Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/90

84 on the other hand, she has a virile firmness, an unflinching directness of touch and purpose which, combined in one person, gives her work quite a unique character and charm. She is truly a Southerner. Her mother was a Greek, descended from the Princes Scanavy, who gave emperors to Trebizond; and she herself was born at Patras, so that Italian is to her a learned language. It is from her mother that she has gained all she knows; for she was lazy in studying, preferring reading to steady application. Her father was a Neapolitan exile, who only returned to his native town in 1860, when Matilde was twelve years old. At quite an early age she began to write, and was only seventeen when her first short tale was published – 'Opale,' an ingenuous spontaneous manifestation of a fresh and potent talent. It made some stir, and De Zerbi, then editor of the Neapolitan 'Piccolo,' offered her work upon his journal. Her fertility and vivacity, the facility with which she could turn her hand to any style of writing, – now short tales, now impressionist sketches of changing and transient scenes; now criticisms of art and literature; now records of balls and operas; now even Lenten sermons, composed with exquisite verve and wit, – made the world fear lest the need of immediate gains, and the clamourings of editors, should cause this gifted woman to fritter her talents in ephemeral work. Happily these fears were not realised; and in 1881, and again in 1883, she gave to the world two long romances, on which her future fame will surely rest. She has also collected into volumes such of her shorter tales and sketches as she has judged worthy of continued life. Of these 'Dal Vero,' a series of tales treating mostly of the higher fashionable life of Rome and Naples, is distinguished by great freshness of manner and elaborate analysis of motive and character. Here all her dramatic presentment, her boldness, her caustic power have full play. 'Le Leggende Napoletane' are described by herself as "a book of imagination and dreams," in which she allows her impressionable nature full play: a monument, a house, a name, a coat-of-arms will stimulate her fancy, and set her weaving stories, half fact, half fiction, in which a strong poetic vein makes itself evident – a vein that saved her tales from sinking into the depths of naturalism. Spontaneity distinguishes these sketches, whose style is sometimes too apparently recherché; but this with her springs rather from exceptional sensibility than from conscious pursuit of unusual expressions. She admits that her art is vivified by an entirely feminine sentiment of sympathy – a fact strongly felt in 'Piccolo Anime,' which is devoted wholly to children, but written for grown people, in which she treats of every variety of child that has come into her way, giving us a picture of their little mental lives, with their precocious sensibility, their rapid intuitions, their nervous irritability; their instinctive sympathies and unreasoned antipathies; their joys and sufferings, – a book, in short, as charming and varied as children and child-life.

Matilde Serao is, before all else, a master of miniature-painting after the Dutch style, though her tendencies are modelled upon the stern French realistic pattern. She permits herself no pathos, no sentiment in expression, though she has both in feeling – she is almost convulsively objective; and though her two novels are in parts inclined to lengthiness, she neverthe-