few attentive readers, i take it, would deny that the english novelist—from whom, in this case, there happens to be even less occasion than usual for distinguishing the american—testifies in his art much more than his foreign comrade, from whatever quarter, to the rigour of convention. there are whole sides of life about which he has as little to say as possible, about which he observes indeed in general a silence that has visibly ended by becoming for the foreign comrade his great characteristic. he strikes the spectator as having with a misplaced humility consented once for all to be admonished as to what he shall or shall not “mention”—and to be admonished in especial by an authority altogether indefinite. he subscribes, when his turn comes round, to an agreement in the drawing-up of which he has had no hand; he sits down to his task with a certain received canon of the “proper” before his eyes. the critic i am supposing reproaches him, naturally, in this critic’s way, with a marked failure ever to challenge, much less to analyse, that conception; with having never, as would appear, so much as put to himself in regard to most of the matters of which he makes his mystery the simple question “proper to what?” how can any authority, even the most embodied, asks the exponent of other views, decide for us in advance what shall in any case be proper—with the consequent implication of impropriety—to our given subject?

the english novelist would, i imagine, even sometimes be led on to finding that he has practically had to meet such an overhauling by a further admission, though an admission still tacit and showing him not a little shy of the whole discussion—principles and formulas being in general, as we know, but little his affair. would he not, if off his guard, have been in peril of lapsing into the doctrine—suicidal when reflected upon—that there may be also an a priori rule, a “thou shalt not,” if not a “thou shalt,” as to treatable subjects themselves? then it would be that his alien foe might fairly revel in the sense of having him in a corner, laughing an evil laugh to hear him plead in explanation that it is exactly most as to the subject to be treated that he feels the need laid upon him to conform. what is he to do when he has an idea to embody, we might suspect him rashly to inquire, unless, frankly to ask himself in the first place of all if it be proper? not indeed—we catch the reservation—that he is consciously often accessible to ideas for which that virtue may not be claimed. naturally, however, still, such a plea only brings forth for his interlocutor a repetition of the original appeal: “proper to what?” there is only one propriety the painter of life can ask of his morsel of material: is it, or is it not, of the stuff of life? so, in simplified terms at any rate, i seem to hear the interchange; to which i need listen no longer than thus to have derived from it a word of support for my position. the question of our possible rejoinder to the scorn of societies otherwise affected i must leave for some other connection. the point is—if point i may expect to obtain any countenance to its being called—that, in spite of our great dickens and, in a minor degree, of our great george eliot, the limitations of our practice are elsewhere than among ourselves pretty well held to have put us out of court. the thing least conceded to us moreover is that we handle at all frankly—if we put forward such a claim—even our own subject-matter or in other words our own life. “your own is all we want of you, all we should like to see. but that your system really touches your own is exactly what we deny. never, never!” for what it really comes to is that practically we, of all people in the world, are accused of a system. call this system a conspiracy of silence, and the whole charge is upon us.

the fact of the silence, whether or no of the system, is fortunately all that at present concerns us. did this not happen to be the case nothing could be more interesting, i think, than to follow somewhat further several of the bearings of the matter, which would bring us face to face with some wonderful and, i hasten to add, by no means doubtless merely disconcerting truths about ourselves. it has been given us to read a good deal, in these latter days, about l’ame fran?aise and l’ame russe—and with the result, in all probability, of our being rather less than more penetrated with the desire, in emulation of these opportunities, to deliver ourselves upon the english or the american soul. there would appear to be nothing we are totally conscious of that we are less eager to reduce to the mere expressible, to hand over to publicity, current journalistic prose aiding, than either of these fine essence; and yet incontestably there are neighbourhoods in which we feel ourselves within scent and reach of them by something of the same sense that in thick forests serves the hunter of great game. he may not quite touch the precious presence, but he knows when it is near. so somehow we know that the “anglo-saxon” soul, the modern at least, is not far off when we frankly consider the practice of our race—comparatively recent though it be—in taking for granted the “innocence” of literature.

