Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/84

78 it is somewhat disjointed – now too prolix, now too concise.

In truth, Farina, when he ventures on longer works, is not at his best. His scaffolding is indifferently constructed and proportioned, works à longue haleine seem ill-suited to his genius. And this reproach, curiously enough, touches most of the modern Italian writers, who are excellent in short sketches and tales. Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that feuilleton literature is chiefly required from them, and hence they have learnt to tell tales, as it were by lightning, but understand less well the art of slowly developing their characters and situations. In little literary genre pictures of daily life they are certainly at this moment without rivals; and we in England could learn much from them, for with us short tales are not our strong point. Farina's masterpiece, 'Mio Figlio,' though a long work, is in reality a cycle of novelettes, all dealing with the same family, but each sketch complete in itself. Farina has never surpassed this book, and it seems to us unlikely that he will do so. All the best elements of his amiable muse are united here – his light-hearted philosophy, his wholesome emotion, his fine observation. It is a prose poem of family life, an epic of home joys and loves, a series of tableaux vivants taken au vif from the domestic hearth. In a series of nine sketches the lawyer Placide, in whom we may recognise many little traits of resemblance with the author, relates the history of his son, from before his birth to his marriage. Each story contains a finished picture of a particular stage of family life, and as a whole they enclose the entire compass of an ordinary human life reflected in the fortunes of one family. Written from the heart, it appeals to the heart, and its very simplicity and everyday theme lend it a typical character. We regret that exigencies of space prevent us from quoting a few scenes from this work, which, we fear, can never be translated into English, – for one reason, because its naïve, innocent, childlike outspokenness – an outspokenness characteristically Italian, that thinks and means no harm – is foreign to our mode of thought, and would be misinterpreted here; and for another, because its charm of language – suave, caressing, musical, at times almost rythmical – would entirely evaporate in translation into our incognate speech.

Idealist and Puritan, so some of his critics sum up Farina, and especially those who contrast him with his great Sicilian contemporary, Verga, a naturalist of the first water, though of the purest type, – one who does not grovel in dirt for dirt's own sake, but who puts down accurately what he sees before him. His eyes wear no spectacles, either rose-coloured or black. He is an artist who has struck out his own paths in lieu of walking in those of others.

But we must hasten at once to say that there are two Vergas, the one as conventional and trivial as the other is original and racy, – the one who seeks his themes in the higher social classes, with whom he has clearly no sympathies, and whom he only seems to know from the corrupt and artificial side; the other, the Sicilian, who knows intimately, loves well, his compatriot peasants, the fishermen that ply their precarious trade upon its classic shores. Verga's society novels have no specifically Italian character; they deal with those stock-in-trade novelistic puppets that might live in any land or clime; and though here and there the master-hand is felt, they do