre imputees au pays: c"etait une pure verole parisienne."
"The Moon and Sixpence" is interesting. There is scarcely any diversion more engrossing than reading about others" infirmities unless it be relating one"s own. Hence the continued popularity of Pepys, Amiel, Rousseau, Marie Bashkirsteff, and other garrulous sufferers. But it is a book that no one can be the better or happier for reading, and it does Gauguin"s memory an injury because it parodies it. His life as it has been revealed to us was bizarre and irregular enough. We could wish that he had been less like Rimbaud and more like Rodin, but, distressing as his behavior was, seen in conventional light, we should like not to have seen it featured in fiction.
Mr. Maugham wrote a novel, "Out of Human Bondage," which is a far more meritorious piece of work than "The Moon and Sixpence," in which some of his professional colleagues-he is a physician-recognized portraitures. Perhaps it was his success with them that encouraged him to try a larger canvas.
The author"s admitted cleverness was never more evident than in the depiction of Mrs. Strickland"s character and characteristics-a smug Philistine, who runs the gamut of preciosity, jealousy, martyrdom, autorighteousness, and autosanctification. She is pleased and proud as she views the veneer of sanctimoniousness which her son, in holy orders, gives the dearly beloved husband of Mrs. Charles Strickland, who wrote his father"s biography "to remove certain misconceptions which had gained currency," viz., that Doctor Maugham is masquerading as a psychiatrist and publishing his experiences with the insane, meanwhile throwing off "punk" about art and traducing normal, though admittedly "immoral," man.
"There is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a severe mortification. I have never failed to read the literary supplement of the Times." So says Mr. Somerset Maugham. The first part of the statement is difficult to believe after reading "The Moon and Sixpence." The latter part may be true, but it can"t be truer than the statement that any one, possessed of ordinary decency and sensibility, and belief that love, sentiment, kindliness, generosity, altruism, forgiveness, and faith are the seven lamps that illumine our path on our way to immortality, will subject his flesh to severe mortification, while being interested and sometimes even amused by reading Mr. Maugham"s new book.
CHAPTER IX THE LITERARY MAUSOLEUM OF SAMUEL BUTLER
"Those two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead-who does not know them, with their ill-digested ma.s.ses of material, their slipshod style, their love of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?"