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Among the interesting literary figures of the old school still living is Renato Fucini, whose pen-name is Neri Tanfucio. He is now nearly eighty years old, and for some years has been living in a small town not far from Florence, writing his recollections. In college he studied civil engineering, but he soon forsook it and secured employment in the office of the Municipal Art Direction in Florence. Later he taught Italian in the technical school at Pistoia and after that was several years an inspector of rural schools. It was during these years of wandering through Tuscany that he got the intimate knowledge of its simple, industrial, pleasure-loving people, peasant and poacher, landlord and inspector, teacher and pupil, that he has embodied in his stories and in his burlesque, tragic, and sentimental verses.

His fame rests on his dialect poetry ("Poesie"), chiefly in sonnet form, in which he depicts the virtues and vices, the licenses and inhibitions, the hopes and the despairs, of his fellow Tuscans, at the same time embodying delightful descriptions of their charming, romantic land; and a few small volumes of prose, all little masterpieces—"Napoli a occhio nudo" ("Naples to the Naked Eye," letters written to a friend about that enchanting city two generations ago when it was still plunged in the misery of its protracted predatory misrule and the majority of its inhabitants were reduced to a deplorable state); "All' Aria Aperta" ("In the Open Air"), scenes and incidents of life among the common people of Tuscany; and "Le Veglie di Neri" ("Fireside Evenings of Neri"), which showed him a man of heart and of mind supremely capable of transforming the messages of the former by the latter in such a way as to make great appeal to his fellow beings. His books can be read to-day with the same pleasure that they were read half a century ago, and the pictures which are painted, particularly in the former, are as vivid as the day they were first put on the canvas.

Fucini is a type that is indigenous to central Italy, by nature a lover of the fields, the forest, the brooks, he was compelled from earliest infancy to earn his living, and he seemed to be content with a bare sustenance, getting pleasure from his wanderings and from books. He did on foot and more intimately what Signore Panzini has done on a bicycle or on way trains. As an inspector of country schools he was obliged to visit countless villages and hamlets, and there he found in the habits, customs, and conduct of their inhabitants material for comment and reflections such as most people find in new countries and large cities. His descriptions of them found sympathetic response in the hearts of many who see in the lives of these simple yet sophisticated people the romance of bygone days.

Fucini has not cut a great figure in Italian letters, but any one who would get a familiarity with the literature of the early days of Italian unity, or who is in search of diversion and delight should not neglect him. He is a sympathetic figure, whether wandering through Tuscany, bending over a table in the Riccardi Library, or awaiting his cue at Empoli.

A writer of this period to whom posterity is likely to give a high rating is Alfredo Oriani, who died in 1907. His fame will finally rest on his fiction rather than on his historical contributions. Though "La lotta politica in Italia" ("The Political Struggle in Italy"), from 486 to 1877 in three volumes, is a creditable performance, it is not based on personal research. Malignant-minded critics have occupied themselves with proving him a pilferer, but the work is done with such consummate literary skill that he has put the reading world under obligations to him.

His first books, "Memorie inutili" ("Useless Memories"), "Sullo Scoglio" ("On the Reefs"), and "Al di la, no" ("The Next World, No"), revealed such unbridled license of morbid tendencies that even Italians could not stomach them. He appeared to them a romanticist after the manner of Guerrazzi, addicted to the Macabre, subject to satanic inspiration, bombastic, and rhetorical.

When Oriani took up a second phase of his writing in the period from 1880 to 1890 the reading public still continued to mistrust him. Although he brought his spirit to a more stable equilibrium, he carried upon himself the stigma that clung to him in consequence of his previous books, and such productions as "Il Nemico" ("The Enemy"), "Incenso e Mirra" ("Incense and Myrrh"), "Fino a Dogali" ("Up to Dogal"), "Matrimonio e divorzio" ("Marriage and Divorce"), did not absolve him from previous sins.

