toward gallantry; d’Annunzio an adventuress with leanings toward mysticism.
Oriani and Verga, far superior to the other two in sobriety, solidity, honesty, and energy, are the real men of the group. But they are too hard for teeth that prefer sweetmeats (women readers determine popularity!) and by the side of the other two they appear inferior and uncouth. They were both deeply attached to their own regions—Romagna and Sicily—they were both upright artists, sad with a manly sadness, recorders of misfortune and decadence, scorners of ornament and trickery. And they both await a fairer judgment. One of them died all but unknown; the other, all but forgotten, waits still for death.
Oriani did not write any one novel that can be called a masterpiece, but in every one of his novels there are pages in which nature lives in its full freshness of sound and color, pages of relentless and cruel psychology in which the wretched souls of wretched men are revealed with a homicidal lucidity. When the definitive history of the Italian novel of the nineteenth century shall be written, the importance of Oriani will inevitably be recognized, and he will receive the place to which the profundity of his genius and the vigor of his art entitle him. To find his compeers one must go to the great French novelists of the nineteenth century.
