productivity. The lines and the novels traced by that tireless hand are more than the Alexandrines of Victor Hugo, more than the autos of Calderón. We may call them "flowers and hay," to use Manzoni's term; but hay-and if you don't believe it, ask any peasant-is no less precious than flowers. It has its own fragrance, and it feeds beasts who would not touch lilies and roses. You may say that her French rival Xavier de Montépin had an equal abundance of inventive imagination. But he was a man, and a Frenchman; Carolina a woman, and an Italian.

Among the women writers of other lands the only one to whom she may fairly be compared is Ann Radcliffe, authoress of the terrible Mysteries of Udolpho-and she, though she died in 1823, is still unforgotten. Among Italians, Mastriani alone can rival the fertility of her unrestrained genius. And yet I would swear that her modern sisters in fiction regarded her with that arrogant scorn of which women alone are capable. Certainly they said that she did not know how to write or to psychologize. But how can you ask, my dear ladies, that an Italian woman should write good, pure, strong Italian prose? Since the time of Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, who wrote for her children and not for print, since the time of St. Catherine of Siena, who wrote for Paradise and not for this foolish and sinful earth, since the time of Sister Celeste

Galilei, who wrote for her blind father and not for the publishers, I have never heard of any Italian woman who knew how to write Italian. Surely you would not give the name of true Italian prose to the thin broth of Matilde Serao, the surreptitious delight of boarding-schools? Or to the honest camomile in which the venerable lady who hides under the pastoral name of Neera sets forth her chaste narratives? Or to the colorful swoonings of that pretentious literary dialect which Grazia Deledda manipulates with a Sardinian frankness.

Leave her in peace then-poor Carolina. She wrote just as the words came, to be sure, but she was always intelligible, and, what is more, she was always readable. She too, like her fellowcitizen Alfieri, like her colleague Manzoni, came in her youth to Tuscany to steep herself in the idiom of the Arno. But the Arno, so clear and resplendent when it gushes forth amid the chestnut trees of Falterona, is so muddy and greasy and turbid when it reaches Florence that the beauty of its idiom is gone. And the Academy of the Crusca in its Medicean palace is too high and mighty a lady to receive or help a humble schoolma'am, such as Signora Invernizio then

was.

So then you must not seek in her books the full-blown flowers of choice speech that may be gathered from the hopper of the dictionaries.

CAROLINA INVERNIZIO
CAROLINA

233

There are too many people in Italy, from Captain d'Annunzio down, who write by dint of fingering Tommaseo-Bellini. Nor must you seek art. Who now, indeed-save for eight or nine desperate lunatics-really insists on pure art? The bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the people who patronize the movies and the circulating libraries, the infallible and sovereign people, demand homicides, infidelities, gendarmes, and swoonings in the moonlight-they demand Carolina Invernizio. They may not give her a place among the approved classic texts. What of it? Neither did Balzac and Zola have the satisfaction of sitting under the dome of the French Academy.

The poverty of her psychology might seem to be a more serious matter. But in this connection it may not be amiss to sketch a brief theory of the novel. Today, amid the squalor and decay of so many literary forms, the novel is nothing more than a stake that serves to uphold all sorts of vines. Rousseau began by putting into the novel the philosophy of sentiment; Walter Scott and Manzoni threw in raw chunks of political and civic history; Dumas fils, the mulatto, added social theses; Flaubert, archæology; Weisman, Sienkiewicz and Fogazzaro, Christian apologetics; Zola, treatises on medical science and sociology; Bourget, the psychological problems of souls with an income of fifty thousand francs; Barrès, the battles of contemporary politics;

d'Annunzio, æsthetic exegeses, lyric descriptions, and the history of art. It is too much. The novel should be a novel; that is, a narrative of strange and curious events, a story of unusual happenings. The novel of adventure is the only genuine, legitimate novel. Let him who wants the history of art write books on the history of art; let him who wants religion write on theology; let him who wants psychology turn to psychological studies and manuals. Why should the novel, the very type that has least right to bore the reader, be compelled to serve as the receptacle, the vehicle, the substitute for all these other sciences, arts, and disciplines, beautiful in themselves, no doubt, most worthy and most useful, but utterly unrelated to romance? There is no psychologizing in the Tristan, the best and most popular novel of the Middle Ages. The favorite novel of modern times, the Don Quixote, is wholly a story of adventure, and does not pause for the analysis of souls. The first European novel, the Odyssey, is an unbroken sequence of events, without a trace of introspection. The department-store novel is a discovery of modern times. The novel which seeks to inform, instead of bringing pleasure, is an outcome of the corruption of the genre. The knowing, overladen, mixed and composite novel is faithless to its ancestry and its purposes. The great narrators -let us say Boccaccio and Maupassant, to keep

the ancients and the moderns on even termsdid not betray their art. They tell of events, sad or ridiculous, and seek no further. They do not spin psychology. That they leave to their readers or their critics or the professional psychologists.

This simple truth seems to have flashed upon the simple mind of Carolina Invernizio when in her early youth she undertook the writing of her first novel. She was well aware that a novel is written to amuse, and is read for the sake of amusement. So then it calls for many facts, for surprising and intricate combinations, for fancy unrestrained, for plenty of action, for a clever plot in which the splendor of virtue and the shadow of vice shall find their place. Her readers, and especially her feminine readers, have been completely satisfied by novels so composed, and her success is a proof of the intrinsic and undeniable excellence of the method. Her novels have been sold and are still sold by the hundred thousand wherever women's hearts beat for the misfortunes of innocence and the Italian tongue is read and understood. Before the war her publisher, Salani, sent whole shiploads of her novels to South America. And they were sold and were read far more than the works of her superior colleagues, far more than the volumes of De Amicis or d'Annunzio. The editions of her most famous books are as numerous as those of the