Notes on novelists, with some other notes, by Henry James.

MATILDE SERAO

243

folk, have a palpable truth, and it is striking that, to put the
matter simply, Madame Serao is at her best almost in direct
proportion as her characters are poor. By poor I mean literally
the reverse of rich; for directly they are rich and begin, as the
phrase is, to keep their carriage, her taste totters and lapses,
her style approximates at moments to that of the ladies who do
the fashions and the letters from the watering-places in the
society papers. She has acutely and she renders with excellent
breadth the sense of benighted lives, of small sordid troubles,
of the general unhappy youthful (on the part of her own sex
at least) and the general more or less starved plebeian consciousness. The degree to which it testifies to all this is one of
the great beauties of " II Paese di Cuccagna," even if the moral
of that dire picture be simply that in respect to the gamingpassion, the madness of " numbers," no walk of life at Naples
is too high or too low to be ravaged. Beautiful, in " II Romanzo
della Fanciulla," are the exhibitions of grinding girl-life in
the big telegraph office and in the State normal school. The
gem of " Gli Amanti" is the tiny tale of " Vicenzella," a
masterpiece in twenty small pages-the vision of what three or
four afternoon hours could contain for a slip of a creature of
the Naples waterside, a poor girl who picks up a living by the
cookery and sale, on the edge of a parapet, of various rank dismembered polyps of the southern sea, and who is from stage
to stage despoiled of the pence she patiently pockets for them
by the successive small emissaries of her artful, absent lover,
constantly faithless, occupied, not too far off, in regaling a lady
of his temporary preference, and proportionately clamorous for
fresh remittances. The moment and the picture are but a scrap,
yet they are as large as life.
" Canituccia," in " Piccole Anime," may happily pair with
"Vicenzella," Canituccia being simply the humble rustic
guardian, in field and wood-scarce more than a child-of
the still more tender Ciccotto; and Ciccotto being a fine
young pink-and-white pig, an animal of endowments that lead,
after he has had time to render infatuated his otherwise quite