Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/428

410 They have already gained him renown and circulation in France and the United States. The most celebrated are Il Piacere, Il Triunfo della Morte, La Vergine delle Rocce, the last of which is exempt from most of the objections justly urged against the others.

(b. 1840) rivals the European reputation of D'Annunzio, and is, like him, the head of a realistic school; but his realism is of quite another sort, owing nothing to Zola or Maupassant. He is the most eminent European representative of the local novel, dealing with the manners, humours, and peculiar circumstances of some special locality. The vogue of this style was perhaps originally due to George Sand's idyllic pictures of Berri. Verga has found a yet more interesting corner of the world to delineate. A Sicilian, though residing at Milan, he has made his native island the scene of his fiction. Centuries of misgovernment have unhappily accumulated stores of tragic material in the people's misery and oppression, and the ferocity and vindictiveness these have engendered. Verga depicts these circumstances with the fidelity of a dispassionate observer and the skill of an artist. His books not only attract in their own day, but will be treasured in the future among the most valuable documents for the social history of Sicily.

Any one of even the minor poets whom we have enumerated has a chance of reaching posterity, for their work is at all events individual, and expressive of the personality of the author. If this is sufficiently interesting, the work may live, though it be far from inaugurating a new literary era like Carducci's. It is otherwise with the contemporary prose literature of Italy. A history, a biography, philology like Ascoli's or D'Ancona's, a work on social science like Sella's or