There are too many people in Italy, from Captain d’Annunzio down, who write by dint of fingering Tommaseo-Bellini. Nor must you seek art. Who now, indeed—save for eight or nine desperate lunatics—really insists on pure art? The bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the people who patronize the movies and the circulating libraries, the infallible and sovereign people, demand homicides, infidelities, gendarmes, and swoonings in the moonlight—they demand Carolina Invernizio. They may not give her a place among the approved classic texts. What of it? Neither did Balzac and Zola have the satisfaction of sitting under the dome of the French Academy.
The poverty of her psychology might seem to be a more serious matter. But in this connection it may not be amiss to sketch a brief theory of the novel. Today, amid the squalor and decay of so many literary forms, the novel is nothing more than a stake that serves to uphold all sorts of vines. Rousseau began by putting into the novel the philosophy of sentiment; Walter Scott and Manzoni threw in raw chunks of political and civic history; Dumas fils, the mulatto, added social theses; Flaubert, archæology; Weisman, Sienkiewicz and Fogazzaro, Christian apologetics; Zola, treatises on medical science and sociology; Bourget, the psychological problems of souls with an income of fifty thousand francs; Barrès, the battles of contemporary politics;