His turgid style was more objected to than his taints and his themes, and his aggressiveness and political arrogances found greater opposition than his early decadent manner and his late negations in religious matters. He was accused of being a plagiarist. His greatest work "Lotta Politica" was characterized by a critic, L. Ambrosina, to be wholly devoid of originality. His "Momo" was called an imitation of Turgénieff's "A Neighbor's Bread." His "L'Invincibile" was derived from "Andrea Cornelis" of Paul Bourget, and the "Ultimi Barbari" ("The Last Barbarians") from Verga's "Pagliacci" and the "Cavalleria Rusticana."

Thus beset, Oriani, despairing of recognition, gathered his strength for a final flight and strove to reach heights never reached before, and he wrote "The Political Struggle," "Holocaust," and "Ideal Revolts."

"The Holocaust" is a study of mother and daughter. The mother has, from leading a wayward life, been able to keep body and soul together until middle age has effaced her charms. Reduced to hunger and rags, she decides to sacrifice her fifteen-year-old daughter and offers her to the first stranger whom she encounters walking beside the Arno one evening; she takes him to her contemptible rooms where the emaciated and ragged child awaits, in ignorance of her mission, the mother.

The young man of the self-made and aggressive type primed with animal spirits hesitates to be the instrument of the mother's monstrous designs, and hurls himself from the house when he realizes the situation, leaving the contents of his purse with the crushed little flower. The inhuman mother and a friend even more saturated in iniquity spend the money in an improvised banquet and plan how they shall take the child to the home of a well-known procuress. Their object is realized when this is accomplished and the mother receives a small sum of money, but the child, not having been cut out for the life, soon escapes. A narrative of her experiences, a picture of her suffering, the conflict between filial love and justifiable resentment, is set forth in page after page of psychological analysis. From the violence of the encounter flow simultaneously mortal disease and pregnancy. The former gives the author an opportunity to depict the child mind in rebellion against both bodily and spiritual salvation. The ministrations of the church are done with great finesse, kindliness, and skill, and give much satisfaction to believers. This may be the author's votive offering to the church, or it may reflect a new illumination of his soul. When the heroine dies the mother realizes her sin in having borne the child and in having betrayed her.

It would be difficult to imagine anything more disagreeable than the story. The only thing that can be said is that it is well told, but what does it advantage one to read it? As Henry James said, no one is compelled to admire any particular sort of writing, but surely there must be compulsion to make one write them. And as Flaubert, whom Oriani probably called master, wrote: "Such books are false; nature is not like that."

Oriani lived a singularly isolated life, having little contact with his fellow workers and little recognition. But he was a thinker and idealist, and it is unfortunate that he did not choose more attractive media to present his thought and project his aspirations. Only after his death did he begin to get any measure of appreciation. The four wars against Austria, the final charge against the Alps, foreseen and invoked by Oriani, were the conditions of his recognition by the Italian people.

The most widely read of all Italian writers of this period was Edmondo de Amicis (1846–1908). His books, "Bozzetti Militari" ("Military Life"), which appeared shortly after his period of service in the army, and the book for boys entitled "Cuore" ("Heart"), had a tremendous sale and still have. They were also widely read outside of Italy. He wrote many books of travel, some poetry, literary portraits, and short stories. However, he made no particular impression upon the literary period of his time.

Guido Mazzoni, born in 1859, was, and perhaps still is, professor at the University of Florence. He has been for many years secretary of the Crusca and senator of the realm. His critical work is "L'Ottocento." His poetry is of the familiar variety. "Sewing-machine" is one of them. He is an excellent example of the culture of the Italians, but he has made no lasting impression upon Italian letters. He is best known in this country from Papini's gibes at him and at the Crusca. His recent contributions, "The Lament of Achilles" and "Con Gli Alpini" ("With the Alpini"), are of the eminently respectable, commendable, poet-laureate variety, called forth by valorous deeds of Italy's soldier sons.

