Reali di Francia (the one truly Italian romantic epic) or those of Bertoldo (the one truly Italian comic hero). So long and so vast a success cannot be without its reasons, nor can all its reasons be to the discredit of the writer or her devotees.

Her success was obtained honestly, without the trumpeting of newspapers or the fanning of critics, without even the aid of mystery or a poetic pseudonym. She did not call herself the Countess of Lara, nor Phoebe, nor the Sphinx, nor the Queen of Luanto, nor Iolanda, nor Cordelia, nor Fate. She was content-being a woman of simple ways, as our friend the paragrapher has it-with the modern and homely name of Carolina Invernizio. And though she married a certain Colonel Quinterno, she died as Carolina Invernizio at Cuneo, in that sturdy Piedmont where she was born, I believe, in the fateful year of 1860. Her ashes are to be brought to Florence, where first the ways and the hopes of art opened before her. In the half century that witnessed the final resurrection of her fatherland, it was she who rendered Italy independent of foreign importations in the one branch of literature that is so necessary to the mass of the nation-the novel of intrigue and villainy.

Lest it be said that I am too partial to this woman, who has been too much blamed and too much praised (as they said of Voltaire), let me close with the testimony of a keen and disillu

sioned writer who, though a friend of mine, has exceptionally good taste. Ardengo Soffici relates in his Logbook that on a certain occasion he and a companion were both reading novels by Carolina Invernizio. His was The Villain's Joy; his companion's was Mortal Passion:

Every now and then we stopped reading to compare notes. "How many killed off so far?"

"Two."

"Three in mine."

"What's the heroine like?”

"Periwinkle eyes, golden hair, pale face, sad mouth." "Same here."

And the rest was what you might expect to find in Zuccoli or Ojetti or Angeli. Nor was it notably inferior.

And that is exactly my opinion, except that I would omit the "notably," and would not hesitate to say the work of Carolina Invernizio is superior at least in that it does not bore one. But a modern Italian novelist who realized that he was interesting would think himself dishonored. I, free from prejudice and from Arcadian austerity, admire and salute in the deceased Carolina the first and only Italian rival of the immortal Ponson du Terrail.1

The perception of real values is so rare among us that soon after this essay was first published I received a letter of thanks from the husband of the deceased-and her publisher, Salani, asked my permission to reprint it as a preface to a posthumous novel.

XVIII

ALFREDO ORIANI1

I

SEVEN years ago there died, after fifty-seven years of restless and imprisoned life, a man whom his fellow men had neither loved nor understood. He died alone as he had lived; he died in this season of death which had inspired his most poetic pages.

One cannot say that he died forgotten, because he had never won fame. The novels written in his youth had aroused a curiosity which failed to develop into glory. His other, stronger books, his books of synthesis, had been received in silence by a generation incapable of understanding them. In recent years a little youthful appreciation had brought the rare smile to that face of his, graven by the acids of melancholy, but had not canceled the look of proud sadness impressed upon it by the neglect of his contem

Written in October, 1916, for the seventh anniversary of the death of Oriani.

poraries. He had just begun to emerge from the silence into which a deaf and brutal indifference had banished him, when Fate thrust him into that other silence from which there is no emerging save at the summons of glory.

Some three years before Oriani's death, Giosue Carducci had passed to the heaven of recognized glories, amid a national adoration which took well nigh the form of apotheosis. Carducci was a greater man than Oriani, to be sure, but they differed far more widely in fame than in desert. They were not friends, but Oriani would have been the one man worthy to be the companion of Carducci, through the loftiness of his genius and the virility of his eloquence; far more worthy than the so-called disciples of Carducci, who were scarcely capable of following feebly the letter of his work, and were utterly remote from its spirit, from its temper, from its dignity-parlor kittens playing about the bed of a sick lion whose roaring days were over.

As poet and as philologist, Oriani would have suffered by the comparison; but as thinker and as historian he unquestionably surpassed Carducci, and would have surpassed him still more notably had he felt around him that affectionate and intelligent approval which may be scorned by those who fail to win it, but serves none the less to encourage even the most vigorous. Both

men loved Italy with a jealous and passionate love, and both lashed Italy for the faults of her decadence-even as all those who have loved her deeply have reproached her bitterly. And here there is food for the thought of those who regard all that surrounds them as perfect and heroic, who cannot unite the dart of Archilochus to the song of Pindar, who fancy that patriotism is composed of caresses and flatteries.

In Carducci this passion for Italy came chiefly from the practice of art: in Oriani it came from meditation on the past. The former was a lyrist who in the depths of history saw only an indefinite Nemesis; the latter, a "prophet of the past" who brought the dead to life that they might tell their secret to the living, a man who could discern in the nation's experience the manifold elements of an age-long plot, and fateful preparations for the future. Equally intense in their adoration, they drew their nourishment from different sources-those of Carducci more traditional and literary, those of Oriani more conscious and political. Oriani's eloquence was more excited and more modern, and his view, trained to the telescopic perspectives of philosophy, was of longer reach.

To those who have been slow to perceive or quick to forget, this comparison will seem strange and irreverent. Interest in Oriani was revived