Farfan Don Pedro The pledge he gives The least of us is ready, as you have proof, No human power, nor earth and heaven combined, As vassals our obedience You command: as judges your authority Warden To take, Don Arias? What counselest thou, Enter the Warden with Don Sancho My lord, Don Sancho King Don Sancho King Don Sancho Sancho Ortiz here waits your pleasure. Great King, Wherefore with death dost thou not end my woes? Wherefore, the rigor of the law applying, My cruel sufferings dost thou not end? Busto Tabera at my hand met death: Let death be my award; let him who slays Stay: What warrant hadst thou for Tabera's death? A paper. Signed by whom? That would the paper Is, that I slew the man I held most dear, To death that dooms me,- vengeance all too slight. King Estrella Estrella, with a noble of my house, Thy pardon thou dost grant me, then, For that his Highness has betrothed thee? Don Sancho King- Thou art avenged for my offense? And satisfied. I accept my life, that so thy hopes attain My lord. King [to Don Arias] – This to Seville is an offense, What now To do? These people humiliate me, Don Arias - Speak. Seville, I to the law will answer for Tabera's death, For this exoneration only did My honor wait. The King commanded me Seville is satisfied. For since thou didst command the deed, Doubtless he gave thee cause. Don Sancho King Nobleness of soul I contemplate. Amazed the Sevillian I To fulfill the sentence of my banishment, I will fulfill it. The boon I asked, that thou for bride shouldst give me The boon is granted. The hand of Doña Estrella then I claim; King Estrella Then is the sentence of my death pronounced! And should fulfill it. What answerest thou? Estrella Sancho And this there could not be between us, I do absolve thee from thy promise. From thine I do absolve thee. The slayer To see forever of my brother, in bed, And me, to be forever with the sister 'Tis true; and therefore So Who slew my brother, though I do adore him, [Exit. Don Sancho Nor I, my lord, Because I adore her, do count it just [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. |