our perhaps a trifle witless way of expressing our conception of this innocence and our desire for it is, characteristically enough, by taking refuge in another vagueness, by invoking the allowances that we understand works of imagination and of criticism to make to the “young.” i know not whether it has ever officially been stated for us that, given the young, given literature, and given, under stress, the need of sacrificing one or the other party, it is not certainly by our sense of “style” that our choice would be determined: no great art in the reading of signs and symptoms is at all events required for a view of our probable instinct in such a case. that instinct, however, has too many deep things in it to be briefly or easily disposed of, and there would be no greater mistake than to attempt too simple an account of it. the account most likely to be given by a completely detached critic would be that we are as a race better equipped for action than for thought, and that to let the art of expression go by the board is through that very fact to point to the limits of what we mostly have to express. if we accept such a report we shall do so, i think, rather from a strong than from a weak sense of what may easily be made of it; but i glance at these things only as at objects almost too flooded with light, and come back after my parenthesis to what more immediately concerns me: the plain reflection that, if the elements of compromise—compromise with fifty of the “facts of life”—be the common feature of the novel of english speech, so it is mainly indebted for this character to the sex comparatively without a feeling for logic.

nothing is at any rate a priori more natural than to trace a connection between our general mildness, as it may conveniently be called, and the fact that we are likewise so generally feminine. is the english novel “proper” because it is so much written by women, or is it only so much written by women because its propriety has been so firmly established? the intimate relation is on either determination all that is here pertinent—effect and cause may be left to themselves. what is further pertinent, as happens, is that on a near view the relation is not constant; by which i mean that, though the ladies are always productive, the fashion of mildness is not always the same. convention in short has its ups and downs, and these votaries have of late years, i think, been as often seen weltering in the hollow of the wave as borne aloft on its crest. some of them may even be held positively to have distinguished themselves most—whether or no in veils of anonymity—on the occasion of the downward movement; making us really wonder if their number might not fairly, under any steadier force of such a movement, be counted on to increase. all sorts of inquiries are suggested in truth by the sight. “emancipations” are in the air, and may it not possibly be that we shall see two of the most striking coincide? if convention has, to the tune to which i just invited an ear, blighted our fiction, what shall we say of its admitted, its still more deprecated and in so many quarters even deplored, effect upon the great body under the special patronage of which the “output” has none the less insisted on becoming incomparably copious? since the general inaptitude of women appears by this time triumphantly to have been proved an assumption particularly hollow, despoiled more and more each day of the last tatters of its credit, why should not the new force thus liberated really, in the connection i indicate, give something of its measure?

it is at any rate keeping within bounds to say that the novel will surely not become less free in proportion as the condition of women becomes more easy. it is more or less in deference to their constant concern with it that we have seen it, among ourselves, pick its steps so carefully; but there are indications that the future may reserve us the surprise of having to thank the very class whose supposed sensibilities have most oppressed us for teaching it not only a longer stride, but a healthy indifference to an occasional splash. it is for instance only of quite recent years that the type of fiction commonly identified as the “sexual” has achieved—for purposes of reference, so far as notices in newspapers may be held to constitute reference—a salience variously estimated. now therefore, though it is early to say that all “imaginative work” from the female hand is subject to this description, there is assuredly none markedly so subject that is not from the female hand. the female mind has in fact throughout the competition carried off the prize in the familiar game, known to us all from childhood’s hour, of playing at “grown-up;” finding thus its opportunity, with no small acuteness, in the more and more marked tendency of the mind of the other gender to revert, alike in the grave and the gay, to those simplicities which there would appear to be some warrant for pronouncing puerile. it is the ladies in a word who have lately done most to remind us of man’s relations with himself, that is with woman. his relations with the pistol, the pirate, the police, the wild and the tame beast—are not these prevailingly what the gentlemen have given us? and does not the difference sufficiently point my moral?

let me, however, not seem to have gone too far afield to seek it; for my reflections—general perhaps to excess—closely connect themselves with a subject to which they are quite ready to yield in interest. i have lately been giving a happy extension to an old acquaintance, dating from early in the eighties, with the striking romantic work of matilde serao; a writer who, apart from other successes, has the excellent effect, the sign of the stronger few, that the end of her story is, for her reader, never the end of her work. on thus recently returning to her i have found in her something much more to my present purpose than the mere appearance of power and ease. if she is interesting largely because she is, in the light of her free, her extraordinary neapolitan temperament, a vivid painter and a rich register of sensations and impressions, she is still more so as an exceptionally compact and suggestive case, a case exempt from interference and presenting itself with a beautiful unconsciousness. she has had the good fortune—if it be, after all, not the ill—to develop in an air in which convention, in our invidious sense, has had as little to say to her as possible; and she is accordingly a precious example of the possibilities of free exercise. the questions of the proper and the improper are comfortably far from her; and though more than in the line of her sisters of english speech she may have to reckon with prescriptions as to form—a burden at which in truth she snaps her fingers with an approach to impertinence—she moves in a circle practically void of all pre-judgment as to subject and matter. conscious enough, doubtless, of a literary law to be offended, and caring little in fact, i repeat—for it is her weakness—what wrong it may suffer, she has not even the agreeable incentive of an ability to calculate the “moral” shocks she may administer.

