THE MODERN ITALIAN DRAMA.

UNTIL comparatively recent days contemporary Italy could boast no modern dramatists. Theatrical companies habitually presented foreign productions, and the public neither expected nor wished for other fare. Occasionally some great player, like Tommaso Salvini, would revive pieces from old and forgotten repertories, such as the plays of Alfieri. But these plays, though in their day they made a great stir, did so rather for their collateral than for their intrinsic merits. Hence people went to hear them not for themselves, but in order to see an actor like Salvini again. The one hopeful feature was that this unproductiveness aroused much public discontent, which grew with the growing fashion of presenting inferior productions which the managers thought would go down under the hall-mark of a foreign name. In the eighteenth century the Italian theatrical public tolerated the buffooneries of Harlequin, who ate cherries on the stage and threw the stones at the spectators. By the nineteenth century, when taste had grown more refined and a critical spirit had penetrated into every class of society, audiences no longer tolerated an exclusive fare of foreign pochades, but demanded national productions; they felt, and rightly, that the Peninsula was not lacking in wit and intellect of its own. Above all they recognised that no European country, not even France, can boast of such excellent actors as can Italy.

A full understanding of the Italian theatre to-day requires a rapid retrospect over its development during the nineteenth century. Goldoni, whose comedies, according to Voltaire, had liberated Italy from the Goths, and who was so intensely national, so full of vis comica-Goldoni was dead, and his best plays, being in Venetian dialect, could not everywhere keep the boards. He was succeeded by Alfieri the tragic, a poet who would not even read the Greek tragedians for fear he should unconsciously imitate them. Hence his work was at once original and spontaneous. It is, of course, somewhat difficult for a later generation to judge these works, for Alfieri is, above all, the man who created rather than awoke the sentiment of Italian nationality, which culminated in the wars of independence. His bold verses, that sound hollow and bombastic

to our ears, were then best adapted to rouse the feeble soul of the majority of Italians. Nor was his work in vain. Secret societies sprang up on every side preaching revolt under cover of queer names and absurd rites, and it was but natural that the theatre should feel the influence of this far-reaching movement, at once political and spiritual. Silvio Pellico wrote his Francesca da Rimini,' and G. B. Niccolini gave to the world his 'Foscarini,' 'Giovanni da Procida,' 'Filippo Strozzi,' all works that aimed at destroying the temporal and regal powers. What did the hearers of those days care if Silvio Pellico falsified history in making his Paolo say he abandons Francesca in order to fight the foreign oppressors of Italy? In the days of Paolo Malatesta Italy had no foreign oppressors; it was torn by the dissensions of its little Communes and petty States. But this phrase, unhistorically put into Paolo's mouth, touched an open wound when the Italians were indeed oppressed. Niccolini was yet another patriot of the same kind. 'You have been the prophet of Italy's resurrection,' said Vittorio Emanuele, the first king of United Italy, when in 1860 the venerable poet offered him his historic play of 'Arnoldo da Brescia,' the martyred monk in whom the Italians of that day chose to see a precursor of political revolution.

After this, for a time, no more tragedies were produced; the vein seemed to be exhausted. The comedies that took their place were widely played. Paolo Ferrari, celebrated for his 'Goldoni e le sue 16 commedie nove' (Goldoni and his Sixteen New Plays '), was the Italian playwright par excellence of the middle nineteenth century, and his plays were always touched by a high moral, humanitarian, and patriotic purpose.

Meantime a Florentine lawyer, Gherardi del Testa, also won much applause by a series of comedies written in the purest Tuscan, which are no longer acted, though they had undoubted merits and amused honestly and easily, dealing, as a rule, with a lovers' warfare wherein man ever triumphed over woman. The best of these, called 'Regno d'Adelaide' (Reign of Adelaide '), was dedicated to the great tragic actress Adelaide Ristori.

These two decidedly individual writers were followed by a crowd of others who deserve neither praise nor blame. Briefly it may be said that their productions were everything except original; that the society they represented was more French than Italian, that the developments were commonplace, and only served to divert the bourgeoisie whose life they depicted. But after this mediocre

interlude arose Pietro Cossa and Felice Cavallotti, who once again raised the fortunes of the Italian stage. Cossa, before the fall of the temporal power, had only been suffered by the pontifical censorship to produce his biographical drama ' Beethoven,' a poor thing. But his masterpiece 'Nero' was played with great success during the confusion and excitement of the first months after Rome became the capital of Italy. Cossa is said to have taken his inspiration from Dumas's 'Acte,' emphasising the wild beast rather than the artist in Nero.' At all events his versified dramas were those of a playwright rather than a poet, splendid historical masquerades wherein the action does not halt, and, what is rare in a Latin, the language is energetic without being bombastic and rhetorical. Of his tragedies, which are all historical, besides 'Nero,' the best are 'The Borgias,' 'Julian the Apostate,' 'Cola di Rienzi,' and Cleopatra.' He also wrote two comedies, 'Plautus and his Age,' which gives a vivid picture of Roman society in the time of the dramatist, and 'Cecelia,' which still holds the boards. It deals with the tender love story of that sweet and rare painter Giorgione di Castelfranco, who wooed Cecelia Grimani, the daughter of a Venetian patrician. The verses, for the play is written in verse, are elegantly chiselled, and the whole is inspired by graceful feeling.

