Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/86

80 the impression left by the whole is sickly.

With 'Nedda,' a Sicilian sketch, Verga stepped forth strong and fully equipped. All maudlin sentimentality had vanished; we have here to do with a writer who has felt the pulse of the peasants, and puts their life before us in all its pathos; lives heroic within their small sphere, lives sordid and squalid amid a landscape of exquisite beauty, lives fever-stricken and cruel amid the most gracious conditions of nature; men and women whose veins would seem to run lava, as though the fiery mountain, beneath whose shade they dwell, had poured its vitals into their frames. 'Nedda,' within its short compass, is a village tragedy of great power, though its personages are but a miserably poor young girl, of hot, strong feelings, with an instinctive fear of temptation – her loutish, but true-hearted lover, with his awkward modes of wooing – a narrow-souled priest, a cruel world that judges the fallen as harshly in a hamlet as in a metropolis, the good-natured Uncle Giovanni, generous as only the poor know how, – all figures that stand forth from the sun-gilded Sicilian background, etched upon our memories for ever. 'Vita dei Campi,' 'Per le vie,' 'Novelle,' 'Novelle rusticane,' are the various titles under which Verga has collected his rustic tales. All are distinguished by a conscientious study of truth, the exclusion of any literary artifices, and a conciseness and intensity of style which says in ten words what others would say in a hundred, curiously at variance with our notions of Southern volubility. But under this reticence we feel the author's earnestness. He resembles one of his own heroes, Alfio, who speaks tranquilly while he has a tempest raging in his breast. His studies of Sicilian life, transcribed from amid the villages and old ruined houses of the coast, on the plains of Catania, have not only an artistic but a social value, and may in time be quoted as what, according to a current phrase, is known as "human documents," when the modern history of Italy is written. These stories have the grace of Mérimée's Corsican novelettes, the vigour and virgin-soil freshness of Bret Harte's 'Tales of the Argonauts.' Like Bret Harte, Verga has stepped among the people and studied human passions there, where conventionalities do not quench their full strength, and where they often manifest themselves in their entire animal unreasoning character. The dominant purpose of his tales may be summed up as the war of the rich and wicked against the poor and simple, a warfare in which the poor and simple ever succumb; as how can they resist laws, prejudices, religion, – in a word, all the social organisation which the powerful use as their instruments of oppression? He tells the sad tale calmly, with a coldness that might seem irony, if we did not ask ourselves, would he speak at all had he not been deeply touched? He graves his etching stylus into the very marrow and veins of the people; but he is not therefore cruel, or immoral, or biassed. There is an innate love of truth in the life-studies he has made on the sphinx of humanity. They are mostly sombre, as might be expected. The life of the poor hard-worked peasant is not gay and careless, as the believer in Arcadia would have us think; Arcadia that has never existed out of the pages of poets and Dresden china – and 'Rosso Malpelo,' 'Jeli il Pastore,' 'Cavalleria Rusticana,' 'La Lupa,' are