practically chartered then she is further happy—since they both minister to ease—in two substantial facts: she is a daughter of the veritable south and a product of the contemporary newspaper. a neapolitan by birth and a journalist by circumstance, by marriage and in some degree doubtless also by inclination, she strikes for us from the first the note of facility and spontaneity and the note of initiation and practice. concerned, through her husband, in the conduct of a neapolitan morning paper, of a large circulation and a radical colour, she has, as i infer, produced her novels and tales mainly in such snatches of time and of inspiration as have been left her by urgent day-to-day journalism. they distinctly betray, throughout, the conditions of their birth—so little are they to the literary sense children of maturity and leisure. on the question of style in a foreign writer it takes many contributive lights to make us sure of our ground; but i feel myself on the safe side in conceiving that this lady, full of perception and vibration, can not only not figure as a purist, but must be supposed throughout, in spite of an explosive eloquence, to pretend but little to distinction of form: which for an italian is a much graver predicament than for one of our shapeless selves. that, however, would perhaps pass for a small quarrel with a writer, or rather with a talker and—for it is what one must most insist on—a feeler, of matilde serao’s remarkable spontaneity. her neapolitan nature is by itself a value, to whatever literary lapses it may minister. a torch kindled at that flame can be but freely waved, and our author’s arm has a fine action. loud, loquacious, abundant, natural, happy, with luxurious insistences on the handsome, the costly and the fleshly, the fine persons and fine clothes of her characters, their satin and velvet, their bracelets, rings, white waistcoats, general appointments and bedroom furniture, with almost as many repetitions and as free a tongue, in short, as juliet’s nurse, she reflects at every turn the wonderful mixture that surrounds her—the beauty, the misery, the history, the light and noise and dust, the prolonged paganism and the renewed reactions, the great style of the distant and the past and the generally compromised state of the immediate and the near. these things were all in the germ for the reader of her earlier novels—they have since only gathered volume and assurance—so that i well remember the impression made on me, when the book was new (my copy, apparently of the first edition, bears the date of 1885), by the rare energy, the immense disinvoltura, of “la conquista di roma.” this was my introduction to the author, in consequence of which i immediately read “fantasia” and the “vita e avventure di riccardo joanna,” with some smaller pieces; after which, interrupted but not detached, i knew nothing more till, in the course of time, i renewed acquaintance on the ground of “il paese di cuccagna,” then, however, no longer in its first freshness. that work set me straightway to reading everything else i could lay hands on, and i think therefore that, save “il ventre di napoli” and two or three quite recent productions that i have not met, there is nothing from our author that i have not mastered. such as i find her in everything, she remains above all things the signal “case.”