Pietro Cossa, who lived till 1881, was in his latter days one of the most popular figures of the new Rome. There was something leonine in his face and mane of hair, his smile was frank and his person robust. It is told of him that at the time when the Pope was still King of Rome he shouted to a preacher in one of the Roman churches, 'Silence, you liar,' without a thought of the dungeon this temerity might procure for him. About the time of his death Felice Cavallotti, a young journalist, and a convinced Republican, produced at the Royal Theatre of Milan his first play, 'I Pezzenti' ('The Beggars'). It dealt with the revolt of the Netherlands against Philip II. The theme was certainly not new, but it was newly treated by the young writer, and gained him much praise. It was followed by his masterpiece, 'Alcibiades.' Here the handsome disciple of Socrates is presented in all his vigorous manhood, and there are many purple passages in a play that strove to be a graphic reconstruction of Greek life. But his one-act poem 'Il Cantico dei Cantici' (The Song of Songs') gained for him the suffrages of all lovers, and is perhaps his most popular play in the strictest sense of the word. It contains but three personages,

a retired colonel, a seminarist nephew, and a niece, the cousin of the budding priest. The sweet instinct of love triumphs over superstition, the lad throws aside his frock and marries the pretty cousin, to the no small amusement of his free-thinking uncle. With his Sposa di Menecle' Cavallotti resumed his Greek themes, and followed it by 'Povero Piero,' in which the influence of Victor Hugo is marked. It deals with the contrast between the deformity of a body and the beauty of its soul. Cavallotti was destined to meet with a tragic end. A leader in politics, an irresistible orator, an indefatigable defender of public morality, he fell a victim to his passion for duelling. But his name and influence survive among the extreme Republican party in Italy, while in literature his works remain as an example of the romanticism that beautifies without falsifying the incidents of real life.

It is a curious fact, illuminating the Italian character, that while philosophical and problem plays, such as are beloved of Ibsen, Tolstoi, and their school, are antipathetic to this public, historical plays, such as a northern public pronounces dull, are in high favour. This taste originates, perhaps, in the classical traditions of the Italians. Appeals to antiquity find an echo among every class of playgoers, and, curiously enough, this response is, if possible, keener in the lower than the upper social ranks, for the lower classes in Italy, save perhaps a section of very advanced Socialists, still feed upon the splendid records of their national story. It would seem as though for them the historical play, appealing to their love of country, was the lineal outcome of that tragedy, the dominant element in the Greek and Roman theatre, of which they consider themselves the natural heirs. Didactic plays, on the other hand, the public will not stand. They laugh, they hiss, they talk, they call the curtain down. And an Italian public is the most critical and merciless in the world. Not even an old favourite can save a situation. As in music they will not tolerate a false note, and without pity whistle a trembling débutante or a worn-out artist off the stage, so at the play they will not endure being sermonised, instructed, or bored. Only what bores other nations does not bore them, and vice versa. Thus they will listen for hours, and with the most rapt attention, to what a northerner would call empty flight of rhetoric; they will applaud to the echo interminable speeches of richly coloured words and rolling periods, regardless of the fact that when reduced to plain speech they contain few ideas, and are compounded chiefly of

'words, idle words'; sufficient if they are musically woven and tickle the sensitive and innately true ear of the Italian. Hence in part the great and overwhelming success achieved by Gabriele d'Annunzio, understood by few foreigners, to whom too much of the work of this undoubted genius seems full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'

His influence has certainly been far-reaching in more than one respect, both on and off the stage. He flashed upon the theatre, at a moment when foreign influence was at its height, with the noble aim of recalling the Italian stage to its best national traditions, and replacing the journeyman phrases of the translator by the splendid Italian tongue. Curiously enough he pressed into his service that very Eleonora Duse to whom much of the foreign corruption was due, for until she came to act in D'Annunzio's plays her répertoire, with few exceptions, consisted wholly of translated work. That D'Annunzio was not happy at first in the theatrical environment, that even now, when he has achieved world-wide success, it is permissible to doubt whether he has real dramatic talent, is perhaps beside the mark. The fact remains that he revolutionised the modern Italian theatre.

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It was in 1896 that D'Annunzio, putting aside for a while his novels, his odes, and his verses, first came forward as a playwright with his 'Dreams of the Seasons' ('Sogni delle Stagioni '), which, owing to their utter novelty of method and conception, made much ado among the critics. Il Sogno d'un mattino di Primavera cannot be highly praised, nor did it merit as a work of art all the attention it excited. It revolved around what may be called the Leitmotif of D'Annunzio-that is to say lust, love, blood, and brute force, strangely wedded to a keen appreciation of Nature, an ardent patriotism, and an exquisite art, whether displayed in music, sculpture, or painting. It should have remained a closet play. In its successor The Dream of an Autumn Sunset' ('Sogno d'un tramonto di Autunno '), the form and the intention are more artistic and better welded. Indeed, in his diction D'Annunzio is ever past master. His phrasing is of the happiest, his words are always picturesque, and his vocabulary forceful, and this he has enriched by going back to the fountain-head of all Italian speech, the fourteenth-century writers. This autumnal dream deals with a tragedy of sensuous desire (it would not be D'Annunzio otherwise), and the whole is set in the midst of a vision of livid and ominous darkness. Passion tasted, lost, desired, gives colour to