254
PARTISAN REVIEW
lals, without any patients, without, in short, diplomas, aristocrats without
culture, without even any money-tossed together somehow a whole hum–
hug of a private social system.
An observant English consul in Sicily wrote in the last century that
the Sicilians were more interested in
seeming
than in
being.
And the theme
that haunted Pirandello was not the product of pure accident.
The poet and Garibaldian, Nievo, appointed vice-intendant of the
National Forces in the island, was nearly buried in the scramble for posts
in 1860. "Even before the capture of Palermo was complete, even before
the Bourbon troops had signed the capitulation, no less than 3000 peti·
tions for employment had been sent in, each petitioner setting forth his
own claims on the State- in terms of fulsome panegyric."
6
Nievo com·
plained of the "Princes and Princesses, Dukes and Duchesses by shovel–
fuls, coveting salaries of twenty ducats a month." Cavour absorbed some
of these Sicilians into his army of bureaucrats; the rest in desperation and
mortification manufactured a bootleg State.
The masses hated the new State on their own account.
It
was
the
people
who composed Garibaldi's own Army of the South, an "undisci·
plined horde.'' Victor Emmanuel refused even to review these new
sam
culottes.
The Piedmontese "were not disposed to run the risk of disorgan·
izing their Northern army by incorporating into it such an element of dis·
order.''
7
•••
If
Garibaldi had only given the word these Southerners would
have taken Italy apart again, piece by piece.
Thus the charlatan state, like others, is complicated with class con·
flicts. All charlatans are not of the same color, even within the same
international class. There is a great difference between Hitler and Musso·
lini: England might have produced the latter hut not the former. True,
eighteenth century England produced George Gordon, one of the most
significant figures in her history. England too in this century produced
charlatans, like Havelock Ellis, but they are as far removed from Lord
Gordon as Clive Bell, the Bloomsbury anarchist, is from Guy Fawkes, the
last of that breed in England.
•
The Sicilian character is the bastard child of the island, its mother,
and the particular historical rulers, i.e. oppressors, of the island, its
father. It has shapes as varied as the historical shapes of Sicily's rulers.
Cagliostro's father was all Europe. The Maffioso is a shame child of
Piedmont.
There is a constant factor in this "Sicilian" character throughout all
the eras of the island-revolutionary, feudal, and capitalist. From the
great leaders of the Sicilian slave-wars in the second century before
Christ, ex-jugglers and ex-bandits from Syria and Cilicia, who, vomiting
fire and uttering oracles and with prophecies and other "edifying impos·
•c.
M. Trevelyan,
Garibaldi and the Making o/ Italy.
'E. W. Latimer,
Italy in the Nineteenth Century.