if, however, she appears, as i am bound to note, not to have kept the full promise of her early energy, this is because it has suited her to move less in the direction—where so much might have awaited her—of “riccardo joanna” and “la conquista” than in that, on the whole less happily symptomatic, of “fantasia.” “fantasia” is, before all else, a study of “passion,” or rather of the intenser form of that mystery which the italian passione better expresses; and i hasten to confess that had she not so marked herself an exponent of this specialty i should probably not now be writing of her. i conceive none the less that it would have been open to her to favour more that side of her great talent of which the so powerful “paese di cuccagna” is the strongest example. there is by good fortune in this large miscellaneous picture of neapolitan life no passione save that of the observer curiously and pityingly intent upon it, that of the artist resolute at any cost to embrace and reproduce it. admirably, easily, convincingly objective, the thing is a sustained panorama, a chronicle of manners finding its unity in one recurrent note, that of the consuming lottery-hunger which constitutes the joy, the curse, the obsession and the ruin, according to matilde serao, of her fellow-citizens. her works are thus divided by a somewhat unequal line, those on one side of which the critic is tempted to accuse her of having not altogether happily sacrificed to those on the other. when she for the most part invokes under the name of passione the main explanation of the mortal lot it is to follow the windings of this clue in the upper walks of life, to haunt the aristocracy, to embrace the world of fashion, to overflow with clothes, jewels and promiscuous intercourse, all to the proportionate eclipse of her strong, full vision of the more usually vulgar. “la conquista” is the story of a young deputy who comes up to the chamber, from the basilicata, with a touching candour of ambition and a perilous ignorance of the pitfalls of capitals. his dream is to conquer rome, but it is by rome naturally that he is conquered. he alights on his political twig with a flutter of wings, but has reckoned in his innocence without the strong taste in so many quarters for sport; and it is with a charge of shot in his breast and a drag of his pinions in the dust that he takes his way back to mediocrity, obscurity and the parent nest. it is from the ladies—as was indeed even from the first to be expected with serao—that he receives his doom; passione is in these pages already at the door and soon arrives; passione rapidly enough passes its sponge over everything not itself.

in “cuore infermo,” in “addio amore,” in “il castigo,” in the two volumes of “gli amanti” and in various other pieces this effacement is so complete that we see the persons concerned but in the one relation, with every other circumstance, those of concurrent profession, possession, occupation, connection, interest, amusement, kinship, utterly superseded and obscured. save in the three or four books i have named as exceptional the figures evoked are literally professional lovers, “available,” as the term is, for passione alone: which is the striking sign, as i shall presently indicate, of the extremity in which her enjoyment of the freedom we so often have to envy has strangely landed our author. “riccardo joanna,” which, like “la conquista,” has force, humour and charm, sounding with freshness the note of the general life, is such a picture of certain of the sordid conditions of italian journalism as, if i may trust my memory without re-perusal, sharply and pathetically imposes itself. i recall “fantasia” on the other hand as wholly passione—all concentration and erotics, the latter practised in this instance, as in “addio amore,” with extreme cruelty to the “good” heroine, the person innocent and sacrificed; yet this volume too contributes its part in the retrospect to that appearance of marked discipleship which was one of the original sources of my interest. nothing could more have engaged one’s attention in these matters at that moment than the fresh phenomenon of a lady-novelist so confessedly flushed with the influence of émile zola. passing among ourselves as a lurid warning even to workers of his own sex, he drew a new grace from the candid homage—all implied and indirect, but, as i refigure my impression, not the less unmistakable—of that half of humanity which, let alone attempting to follow in his footsteps, was not supposed even to turn his pages. there is an episode in “fantasia”—a scene in which the relations of the hero and the “bad” heroine are strangely consolidated by a visit together to a cattle-show—in which the courage of the pupil has but little to envy the breadth of the master. the hot day and hot hour, the heavy air and the strong smells, the great and small beasts, the action on the sensibilities of the lady and the gentleman of the rich animal life, the collapse indeed of the lady in the presence of the prize bull—all these are touches for which luckily our author has the warrant of a greater name. the general picture, in “fantasia,” of the agricultural exhibition at caserta is in fact not the worse at any point for a noticeable echo of more than one french model. would the author have found so full an occasion in it without a fond memory of the immortal cornices of “madame bovary”?

these, however, are minor questions—pertinent only as connecting themselves with the more serious side of her talent. we may rejoice in such a specimen of it as is offered by the too brief series of episodes of “the romance of the maiden.” these things, dealing mainly with the small miseries of small folk, have a palpable truth, and it is striking that, to put the matter simply, madame serao is at her best almost in direct proportion as her characters are poor. by poor i mean literally the reverse of rich; for directly they are rich and begin, as the phrase is, to keep their carriage, her taste totters and lapses, her style approximates at moments to that of the ladies who do the fashions and the letters from the watering-places in the society papers. she has acutely and she renders with excellent breadth the sense of benighted lives, of small sordid troubles, of the general unhappy youthful (on the part of her own sex at least) and the general more or less starved plebeian consciousness. the degree to which it testifies to all this is one of the great beauties of “il paese di cuccagna,” even if the moral of that dire picture be simply that in respect to the gaming-passion, the madness of “numbers,” no walk of life at naples is too high or too low to be ravaged. beautiful, in “il romanzo della fanciulla,” are the exhibitions of grinding girl-life in the big telegraph office and in the state normal school. the gem of “gli amanti” is the tiny tale of “vicenzella,” a masterpiece in twenty small pages—the vision of what three or four afternoon hours could contain for a slip of a creature of the naples waterside, a poor girl who picks up a living by the cookery and sale, on the edge of a parapet, of various rank dismembered polyps of the southern sea, and who is from stage to stage despoiled of the pence she patiently pockets for them by the successive small emissaries of her artful, absent lover, constantly faithless, occupied, not too far off, in regaling a lady of his temporary preference, and proportionately clamorous for fresh remittances. the moment and the picture are but a scrap, yet they are as large as life.

