36
PARTISAN REVIEW
among the peasants which from a practical standpoint had appeared
futile. And here the internal movement of the novel comes to a full
pause. A few last tones are indeed still to be heard; Spina is to be
pursued by the police and escape into the mountains, Cristina is to
follow him and be eaten by the wolves. But these tones need not
concern us, they are not real sounds but silences. . . .
II
THE HEART.
In
Fontamara
there was the classstruggle, there was
the town and the country, and man was certainly poor, w('ak, terri-
fied. But the point on which all hope of freedom turned was not as
in
Bread and Wine,
the integrity of man's heart. But I do not think
it necessary to inquire further into why the human center of revolu-
tionary gravity has shifted for Silane from consciousness to the heart.
Has not the explanation been indicated? It is the absence of struggle.
In
Fontamara
there was a mass in movement, which did not ask
whether or why it should struggle, but only by what means. And this
was not because of the personal integrity of each individual Fonta-
maran peasant. On the contrary, Silane clearly showed that many
Fontamarans would have liked to escape the destiny of the group,
but could not. On the other hand the distinctive virtues of Viola
Berardo, who stood head and shoulders above the others, appeared
as particularly intense and violent exertions of the whole group in the
direction of freedom. When a collectivity, a class, is fighting op-
pression, it
exacts
courage and dignity and the heart of the individual
finds itself porous to courage and to dignity without quite knowing
how or why. But in
Bread and Wine,
as we have seen, there was no
mass movement and the problem of struggle was accepted as a neces-
sary burden by a single lonely individual.
ETHICS.
But before a proper criticism of Silane's position on the
importance of individual integrity can be made, I shall have to con-
sider the second cause of Spina's doubts, one which is hidden away
in the text and not made a great deal of. I feel that the passage I am
about to quote proves it to be of the utmost importance.
'But now he had been a Marxist for fifteen years, and it had be-
come his profession. Alas for all professions that have for their
ultimate aim the salvation of the world! For the sake of saving others
you ended by losing yourself ...
Don Paolo [Pietro Spina] saw
clearly that his return to Italy had been an attempt to escape from
that profession, to get away from the MarAist bureaucracy, to return
to the rank and file and recapture in action the enthusiasm that had
originally led him into the movement. This discovery left him
perplexed. What had those fifteen years devoted to political struggle
been worth? He went to bed but the question would not let him