Nothing shows the flight from romanticism to realism that took place at the end of the nineteenth century so clearly as its stage literature. The dominating figure of that period was Giuseppe Giacosa. He was not alone the most prolific contributor to the literature of the theatre, but a man who early excited and kept the admiration and affection of fellow artists. He can truthfully be called the literary mirror of that period in Italy.

The lamp of enthusiasm was flickering when he first put secure steps upon the literary road, but it lighted him to a great success in "Una Partita a Scacchi" ("A Game of Chess"). Then the car of realism came along with a rush, as if it would carry everything in its wake, and he threw a great bouquet into the tonneau in the shape of "Surrender at Discretion." But his ear was always to the ground, and, when he sensed the advent of a new literary period and learned of the existence of readers that did not know just what they wanted but thought they would like to have the truth, the naked truth of life as depicted in fiction, he wrote "Sad Loves." But the Veristic period did not last long, and Giacosa took leave of it without a tear. Pascoli and D'Annunzio had not only entered idealistic realism in the literary race, but they were shouting in the most vociferous way for the latter especially to win. When Giacosa became fully cognizant of the favorite colors he was quick to make his entry with "As the Leaves" and "Il Più Forte" ("The Stronger").

The play to which he owed his first success, "A Game of Chess," had a remarkable career in Italy, and it still makes leading appeal to extravagant youth and romantic maturity, who see, in the lovely Iolande or in the dashing Fernando, prototypes who solve perplexing problems of life with an ease and readiness that is soul-satisfying. They also see in their experiences the smouldering or dying embers of their own passions, whose articulate breathings cause them to glow consumingly and pleasantly.

Its success turned the author from law, which he despised, to literature, which he adored.

His next play, "Il Trionfe d'Amore" ("The Triumph of Love"), was along the same lines: life without sorrow or strife save such as make pleasure—which bulks large in life—sweeter. Within a few years Giacosa began to depict life as it really was, is, or should be, and the first indication of it was "Il Conte rosso" ("The Red Count"), and for a decade he gave himself to the production of historical plays none of which can be used to-day as a wreath on the monument to his memory. It was not until he wrote "Resa a Discrezione" ("Surrender at Discretion"), that he came into the field which he finally tilled so profitably, holding up to the contemptuous, scornful gaze of the people the useless, iniquitous, pernicious existences of a certain class, the noble. In this he did the same thing that he had done in his masterpiece, "As the Leaves." But here he portrayed flesh and blood confronted with problems conditioned by life, called chance. Instead of desperation and whetted appetite for sensuous appeasement, we see latent character budding and flowering under the stimulus of adversity; virtue which does not lose its aroma from enforced tarry in putrid milieu; the deadly sins, rooted in ancestral emotions and nurtured by environment displayed in the conduct of human beings of our acquaintance and our intimacy; we see the exaltation and the deprecation of viciousness just as we see it and accomplish it in real life. The literary features of the lines, the crispness and naturalness of the dialogue, the fidelity with which he reflected the handling of problems likely to confront any one show the finished artist.

Giacosa was a conspicuous literary figure of yesterday's Italy, friend of poets and philosopher, journalist, essayist, lecturer, man of the world, mirror of one side of its mental and emotional activity.

Next to Verga the Verists found their chief exponent in Luigi Capuana, a Sicilian born in 1839 and still living. He wrote romances, short stories, plays, and criticisms, none of which save the latter had great vogue, though one of his plays, "Malia" ("Enchantment"), gave such offense to Mrs. Grundy that it had great popularity. Like Verga he knows his countrymen and women, particularly their emotional reactions and the conduct conditioned by it, by their inheritancy, and by their environment. Many of his short stories are gems of construction and of narrative. For instance, "Passa l'Amore," in "Il buon Pastore" ("The Good Pastor"), is a masterly delineation of the struggle between what is usually called good and evil in the person of a saintly old priest. Love had been an abstract conception for the good pastor until he essayed to reclaim a lamb who had been driven from the fold by the efforts of a cruel father intensively to prepare her for sacrifice at the hands of Cavalier Ferro. Perhaps if Capuana had not been content with merely interesting and diverting the public, as he counselled Bracco to be, and had tried to teach them and lead them he would have greater renown. As it is he is one of the best short-story writers of Italy, a discerning, trustworthy critic, who has written an interesting volume of studies in contemporary literature, and several plays, the last of which, "Il Paraninfo" ("The Best-man"), has recently been published. Nevertheless he must be considered a writer whose potentialities were but partially realized.

