The Viceroys Read Free

There De Roberto first met his fellow-townsman Verga, already an established writer and just plunging into the great creative period of his life. Capuana joined them, and it is pleasant to think that the meeting of these three Sicilians amid the Lombard mists helped to bring about a renovation of Italian letters.
    Cosmopolitan though Milanese literary life may have seemed then, with its pervading influences from Zola, Flaubert and Bourget, most Italian writers of the time were as provincial in their habits and interests as they are today. De Roberto cast one of the widest nets among literati of his time; he translatedBaudelaire, wrote essays on Tolstoy, Maeterlinck, Nietzsche, and through the pages of the new
Corriere della Sera
of Milan, (while Capuana did the same through
La Nazione
of Florence), became a major diffuser of French, English, German and Russian literature in the peninsula. Through forty years and in thirty volumes he ranged from psychological stories, tales of peasant life (early efforts, in imitation of Verga, though one may have been the original plot of
Cavalleria Rusticana
), realist studies, the earliest psychological thriller in the language, to works on art and antiquities, and a series of volumes on a hybrid science, very popular at the time and fitting somewhere between Lombroso and Havelock Ellis, ‘the psychology of love’. At times he had hardly finished a book in one style before he was busy on something totally different, and the very breadth of his interests has tended to defy docketing and to confuse his reputation. Restless, searching, diffusing throughout his life a kind of intimate disquiet, he was an example of that strange island ill which Sicilians are apt to illude themselves preoccupies us all,
la tensione siciliana
.
    He began writing early, first published some scientific papers at the age of nineteen, and in spite of the tacking of his talent remained a dedicated writer all his life. A cool eye for the vagaries of human conduct and of daily reality combined with technical control to avoid literary attitudes. According to Brancati and Pirandello he was already at his best in his very first book of stories of Catania life,
Processi Verbali
. Soon, in his first novel,
Ermanno Raeli
(1889), came influences from France, particularly of Bourget; this is an uneven book about a young Sicilian of half-German extraction and his troubles in integrating a double nature into Sicilian life. ‘Happiness is a chimera’ is the opening line, and one might dismiss this book as full of woozy adolescent self-pity were there not glimpses of an adult and original mind, some good talk on a local baroque painter who is still too little known, Pietro Novelli il Monrealese, and well-observed details of a Palermo winter season in the ‘eighties, when for the locals ‘all foreigners were English’. Tension and disquiet show again, more clearly, in his second novel,
L’Illusione
(1891), whose theme was a bold one for the period, a woman’s search for true love from one affair to another. PoorDonna Teresa may have some affiliations with that other self-destroying charmer, La Pisana of Nievo’s
Confessions
; but she is more obviously a victim; her provenance is from Flaubert and she is a Sicilian Bovary.
L’Illusione
also turns out to be a crablike approach to
I vicerè
, for the heroine is an Uzeda, daughter of two main characters in the later novel, the selfish charmer Don Raimondo and his hapless first wife. De Roberto’s correspondence has not yet been properly sifted and we do not know if he already had the vast novel in view when he wrote
L’Illusione
. Or did an attempt to explain Donna Teresa in terms of heredity draw him into an ever-spreading family chronicle, hoping to find somewhere an answer to the nag of his life, the meaning of love?
    I vicerè
, published in 1894, seems to have been written very fast, though it may have been partly in his head already, for its structure suggests careful