HEMINGWAY IN ITALY
lousness and poetic sense, is something of a phenomenon." For
Savage, Hemingway represents "a special form of that which might
be termed the
proletarianization
of literature: the adaptation of
the techmcal artistic conscience of the sub-average human conscious–
ness." To a literature overripe with culture, as ours was in the twen–
ties, so much so that it seemed quite natural to compare us with
Petrarch's followers, I offered as a curative the example of an art
which seemed to spring from
virgin
soil. A return to nature has been,
every now and then, the infallible remedy for a too sophisticated
society. Now Italian literature, at the time I wrote that article, had
preciosity and traditionalism as its dominant characteristics, its main
currents being still the same ones which had prevailed in the nine–
teenth century, and which can
be
conveniently described by the
epithet: Biedermeier. Italian narrative was then, and is still to a
large extent, steeped in a Biedermeier atmosphere: realism, bourgeois
or peasant life in the provinces, avoidance of sharp contrasts, Chris–
tian resignation, genre-painting, conversation-pieces. In short, such
characteristics which fit to a nicety what German critics have defined
as
Biedermeierkultur,
from the name of the humble schoolmaster
whose homely poems were burlesqued in
Fliegende Blattet·
in the
1850's.
The Biedermeier world is a small world of common sense and
healthy habits, delights of the home, the cult of a tamed and well–
groomed nature, observance of sound principles, love for the con–
crete, along with, ever so often, a flight on the wings of a sweet,
and often gently sad, dream: a world of bourgeois ethics and bour–
geois art, shrinking from extremes, half-classical, half-romantic- the
world which in England is called Victorian. It has been said that
there never was an Italian romantic movement in the true sense of
the word; that same common sense and well-balanced taste which
kept Italy free from the raptures and excesses of romanticism (not
even Leopardi, for all his pessimism, is a romantic ), made her the
ideal country for a blossoming of
Biedermeierkultur.
I cannot speak
here of the whole course of Italian literature in the last century; but
every student of Italian abroad knows at least two Italian books of
the nineteenth century: Manzoni's
I promessi sposi
and De Amicis'
Cuore:
the traditional ethics and quiet humor of the former, the
sentimentality bordering on mawkishness of the latter, are typically
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