Two realistic writers of the end of the nineteenth century must be mentioned, though their work scarcely merits discussion and to do so may be unjust to others. They are Gerolamo Rovetta and Marco Praga. Although the former wrote criticisms, interpretations, and romances, some of which had much success, the contributions by which he is best known are his plays. Rovetta studied contemporary life and depicted it for the stage. His first success, the one upon which his reputation as a man of letters most solidly rests, "La Trilogia di Dorina" ("Dorina's Trilogy"), presents the public pie, upper and lower crust and middle, quite as Zola might have made it. His favorite theme was that man is but a reaction to his environment, expounded particularly in "I Disonesti" ("Dishonest Men"), though his greatest popular success was "Romanticismo" ("Romanticism"), which was a contribution to "idealistic reaction" which would turn us from ugly verities of life. It has been said by competent authorities to be a faithful presentation of public and private sentiment existing in northern Italy previous to her deliverance from tyrannical Austria.

Marco Praga is the son of Emilio Praga, who was the best-known Bohemian poet of Italy in his day (1839–1875), but who abandoned writing to teach dramatic literature in the Conservatory of Music in Milan. He professes to be the dramatic mirror held up to life and to tell the truth as he sees it, that he cannot be persuaded to camouflage it, and that when it is depicted on the stage it shall amuse rather than distress. That is what makes his most successful plays, such as "Le Vergini" ("The Virgins") and "La Moglie Ideale" ("The Ideal Wife"), depressing reading. Such conduct as they depict and such exchange of thought and sentiment as they report undoubtedly exist, but the less one knows of it and comes in contact with it the happier he or she is likely to be. If adultery could only be made a virtue for a few years, it would lose its attractiveness and many writers would have to earn their living.

At the end of the nineteenth century Italy had three women poets of much distinction, one of whom, Ada Negri, had and still has great popularity. Her last book of poems, "Il libro Di Mara" ("The Book of Mara"), has shown that she still has the capacity to put into verse dramatically and lyrically the most delicate and the most dominant notes of love as she or as those she has loved has experienced it. She was born in a little village of Lombardy in 1870. Her mother worked in a factory, and she herself was for some years a teacher in the elementary schools; so she had first-hand knowledge of the shut-in life of those whose repressions and aspirations she sung and published in L'Illustrazione Popolare of Milan. In these she set forth with great sincerity and with stirring lyric quality the sordid sufferings and sorrows of the toiling masses. These poems and others were published under the titles of "Fatality" and "The Tempest" in 1892 and 1894. Two years later a radical change in her social and spiritual environment was brought about by her marriage to Signor Garlanda, and soon she sang of it in a volume called "Maternity," which does for that state what her previous volumes had done for human pain and human poverty. "Dal Profondo" ("From the Depths") was but a continuation of these sentiments, tinctured with philosophical and socialistic knowledge that had been displayed for other purpose in "The Tempest." After this came a volume entitled "Esilio" ("Exile"), which reflected the same thoughts and sentiments in Swiss light. She has written two prose works, a series of short stories entitled "Le Solitarie" and "Orazioni" ("Orisons"). She glorifies purity, idealizes it, and sings its adoration.

