Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/88

82 'Uomo di lusso,' who contains within himself all these desires, wishes, vanities, comprehending them, suffering under them, and devoured by them. All these are so many vanquished whom the current of the struggle for existence has thrown out upon the shore. The fatal, restless, often weary, feverish way, trodden of humanity to conquer progress, is magnificent in its results, seen as a whole and from a distance. In the glorious light it sheds about it, are overshadowed the agitations, the desires, the egoism; all the passions, all the vices that are transformed into virtues; all the weaknesses that assist the great labour; all the contradictions from whose attrition develops the light of truth. The grand result for humanity covers all that is mean and petty in the private interests that produce it – nay, almost justifies them as needful means to stimulate the activity of the individual that is unconsciously working for the benefit of the whole. ... Only the observer, though himself torn along by the current, has the right to interest himself for the weak who are left behind by the stream; for the weary who let the waves close over them to end more quickly; for the vanquished who raise their arms despairingly and bow their heads under the brutal tread of those that march over them, the conquerors of to-day, themselves pressing on recklessly, eager to arrive, and who will, on their part, be overtaken to-morrow. ... Whoever observes this spectacle has no right to judge it; it is much already if he succeeds in dragging himself for a moment outside the camp of struggle, to study it without passion, and to reproduce the scene exactly, with its proper colouring, so as to give the representation of reality as it has been or should be."

This idea of a plan running throughout his novel series has, of course, led to a comparison of Verga with Zola's 'Rougon Makart,' and and it is not improbable that the first impetus may have come thence. But Verga differs essentially from his French colleague in that it is not blind, cruel, hereditary necessity, or outward accident, that impels his actors, but rather an ethical power that works unconsciously behind their actions. We only trust that Verga may finish his series, and not – like his Gallician contemporary, Sacher Masoch, who also planned to tell the whole tragedy of life in a cycle of tales – find himself tempted aside from his Herculean path by the invitations of editors to furnish them with short tales, chips from his workshop, chips that seem to have frittered away the building material destined for the main edifice. We note with regret no announcement of 'Don Gesualdo' and a number of feuilleton stories weekly appearing in the Italian press. It is true 'I Malavoglia' has not met in Italy with the popularity its merits deserve. It is not light reading – indeed the first hundred pages are decidedly heavy; but the persevering reader will find himself rewarded, and occasionally diverted too, though the general tendency is mournful. Malavoglia is the name, or rather the nickname, of a Sicilian fisherman family, whose fortunes the author follows in great detail, and around whom are grouped the entire population of the ham- let – some thirty persons. We get a little confused at first, until we are thoroughly acquainted with these various men and women, – more or less insignificant, and yet each a character – a struggling, suffering, human soul. How admirably is the vacuity, the insipidity of rural life depicted, with its sterile heroisms, its disdain for luckless virtue, its griefs, no less profound that their causes seem puerile to our larger capacities for action! The hero – if the book has a hero – is the younger 'Ntoni, who has vaguely heard of the "new ideas" that have fallen with him on fruitful ground. He, too, wants