“canituccia,” in “piccole anime,” may happily pair with “vicenzella,” canituccia being simply the humble rustic guardian, in field and wood—scarce more than a child—of the still more tender ciccotto; and ciccotto being a fine young pink-and-white pig, an animal of endowments that lead, after he has had time to render infatuated his otherwise quite solitary and joyless friend, to his premature conversion into bacon. she assists, helplessly silent, staring, almost idiotic, from a corner of the cabin-yard, by night and lamplight, in the presence of gleaming knives and steaming pots and bloody tubs, at the sacrifice that deprives her of all company, and nothing can exceed the homely truth of the touch that finally rounds off the scene and for which i must refer my reader to the volume. let me further not fail to register my admiration for the curious cluster of scenes that, in “il romanzo,” bears the title of “nella lava.” here frankly, i take it, we have the real principle of “naturalism”—a consistent presentment of the famous “slice of life.” the slices given us—slices of shabby hungry maidenhood in small cockney circles—are but sketchily related to the volcanic catastrophe we hear rumbling behind them, the undertone of all the noise of naples; but they have the real artistic importance of showing us how little “story” is required to hold us when we get, before the object evoked and in the air created, the impression of the real thing. whatever thing—interesting inference—has but effectively to be real to constitute in itself story enough. there is no story without it, none that is not rank humbug; whereas with it the very desert blooms.

this last-named phenomenon takes place, i fear, but in a minor degree in such of our author’s productions as “cuore infermo,” “addio amore,” “il castigo” and the double series of “gli amanti”; and for a reason that i the more promptly indicate as it not only explains, i think, the comparative inanity of these pictures, but does more than anything else to reward our inquiry. the very first reflection suggested by serao’s novels of “passion” is that they perfectly meet our speculation as to what might with a little time become of our own fiction were our particular convention suspended. we see so what, on its actual lines, does, what has, become of it, and are so sated with the vision that a little consideration of the latent other chance will surely but refresh us. the effect then, we discover, of the undertaking to give passione its whole place is that by the operation of a singular law no place speedily appears to be left for anything else; and the effect of that in turn is greatly to modify, first, the truth of things, and second, with small delay, what may be left them of their beauty. we find ourselves wondering after a little whether there may not really be more truth in the world misrepresented according to our own familiar fashion than in such a world as that of madame serao’s exuberant victims of venus. it is not only that if venus herself is notoriously beautiful her altar, as happens, is by no means always proportionately august; it is also that we draw, in the long run, small comfort from the virtual suppression, by any painter, of whatever skill—and the skill of this particular one fails to rise to the height—of every relation in life but that over which venus presides. in “fior di passione” and the several others of a like connection that i have named the suppression is really complete; the common humanities and sociabilities are wholly absent from the picture.