In the closing years of the century there was published in Milan a volume of lyrics by one Annie Vivanti, which was praised intemperately by Carducci and by the Nuova Antologia. She had some fiction to her credit which dealt chiefly with the life of the stage, but her advent into the world of letters was like a shooting star; nothing was known of her origin save that she was said to have been born in London, and there was some mystery about her career. In her poetry there was a true lyric wail, especially in "Destino" ("Destiny"), "Non Sarà mai" ("It Can Never Be"), that appealed tremendously to the public mind. Had she been productive she might have been compared to Ella Wheeler Wilcox. After her marriage to Mr. Chartres, a London journalist, she became better known as the mother of a child-wonder violinist. Amongst her romances the one which had greatest popularity was entitled "I Divoratori" ("The Devourers"). It is obviously the story of her life and of her daughter's career, the record of filial shortcomings steeped in wormwood.

The third of these interesting writers, half Armenian, half Italian, was Vittoria Aganoor, who was born in Padua in 1855. In 1900 she published a volume called "Leggenda Eterna" ("Eternal Legend"), which showed her to be a sincere, impassioned artist with a pronounced leaning toward the sentimental. She died in London in the spring of 1910, after a surgical operation, and a few hours later her husband, Guido Pompili, killed himself. Her best-known poems are "Il Canto dell' Ironia" ("The Song of Irony"), "La vecchia Anima sogna … " ("The Old Soul Dreams"), "Mamà, sei tu?" ("Mother, Is It Thou?"). A complete volume of her poetry was published in 1912.

Italians are astonished when women make a great stir in the world. They have had no Jeanne d'Arc or Florence Nightingale. Their historic women have been mostly mystics who would punish the flesh that they might become spiritually pure, but the generation that is now passing has had five women, four at least of whom will have to be discussed by any historian of the intellectual movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They are Matilde Serao, Grazia Deledda, Maria Montessori, Eusapia Palladino, and Eleanora Duse, and most space will be given to Duse.

Matilde Serao is the Marie Corelli of Italy with one important qualification. She has not been obliged to subscribe to the rigors of convention. She has spoken with great frankness about whole sides of life which Miss Corelli knows, but about which she has been compelled to be silent. Not that the romances of Matilde Serao are in any sense pornographic, but she has painted her subjects so vividly and registered her sensations and impressions so sumptuously that they are considered very improper by Mrs. Grundy. She was in turn school-teacher, telegraphist, journalist, publisher, author, but throughout her writings she has kept the note of the journalist who has made a careful study of Zola and of Flaubert. Her thought is spontaneous, her expression facile, as she depicts the emotions and "feelings" of her Neapolitan characters, clad in rags or royal raiment, living in hovel or in palace.

Her most successful books were "La Storia di un Monaco," "Il Ventre di Napoli" ("The Belly of Naples"), "Il Paese della Cuccagna" ("The Land of the Cockaigne"), and "Terno secco" in which the social, economic, and political world of Naples is revealed. With the third of those enumerated she tried to do for lottery-gambling in Naples what Charles Dickens did for the private schools of England. Regrettably her efforts did not have a similar result.

In her Neapolitan stories the local color is not a mere background, but the very marrow of their being, with the result that it is almost impossible to reproduce it adequately in translation. Her later books were always pictures of the professional lover in different environments. He loves with fury and usually for a short time only. His amatory conduct has no ancillæ of Anglo-Saxon love-making. It is taurine and satyric. He does not always kill after the embrace, but one gathers from his conduct that he would like to do so. Time has tempered Matilde Serao's erotic literary coefficient and her last books are cool, more serene, and less interesting. One of her last books, "Ella non rispose," has recently been translated into English under the title of "Souls Divided."

Grazia Deledda has done for her native island of Sardinia that which Signora Serao did for Naples, but to a great extent she kept lubricity out of her writings. In her "Il Vecchio della Montagna" ("The Old Man of the Mountain"), "La Via del Male" ("Road to Evil"), "Cenere" ("Ashes"), "Nostalgia," "L'Incendio nell' Uliveto" ("The Burning in the Olive Grove"), and many others, she depicted with wondrous accuracy the life, feelings, struggles, ambitions, infirmities of the Sardinians, and painted their sordid surroundings and glorious scenery. She did for that wonderful island, so strangely neglected by the mother country, what Mary Wilkins did for New England. Her imagination was never so vivid nor was her eye so penetrating as that of her Neapolitan sister, nor has she known the voluptuous side of life, seamy or embroidered, but she has known how to put down in a way that engrosses the reader's attention the pitiable and pathetic plights that circumstance and passion force upon the people with whom she lives. The display of their passions and sorrows are apparently as familiar to her as the landscapes. Unfortunately, however, she does for them that which she does for the latter. She idealizes them or, better said, she strains them through her imagination. In other words, instead of recording them as they are she records them as they should be. Her novels give the impression of being photographic until you read Verga. Not that the breath of insincerity which Croce said was the curse of Italy's modern writers comes from her. She is most sincere, but her characters are sandman manikins into whose nostrils she has breathed the breath of life. She makes her characters do what she might do if she were one of them.

Whether she is tugging at the end of her intellectual tether or not remains to be seen, but her recent work has not the spontaneity and imaginativeness of her earlier books and she is almost obsessed with describing landscapes, the advent and departure of the sun, and stage-settings generally. Her last story, "The Burning in the Olive Grove," is a conflict between the present and the past, and turns upon a marriage of convention. It gives the author the opportunity to depict the imperious eighty-three-year-old grandmother, her useless brother, the farm lassie whose worldly success in marrying into a family above her station she owes to her beauty, and a pillar of feminine virtue who would live her own life in her own way despite the schemings of the grandmother of feudalistic behavior. The scene is filled with character studies which she likes so well: the old soldier of Garibaldi's legion, his lame son whom the heroine loves, and virtuous heroic peasantry.

Several of Grazia Deledda's novels have been translated into English, but they have not had great success. She is one of the last of the realistic idealizers. The most her admirers can hope that the future will do for her is that it will suggest to those in search of Sardinian color that they should consult her writings. Neither the psychologist nor the literary craftsman will disturb her literary remains.

The most promising successor of these women novelists is Clarice Tartufari, whose "Rete d'Acciaio" ("Nets of Steel") is a powerful though painful study of the Sicilian brand of jealousy.

Arturo Graf (1848–1918), for many years a professor in the University of Turin, was a materialistic poet whose productions during his lifetime were received with some favor and are now being given high rating. Fifteen years ago a very flattering review of his dramatic poems, especially "Medusa," appeared in the Nuova Antologia, and recently Signor Vittorio Gian has published in Gazetta di Torino an analysis of his mental processes and an estimate of the merit and significance of his poetical productions which, should they find general acceptance, may give Graf the most important position in the poetic field since Pascoli. Neither his intellectual reactions nor his point of view, however, is Italian. They show both his Teutonic origin and inclinations. His last verses, "Nuove Rime della Selva" ("New Rhymes of the Forest"), are full of delightful imagery, delicate fantasy, and gentle sentiment and they do not display the materialism, pessimism, or the figurative symbolism of his early works. In 1900 he published a psychological romance entitled "Riscatto" ("Redemption"), admittedly a spiritual autobiography which heralded and prepared his after-faith, which was thus also a battle for a faith against materialistic pessimism, against arid positivism which had seduced him and against which he reacted. "He who seeks God laboriously may become more religious than he who coddles Him in the firm belief of having found Him." His book of poems published in 1895 is the poet's voicings of his struggle to this end. His fame is greater as a dramatist and litterateur than as a poet. Nevertheless some of his poetical writings show a rare imagery, a facile capacity for description and versification, though a pessimistic psychology. His best-known poems are entitled "Venezie" ("Venices"), "Le Rose sono sfiorite" ("Faded Roses"), "Silenzio" ("Silence"), "Anelito" ("Longings"). Gian says of him: "He did not attain in his career as teacher, writer, and poet that outward recognition that fame and fortune usually bestow on their favorites," but as a recompense "he was honored with such hatreds as are never the lot of mediocrities and which for this very reason are the sanction and almost the guaranty of true worth."

Much of the interesting literature of the past generation has appeared in dialect, especially the poetic literature.