Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/98

92 cause Nanna goes into the rice-fields. How she, who is not robust, catches the fever here and yet returns next season, because the peasants hold that ague does not kill, and, after all, they most of them have it; how she gets it again; how superstitious rites are employed to cure her; how she recovers finally but is quite bald, so that the pins for which she has laboured and spent her breath can never be worn by her, – is told with power, and sufficiently interrupted by lighter incidents not to be too depressingly mournful. The strange admixture of kindness and brutal outspokenness to each other that distinguishes the peasantry is brought into high relief. The situation is summed up in the mother's comment when she finds that Nanna is bald.

"'What God wills is never too much,' Maddalena had said, and it was the quintessence of Christian resignation; because she saw well, that poor mother, that in that which God willed was comprised for her the end of any pride or maternal joy, and for her daughter a perpetual celibacy and a life of humiliation."

And indeed Nanna is made to suffer much rudeness and taunting, and she grows embittered by her enforced celibacy, a condition regarded almost as a reflection upon morality by the lower orders. In the end she does marry a widower, who loves and esteems her, and the whole concludes merrily to the sound of the Christmas bells, the ultimate catastrophe being brought about by some of the peculiar Christmas customs of the people.

Space warns us we must close, though we would gladly have said more about this writer of vivacious invention and purity of aim, whose works are deservedly popular in her native land. And herewith we leave our quartette of Italian novelists, trusting that we have shown just cause for the statement made at the outset, that the complaint, frequently made, that there is no good current Italian literature, is unjustified; and that, in the domain of fiction at least, the Italians can measure themselves with their European contemporaries, and not be found wanting.