the effect of this is extraordinarily to falsify the total show and to present the particular affair—the intimacy in hand for the moment, though the moment be but brief—as taking place in a strange false perspective, a denuded desert which experience surely fails ever to give us the like of and the action of which on the faculty of observation in the painter is anything but favourable. it strikes at the root, in the impression producible and produced, of discrimination and irony, of humour and pathos. our present author would doubtless contend on behalf of the works i have mentioned that pathos at least does abound in them—the particular bitterness, the inevitable despair that she again and again shows to be the final savour of the cup of passione. it would be quite open to her to urge—and she would be sure to do so with eloquence—that if we pusillanimously pant for a moral, no moral really can have the force of her almost inveterate evocation of the absolute ravage of venus, the dry desolation that in nine cases out of ten venus may be perceived to leave behind her. that, however, but half meets our argument—which bears by no means merely on the desolation behind, but on the desolation before, beside and generally roundabout. it is not in short at all the moral but the fable itself that in the exclusively sexual light breaks down and fails us. love, at naples and in rome, as madame serao exhibits it, is simply unaccompanied with any interplay of our usual conditions—with affection, with duration, with circumstances or consequences, with friends, enemies, husbands, wives, children, parents, interests, occupations, the manifestation of tastes. who are these people, we presently ask ourselves, who love indeed with fury—though for the most part with astonishing brevity—but who are so without any suggested situation in life that they can only strike us as loving for nothing and in the void, to no gain of experience and no effect of a felt medium or a breathed air. we know them by nothing but their convulsions and spasms, and we feel once again that it is not the passion of hero and heroine that gives, that can ever give, the heroine and the hero interest, but that it is they themselves, with the ground they stand on and the objects enclosing them, who give interest to their passion. this element touches us just in proportion as we see it mixed with other things, with all the things with which it has to reckon and struggle. there is moreover another reflection with which the pathetic in this connection has to count, even though it undermine not a little the whole of the tragic effect of the agitations of passione. is it, ruthlessly speaking, certain that the effect most consonant, for the spectator, with truth is half as tragic as it is something else? should not the moral be sought in the very different quarter where the muse of comedy rather would have the last word? the ambiguity and the difficulty are, it strikes me, of a new growth, and spring from a perverse desire on the part of the erotic novelist to secure for the adventures he depicts a dignity that is not of the essence. to compass this dignity he has to cultivate the high pitch and beat the big drum, but when he has done so he has given everything the wrong accent and the whole the wrong extravagance. why see it all, we ask him, as an extravagance of the solemn and the strained? why make such an erotic a matter of tears and imprecations, and by so doing render so poor a service both to pleasure and to pain? since by your own free showing it is pre-eminently a matter of folly, let us at least have folly with her bells, or when these must—since they must—sound knells and dirges, leave them only to the light hand of the lyric poet, who turns them at the worst to music. matilde serao is in this connection constantly lugubrious; even from the little so-called pastels of “gli amanti” she manages, with an ingenuity worthy of a better cause, to expunge the note of gaiety.

this dismal parti pris indeed will inevitably, it is to be feared, when all the emancipations shall have said their last word, be that of the ladies. yet perhaps too, whatever such a probability, the tone scarce signifies—in the presence, i mean, of the fundamental mistake from which the author before us warns us off. that mistake, we gather from her warning, would be to encourage, after all, any considerable lowering of the level of our precious fund of reserve. when we come to analyse we arrive at a final impression of what we pay, as lovers of the novel, for such a chartered state as we have here a glimpse of; and we find it to be an exposure, on the intervention at least of such a literary temperament as the one before us, to a new kind of vulgarity. we have surely as it is kinds enough. the absence of the convention throws the writer back on tact, taste, delicacy, discretion, subjecting these principles to a strain from which the happy office of its presence is, in a considerable degree and for performers of the mere usual endowment, to relieve him. when we have not a very fine sense the convention appears in a manner to have it on our behalf. and how frequent to-day, in the hurrying herd of brothers and sisters of the pen, is a fine sense—of any side of their affair? do we not approach the truth in divining that only an eminent individual here and there may be trusted for it? here—for the case is our very lesson—is this robust and wonderful serao who is yet not to be trusted at all. does not the dim religious light with which we surround its shrine do more, on the whole, for the poetry of passione than the flood of flaring gas with which, in her pages, and at her touch, it is drenched? does it not shrink, as a subject under treatment, from such expert recognitions and easy discussions, from its so pitiless reduction to the category of the familiar? it issues from the ordeal with the aspect with which it might escape from a noisy family party or alight from a crowded omnibus. it is at the category of the familiar that vulgarity begins. there may be a cool virtue therefore even for “art,” and an appreciable distinction even for truth, in the grace of hanging back and the choice of standing off, in that shade of the superficial which we best defend by simply practising it in season. a feeling revives at last, after a timed intermission, that we may not immediately be quite able, quite assured enough, to name, but which, gradually clearing up, soon defines itself almost as a yearning. we turn round in obedience to it—unmistakably we turn round again to the opposite pole, and there before we know it have positively laid a clinging hand on dear old jane austen.