he explained to me that he was always writing something, and that while he was writing he did not allow himself to read anything which might possibly affect him too strongly, by bringing a new current of emotion to bear upon him. He was quite content that his mind should "keep as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world"; it was that prisoner's dream of a world that it was his whole business as a writer to remember, to perpetuate.

ARTHUR SYMONS.

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO

OGAZZARO is the prophet of the new awaking of the

FOG

Catholic Church; one of that group of writers in England, France, Switzerland, Austria, Russia, Italy, who are treating religion as the matter of supreme human interest and receiving an amazing popular response; one of those latter-day reformers who believe that the Church has but to act up to the original article of her constitution expressed in the words, Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo, to become once more the "one fold" of Christendom, and who, out of their very loyalty, are seeking to bring her back to her lost ideals. And there are many others, not Romanists, who share this enthusiasm, and who, valuing the liberty for which our fathers fought, rejoice in the dawn of this liberty in the older Church. To such as these every "clerical defeat," from the great débâcle of 1870 to the latest French election, has seemed but a step towards purging the poison of politics out of her blood; every stripping of temporal power has meant the restoration of so much vital energy to its proper spiritual channel. There are even many who, recognising not only her heritage of truth held in common with all Christendom, but also her unique hold upon the human heart in her deep comprehension of, and response to, its needs-the fruit of her age-long experience-like to count themselves the spiritual members, and their various cults the sorores minores (some day to be so acknowledged) of the one great Church, Catholic and Apostolic, the reverend and revered Mother of us all.

No. 72. XXIV. 3.-SEPT. 1906

To all such the present movement appears of an intense interest and significance. A religious mood such as this is, of course, no new thing in literature. Any reflex of human life must again and again return to this, its most universal note. As at the beginning of the twentieth century, so at the beginning of the nineteenth, writers were possessed by this recurrent theme. Chateaubriand was restoring religion to art at the same time that Manzoni's Inni Sacri were infusing its ideals into the popular movement of the day. But the mood passed; in the stupor that followed the feverish years of the Napoleonic domination the interest in religion died out, and when the intellect of Europe re-awakened it woke not to religion but to science.

Needless to recall how science dominated the middle century, and how the popular mind, intoxicated with a little knowledge, cast aside its old gods, false and true alike. The new conception of evolution and the extended knowledge of natural law had, as everybody knows, their first crude effect in an enormous loss of religious faith. Atheism was the great word on people's tongues, soon relegated to the lower sort of working-men's clubs, where boys in their teens fulminated on the strength of a couple of penny pamphlets against the wisdom of the ages, and modified on the lips of the better educated into the more reasonable word Agnosticism, a word still favoured by many, were it only as a sounding term for throwing the whole business over the hedge. Whatever the word of the moment, the spiritual inspiration was gone, and writers of romance were thrown back upon their sensuous perceptionswith results not at first entirely displeasing. But the sensuous, thus materialised, could not but degenerate into the sensual. Romance, to sum up some words of Pompeo Molmenti's, became first physiological, then pathological, then putrid.

Science

Inevitably, and mercifully, the reaction has come. is seen to be but in its infancy, or at most in its adolescence, and not yet in position to challenge convictions rooted in elemental human nature and truths recognised before it was

born. The general intelligence is beginning to perceive what the finest intellects have all along seen, that natural and spiritual law are neither intersecting lines which run athwart each other, nor parallel lines which never meet, but radii of the same circle, merging in the central truth. First there has been the rehabilitation of religion as belonging to a reasonable intelligence, then the renewed insistence on the Christian definition, and finally the movement represented by Fogazzaro, in which the future is boldly claimed for the Catholic Church, no longer a temporal but a spiritual power, no longer Roman but Universal.

The three contemporary Italian novelists, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Grazia Deledda, and Antonio Fogazzaro, are to some degree typical of three stages in this development. D'Annunzio, whose genius is beyond all question, who in respect of art is the greatest of the three, whose fine imagination, poetic insight, delicate sense of beauty, and magic spell of language, should have made his work a great gift to literature, is nevertheless without moral greatness. The refined sensuality which appears to form his philosophy of life has not sufficed to inspire a single strong and noble character. His books are an ornament to the dolce favella, not to the alma d'Italia.

Grazia Deledda is of a far nobler, a far stronger, but scarcely of a more inspiring spirit. Her realism is of the relentless type which spares no detail of the sordid, or even ghastly, wages of sin. Duty is her ideal, high, austere, cruel. Do right, she seems to say, though knowing that only evil will come. Gather up the forces of the soul and set forth steadily along the road of an august despair. Towards the end of "Cenere," representing her hero's mood, she writes: "Tutto era cenere ; la vita, la morte, l'uomo; il destino stessa che la produceva." And though a few lines lower the book is closed with the assurance that "egli sentì che fra le cenere cova la scintilla, seme della fiamma luminosa e purificatrice, e sperò, e amò ancora la vita," yet there is no uplift in the words, and the

conviction clings to the unamended thought. That, not this, is the true outcome of the whole matter; the close reads rather as if some instinct of wholesomeness had risen up and compelled her to give the lie, though feebly, to the whole philosophy of her own book.

Contrast Fogazzaro's handling of the tragedy of Cenere— the effect upon an upright man's career of a disgraceful and degraded mother as it occurs, episodically, in "Daniele Cortis." There is an equal truth, an equal pain, but not an equal despair. His tragedies do not have their issue in the outer darkness. He has the immortal gift of recognising the ideal in the real, the poet's ear to discern the underlying harmonies of existence. Above the degenerate Epicureanism of d'Annunzio; above the brave but unillumined Stoicism of Grazia Deledda, he surveys with clearer eyes the mystery of life, sub specie aeternitatis.

The outward facts of Fogazzaro's life can be summed up in few words. He was born at Vicenza in 1842, amid troublous times for Italy and for Venetia. His father took part in the defence of Vicenza against the Austrians in 1848, while his mother sat at home making cockades for the troops. Though his imagination was thus stirred in childhood by the agitations and alarms of war, yet the family life was, on the whole, tranquil, occupied for the most part with the cultured interests to be expected in a city which liked to be called the Venetian Athens. The elder Fogazzaro was musical, an accomplished pianist, and a lover of Bach and Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, even in the 'fifties and 'sixties, when classical music was little regarded in Italy. The boy was brought up amongst books, bred on Dante, in love with Ariosto. He was fond of English novels, especially those of Dickens. German he never liked and seldom read. Perhaps the events of 1848 had left him with the true Italian prejudice against the Tedesco. It is only fair to say, however, that he loved Heine-in a French translation! But no book was more constantly in his hands than Chateaubriand's " Memoires d'Outre-Tombe," the volume