Page images
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]

Estrella, with a noble of my house,

A gallant youth, and in Castile a prince
And powerful lord, we have betrothed you;
And in return the favor of Sancho's pardon
We ask, which 'tis not just that you deny.
If that I am betrothed, my sovereign liege,
Let Sancho Ortiz go free; nor execute
My vengeance.

15295

Thy pardon thou dost grant me, then, For that his Highness has betrothed thee?

Don Sancho

Estrella

Yes:

Therefore it is I pardon thee.

Don Sancho

And thus

Estrella

Don Sancho

King
Farfan-

Thou art avenged for my offense?

And satisfied.

I accept my life, that so thy hopes attain
Fulfillment; although to die were sweeter.
You are free.

My lord.

King [to Don Arias]·

This to Seville is an offense,
Sancho Ortiz must die.

What now

To do? These people humiliate me,
And put me to confusion.

Don Arias
King

Speak.

Seville,

I to the law will answer for Tabera's death,
For I did cause it; I did command the deed.
To exonerate Sancho this suffices.

Don Sancho

For this exoneration only did

King
Farfan-

My honor wait. The King commanded me
To kill him. So barbarous a deed I'd not
Committed, had he not commanded it.
He speaks the truth.

Seville is satisfied.

For since thou didst command the deed,

Doubtless he gave thee cause.

Nobleness of soul I contemplate.

Amazed the Sevillian

I

To fulfill the sentence of my banishment,
When thou another promise dost fulfill
Thou gavest me, will depart.

King

Don Sancho

King

I will fulfill it.

Don Sancho

King

Don Sancho

The boon I asked, that thou for bride shouldst give me
The maid that I should name.

The boon is granted.

The hand of Doña Estrella then I claim;
And here a suppliant at her feet I crave
Pardon for my offense.

[blocks in formation]

King

Then is the sentence of my death pronounced!
Estrella, I have given my royal word,
And should fulfill it. What answerest thou?
That as thou willest so be it. I am his.

Estrella

[blocks in formation]

Estrella

Don Sancho

Estrella

Sancho

And this there could not be between us,
Living together.

I do absolve thee from thy promise.

From thine I do absolve thee. The slayer
To see forever of my brother, in bed,
At board, must needs afflict me.
And me, to be forever with the sister
Of him I slew unjustly, holding him dear
As my own soul.

'Tis true; and therefore

So

[blocks in formation]

Who slew my brother, though I do adore him,
Can never be my husband.

[Exit.

Don Sancho

Nor I, my lord,

Because I adore her, do count it just
Her husband that I should be.

[Exit.

Translation of Mary J. Serrano.

GIOVANNI VERGA

(1840-)

BY NATHAN HASKELL DOLE

NE of the chief representatives of so-called "realistic » fiction in Italy is Giovanni Verga, who was born in Catania, Sicily, in 1840. His youth was spent in Florence and Milan; and after living a number of years in his native district, he returned to Milan, where he still resides. He has himself acknowledged that his best inspiration has come from the places which he knew as a boy. He has painted the Sicilian peasant with a master hand. The keen jealousy that leads too frequently to the sudden flash of the stiletto; the grinding poverty which is in such contrast to the beauty of the Sicilian landscape; the squalid sordidness that looks with greater sorrow on the death of an ass than the death of wife or child; the pathetic history of the girl who must go to her shame because life offers no aid to the virtuous poor; the father deprived of his son who must serve his time in the army,—all these motives are used by Verga with consummate power. He understands the force of contrast. He has a rapier wit; the laugh, sardonic too often, follows on the heels of pathos. But it is pathos that is most frequently brought into play, pathos and the tragic. Few of his stories are not tragic. There is no glamour of triumphant virtue. The drama always ends with death and defeat.

The best known of Verga's works is the 'Cavalleria Rusticana,' which by reason of Mascagni's genius has become familiar to operagoers all over the world. The story is short; there are no words wasted for a moment the sky is bright, then the swift tropic storm comes; one blinding flash, and all the ruin is accomplished. Verga's flights are generally short. His longest story-The Malavoglias'— is in reality a welding into one of a number of short stories. But throughout there is the same minute study of the reality,- the hard, gloomy life of the peasant. Verga, in the introduction or proem to one of his Sicilian tales, gives his notion of what fiction should be:

"The simple truth of human life," he says, "will always make us thoughtful; will always have the effectiveness of reality, of genuine tears, of the fevers and sensations that have afflicted the flesh. The mysterious processes whereby conflicting passions mingle, develop, and mature, will long constitute the chief fascination in the study of that psychological phenomenon called the plot of a story, and which modern analysis tries to follow with scientific care through XXVI-957

the hidden paths of often contradictory complications. . . . We replace the artistic method, to which we owe so many glorious masterpieces, by a different method, more painstaking and more recondite: we willingly sacrifice the effect of the catastrophe, of the psychological result, as it was seen through an almost divine intuition by the great artists of the past; and we employ instead a logical development, inexorably necessary, less unexpected, less dramatic, but not less fateful. We are more modest, if not more humble; but the conquests that we make with our psychological verities will be none the less useful to the art of the future. . . . I have a firm belief that the triumph of the Novel, the completest and most human of all the works of art, will increase until the affinity and cohesion of all its parts will be so perfect that the process of its creation will remain a mystery like the development of human passions themselves. I have a firm belief that the harmony of its forms will be so absolute, the sincerity of its reality so evident, its method and justification so deeply rooted, that the artist's hand will remain absolutely invisible.

«Then_the_romance will seem to portray a real event; and the work of art will apparently have come about by itself, spontaneously springing into birth, and maturing like a natural fact, without any point of contact with its author. It will not have preserved in its living form any stamp of the mind in which it originated, any shade of the eye that beheld it, any trace of the lips that murmured the first words of it as the creative fiat: it will exist by its own reason, by the mere fact that it is as it should be and must be, palpitating with life, and yet as immutable as a bronze statue, the author of which has had the divine courage to eclipse himself, and disappear in his immortal work."

Verga's earlier stories show decidedly the influence of the French school of fiction. His society novels are conventional and rather vapid, with little native power manifested. Such stories as 'Helen's Husband,' or 'Eros,' or 'Royal Tiger,' are no more valuable than the average run of French novels. Some of them are over-sentimental, as for instance the 'Storia di una Capinera.' But his Sicilian stories have an entirely different character. They smack of real life, and take hold of the imagination. The little story here presented as a specimen of Verga's realism may perhaps be regarded as morbid; but at the same time it fulfills to the letter the programme laid down in his literary creed quoted above. The story-teller has completely effaced himself. You forget that you are reading fiction: it seems like a transcript from life. Its dramatic power is none the less because it is so repressed. Much is left to the imagination; but the effect of the passions here contrasted - love and jealousy — is clearly seen by the desolation that follows, all the more pathetic because of the relationships of the three protagonists.

15299

HOME TRAGEDY

ASA ORLANDI was all at sixes and sevens. The young

C^ Countess Bice was in a slow decline. Some attributed the

disease to constitutional feebleness; others to some deepseated disorder.

In the large bedroom where the lights were turned low, although all that part of the town was illuminated as if for a festival, the mother, pale as a sheet, was sitting beside the sickbed waiting for the doctor to come. She held in her feverish hand her daughter's thin and glowing hand, and was talking to her in that caressing accent and with that put-on smile wherewith we try to reply to the anxious and scrutinizing look of those who are seriously ill. Melancholy conversations were these, which under a pretended calmness concealed the dread of a fatal disease which was hereditary in the family, and had threatened the countess herself after Bice was born; which brought back the recollection of the hours of anxiety and worry attendant on the infancy of the delicate little girl, and the worry caused by the cruel presentiments which had almost choked down the woman's natural mother-love, and palliated the husband's first steps astray that husband who had died young of a wasting illness, during which he had suffered for years confined to his easy-chair.

Later, another passion had caused the widow to bloom out in fresh youth. She had faded somewhat prematurely, what with the cares of the feeble infant, and of that husband who was the embodiment of a living death: it was a deep and secret affection,

cause of uneasiness and jealousy, mingling itself with all her mundane joys and apparently thriving upon them, and refining them, rendering them more subtile, more intense, like a delicate delight perfuming everything—a festa, a society woman's triumph.

Then suddenly this other threatening cloud had arisen - her daughter's illness darkening the bright skies of her happiness, and seeming to spread over the heavy curtains of the sick girl's bed, and to stretch out until it met with those former dark days; her husband's long death struggle; the grave and anxious face of the very same physician who had been in charge of the other case; the tick-tock of the same clock which had marked the hours of death, and now filled the whole chamber, the whole house, with a gloomy presentiment. The words of the mother

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »