he knelt before one of his predecessors. At that time Pius XI was Achille Ratti. His brilliant examination brought him first to a chair of theology and rhetoric in Milan; thence to the Ambrosian, and later to the Vatican, Library. Finally he was sent by Benedict XV as nuncio to Poland. In 1921 he became a cardinal and Archbishop of Milan, and the following year he went to the conclave in the Vatican, which he has not left since. But it is said now that the Pope intends to leave the Vatican this summer in order to take part in a monastic jubilee. Thus captivity would be at an end and Italy and the Church reconciled.

I am on my knees, and I follow the Pope with my eyes. His long white cassock is woven from the wool of blessed sheep. The skullcap covers the back of his head. On his feet he wears red gold-embroidered slippers. He walks around the room, offering each one his hand. You take his hand and kiss the amethyst ring. The Holy Father has become somewhat stout and is no longer fit to be a mountainclimber.

The hand he offers is soft. I catch a pair of unusually intelligent eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. The lackey gives me a small medal in a bag, and the Pope continues his round. He gives the impression of goodness despite the sharp wrinkles from the corners of his mouth to his chin. A smile brightens his face when he pats the little boy on his head and musses his hair. It is becoming to the Pope,

and I believe he should smile oftener.

The Pope has greeted us all, and we are still kneeling around him. He is standing in the middle of the room reciting the formula of the Benediction. The master of ceremonies mumbles something. The cardinal moves his lips. The bishops wag their heads and chew words. Then the Pope lifts his hands and blesses us.

The doors to the next room are thrown open. The yeomen of the guard kneel. All those waiting follow their example. Slowly the Pope crosses the threshold. A wine-red lackey closes the doors after the papal suite.

The Pope must still go through five audience rooms, packed with audienceseekers. A caravan of poor pilgrims is waiting in the last room. It will be a long while yet before he can have his lunch.

The lackeys conduct us through some corridors to a large hall and out into the gallery with our overcoats.

In the Scala Regia the Swiss Guardsmen are lined up like beautiful dolls the last evidence of the papal splendor we are leaving. Out on the Piazza di San Pietro the fountains throw streams of water against the sky. The usual crowd of faithful and heretics moves toward St. Peter's. I hail a cab and drive home, since I cannot take lunch in this costume. Like the Pope, I shall partake of my late lunch alone. From a good source I know that the Holy Father drinks a red Marino; it is rather inexpensive, and I too shall drink it in honor of the day.

IN a few weeks' time the Italian reading public will experience a surprise such as has not been its lot for many a day. There will doubtless be similar astonishment in the intellectual world abroad and overseas. Guglielmo Ferrero, the historian of the Greatness and Decline of Rome and general philosopher, is about to turn novelist also, with his book for imminent publication by Messrs. Mondadori, of Milan. It will be in four volumes, under the comprehensive title, Civili e Barbari. The opening chapters were written ten years ago, and the manuscripts of the two volumes ready for the printers and of the other two under revision testify to the diligence and literary conscience of a writer whose aim at perfection of form and content is attained through year-long revision, correction of point of view, and polish.

As a personal friend, I have been able to put some questions to Ferrero about the book.

"The surprise, if such it be,' said he, 'dates a long way back, but it is perfectly intelligible if it is considered in the light of my historian's work. As a matter of fact, it was not only science and philology that prompted me to devote myself to the study of history. I had always understood man's history as the active expression of the inner self, and I had taken up historical research with the purpose of investigating the working of ethical forces, together with the

1 From the Observer (London Moderate Sunday paper), April 4

mass emotions that animate individuals and multitudes alike; and I had chosen the history of Rome because it appeared to me to be the best suited to my purpose. That is why, in writing the story of Rome, I have stressed "composition" and have sought to vitalize history through its dynamic aspects of human passions and movements. I believe indeed that, if my history of Rome has met with a measure of success with the reading public at home and abroad, this is due primarily to its attempt at "composition," at presenting the reader with a human picture, which is obvious to anyone who will compare my work with that of my forerunners in that field.'

'Why,' I queried, 'have you never undertaken to finish the history of Rome?'

"There have been several reasons. In the first place, I completed long ago the preparatory work upon the remaining volumes, and I could easily bring the work down to the Fall of the Empire. It may be, indeed, that I shall take the thread up again when I have finished with my novel. As a matter of fact, however, my study of history had already come full-cycle. I had learned all I could. I had described fully the interplay of the forces that make history, the clash of individual and collective passions that shape its course,

passions that are elemental and identical throughout time, the uprush of democracy against aristocracy, the struggle of States for primacy, the array of the new against the old orders,

innovation against traditionalism, and so on. The conclusion was borne in upon me that the study of one century of Roman history had disclosed to me the story of all time. I realized also, nevertheless, that the major problems of ethics are best realized through individual lives and not through the collective existence of peoples.

'You cannot but admit that the Confessions of Saint Augustine is the foremost "psychological" novel ever written. The time came when I felt the need to test my intellectual and ethical postulates through the study of the individual conscience, and I realized then that this could be achieved only through a work of fiction in which I could describe the conduct, not of historic personages, but of imaginative creations.'

is more hypothetical or more frequently purely imaginary than testimony in poisoning cases. Death has ensued, but more often through other causes than presumed but nonexistent poisoning. Someone dies unexpectedly, suspicion surrounds the matter, mystery clouds roll up, whispers and suggestion follow; emotion spreads and crystallizes round a nucleus, hate boils over. Justice steps in to follow up the threads woven by prejudice and passion sion and the poisoner culprit is found, the necessary scapegoat is at hand, even when death from natural causes is the obvious and necessary conclusion.

'Judicial errors, until some fifty years ago, were very frequent, and knowledge of toxicology was only elementary; but such errors are not less

'Yes, it is a work of fiction; but it is based on the study of actual happenings set in a framework of known and personally visualized surroundings. As you are aware, my novel relates a complex story with a varied sequence of subsidiary interests converging round an initial plot, a poisoning trial. The first volume, entitled "Le Due Verità," will depict, together with the leading character, the young hero of my novel, and a number of others, the "wheels within wheels" of this poisoning trial.' 'One more procès des poisons-the Brinvilliers, and so forth?'

'Yes, I have always been attracted by this kind of case. In writing my history of Rome I came upon a number of actual or presumed cases of murder by poison. Germanicus, we are told, was poisoned by Tiberius, Claudius by Agrippina, Britannicus by Nero. With a view to judging the credibility of these accusations, the study of evidence in other such trials led me to the conclusion that nothing

is better understood. Progress in their science has led the toxicologists to discover traces everywhere of the agent they are looking for. If the substance is actually found, the case is clear. The possible poisoners are in the circumstances restricted to a very few; the suspected culprit is not far to seek. Clues, circumstances, and suggestions weave a net in which the unwary nay, the innocent- may often find himself dangerously enmeshed. Now, my reading of trials has shown me such a case tried in the court of a South Italian city which ended eventually in acquittal because the expert admitted his mistake in diagnosing a poisonous substance where none existed; but meanwhile the innocent man had undergone several years of preventive imprisonment.'

'But surely your novel will not be a mere narrative of some law-court episode?'

'No, of course not. And here I should like to explain another aspect of my proposed task. My opening scene

is laid in the Rome of thirty years or so ago, where the new Italy evolved after 1870 suggests a highly interesting social and political environment. I purpose to show the attitude of this new order to a case that brings forward scientists, lawyers, politicians, journalists, financiers, all sorts and conditions of men and social classes. It is the arena of all who profit by the judicial error and, on the other hand, of those who have the defense of truth at heart. My principal hero is in conflict with his father and his surroundings in consequence of the judicial error of which he is about to become the victim. At the close of the second volume he abandons Rome, angered and disgusted with all and sundry; he goes to Africa, goes through the campaign, is present at Adua, and is taken prisoner by the Abyssinians.'

'And so you come back to history?' 'Yes, but only in a sense. The trend of the two remaining volumes is not yet fully worked out. My hero will, of course, be thrown on the screen, so to say, of the Italian-Abyssinian War. As a prisoner among the Abyssinians, he will realize the true inwardness of the tragedy that has overtaken him in Rome. Among the barbarians he finds the way to redemption, his road goes per crucem ad lucem. And this atmosphere will offer me the opportunity for a narrative of that African campaign, and more particularly of the Battle of Adua, derived from original and unpublished sources.'

'Are n't you afraid that your novel may be called mere politics, history, or even a case of special pleading, under the transparent guise of fiction?'

'No, indeed. The novel will depict a social state viewed by the historical imagination, but it will be neither an historical nor a political novel.'

'Since, as you say, we are poles apart from all that, tell me a little about your

book from a literary standpoint. What is it to stand for, in fact? What were your literary and artistic impulses in writing it?'

'My novel will not, I feel convinced, appear an easy acceptance of the methods in honor with the young novelists. It is a return rather to the tradition of the mighty men of the last century-to the manner of Scott, Dickens, Manzoni, or, last though not least, Tolstoi. Mind, however, I am not challenging comparison with those great novelists. I mean only that my book resembles their work in bulk, in variety of action, and in the number of characters brought into play.

'As to the difficulties I have met with and sought to overcome, composition has certainly been harder to me than in my historic work. A novelist who sets himself to construct a massive work must move his characters about in broad daylight, powerfully foreshortened; he must graduate appearances and effects; he must establish and maintain a continuous scale of perspective values for his characters and the action they develop. The modern novel, it seems to me, has almost lost sight of this art of perspective. Usually, as my reading of recent fiction suggests to me, the novelist places all his characters upon the same plane; or, again, he shows us fugitive side-effects without a rule governing either, or even any definition of the motives for essential changes in the attitude of the characters. My critics will tell me whether I have succeeded in establishing a graduation of values such as a work of art demands.'

'I take it, then, that you have found novel-writing more difficult than writing history?'

'I have indeed. The novel is necessarily more difficult to write. In history certain events, certain characters, are definite propositions. The document

suggest, judge your heroes good or bad, but as an author how do you think they will regard your work as a whole?'

'My work is not yet finished, and critics will certainly not be in a position to render a final judgment before they have seen it as a whole. It is the first attempt to describe the Italy evolved by the Risorgimento, tempered in the mighty crucible of Rome. This is no longer the provincial or regional novel to which so many eminent writers have accustomed the Italian reading public; it is not merely a picture of Sardinia, of Sicily, of the Romagna, or of Lombardy, but professes to be a true Italian and national romance in the fullest sense of the term, in which folk from all parts of the country meet in Rome and evolve along distinctively Italian lines in the heart of Italy, which is Rome.'

LUIGI PIRANDELLO, both as man and artist, is a product of the new Italy that has arisen from the terrible trial of the war. He is modern in his art, and in the latest phase of his life seems the typical up-to-date fashionable dramatist, who one month is crossing the Atlantic in a speedy liner to be present at a première of one of his plays in New York and the next month is traveling about Germany in an airplane to attend his first nights in one or another city of Prussia or Bavaria.

1 From the Bookman (London literary monthly), April

Dinners with the heads of governments and with ambassadors, and official receptions, are the order of the day, while trips to London, Paris, and Spain are regular items in an exterior activity that does not prevent the artist from being engaged on five or six new comedies.

Yet if there is a vast difference, in appearance at any rate, between the active, almost hustling, playwright who directs a touring company, manages a theatre in Rome, and writes his comedies in hotels and trains de luxe, and the retired, hermitlike figure of only a few