RAZONES DE NO CUMPLIMIENTO (RNC)

generalisations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture o f human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

Later in the same essay she writes that

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode o f amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds o f our personal lot.

This was the main aim o f George Eliot’s narrative; she wanted her readers to sympathise with the characters o f her novels. The faithful representation o f ordinary events and people was aimed at because the more exact the description was the more the reader would have sympathised with the characters; the more she dealt with ordinaiy people the wider her reader’s sympathies would have become. Realism was not the end but a means o f her art. She dealt with ‘the peasant in all his coarse apathy’ or with ‘the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness’,^* but she infused her representation with sympathy, because

ibid.,p.4. The Italian original is: ‘verita” G. Eliot, ‘The Natural..., op. cit., p. 270

ibid.,p. 271

ibid. ibid.

she wanted the reader to ‘feel’ for her characters. This gives a reason for the intmsive authorial comments and for the narrator’s sympathy towards some characters which we notice both in her early works and in more mature novels, such as The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. Furthermore, it explains also the psychological penetration o f her characterisation, the ability to portray the inner life o f her characters. When George Henry Lewes explained to what extent Idealism was based on Realism, he said that he preferred portraits recording inner life rather than portraits superbly focusing on external life. This was the attitude o f George Eliot when dealing with her most complex characters. William J. Hyde in his article ‘George Eliot and the Climate o f Realism’ points out that

George Eliot’s tendency to sympathise led her from a realism that was daring to one that was profound. The accurate penetration o f her characters, especially in M iddlemarch, is based on a realism charged with such idealism as Lewes had described.

The emphasis Verga laid on the concept o f truth was different from' George Eliot’s; it brought different consequences. In his case as in George Eliot’s, his literary realist attitude was not characterised by a rigorous acceptance o f Zola’s theory o f Le Roman Experimental according to which the writer’s task was compared to that o f the scientist examining data in a laboratory. Therefore, the writer represented his characters’

ibid.

30 _{W.J. Hyde, ‘George Eliot and the Climate of Realism’, Publications of Modern Language Association}

life in a specific environment as if it were ruled by scientific laws. Actually, Italian Verismo never accepted this strict and severe artistic attitude. In Italy the acceptance o f Taine, Zola and the other Naturalists’ ideas was intermingled with typically Italian cultural elements, which can be summarised with Francesco De Sanctis’ critical attitude. The most important Italian critic o f the period pointed out the necessity to combine this new born love for reality with the aspiration to a creative and imaginative art, not necessarily suffocated by science’s developments. These ideas influenced Italian Veristi as much as, or probably more than, the ideas emerging from Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola’s works. For the Veristi, and especially for Verga, the aesthetic principle took precedence over the scientific one, the aesthetic experimentation was more important than the attempt to apply the natural laws to the artistic work. The realistic concept they focused on was the belief that artistic form participates in the evolutionary process, and, therefore, must be adjusted to the historical, social context and to the change o f subjects. The concept of truth was not a scientific concept for the Veristi. This naturally limited the influence of certain positivist biological and psychiatric topics in their works, and hindered the establishment o f a verista school. Thus, in Verga’s case we can say that the realistic faithfulness to reality had become impartial love for truth. In a letter to Salvatore Paola Verdura he pointed out that with the term Realism he meant ‘the genuine and pure manifestation o f careful observation’; these words recall to mind the description o f I Malavoglia as a sincere and dispassionate study. It is evident the emphasis Verga laid on the concept o f truth, on the necessity for the novelist to provide the reader with a This letter is quoted by C. Riccardi in her Introduction to I Malavoglia, op. cit.. p. XI. The Italian

description o f reality (and we have seen which slice o f reality Verga was concerned with) developed from direct and sincere observation. It will be veiy important for him to find aesthetic narrative devices which mirrored this intention; we notice in Verga the intention typical o f Realism to switch from a panoramic to a dramatic type o f narrative. 1 will underline in the next section the devices Verga employed in order to achieve this aim; what is relevant at this stage o f our discussion is to emphasise that Verga felt the necessity to be impartial, objective. The emphasis on the concept o f truthfulness did not bring Verga either to a sympathetic involvement with his characters’ representation, or to a psychological penetration o f his characters. In his preface to I Malavoglia. Verga says that the novelist, who he refers to as an observer, is part o f the life he describes; he has the right to show interest for the weak, the losers he represented, but he has not the right to judge. He writes that

He who obseiwes the show does not have the right to judge it. It is sufficient if he will be able to leave for a moment the battle-field in order to study the battle without passion, and to describe the scene accurately, with adequate colours, so as to give the representation o f the reality as it has been, or as it should have been.^^

original is : Ta scliietta ed évidente manifestazione dell’osseivazione coscienziosa’.

G. Verga, I Malavoglia. op. cit., p.5. The Italian original is: ‘Chi osserva questo spettacolo non ha il diritto di giudicarlo; e’ gia’ molto se riesce a trarsi un istante fuori dal campo della lotta per studiaria senza passione. e rendere la scena nettainente. coi colon adatti, tale da dare la rappresentazione della realta’ com’e’ stata, o come avrebbe dovuto essere.’

(I will explain later why he used the image for the battle-field to describe life). Nevertheless, the ordinary situations and people he dealt with were for him the symbol of the whole human situation he himself was part of; as we have seen, he stated that the novelist participated in this battle o f life. Only in this respect was the novelist involved with the subject he was interested in, however, description could not fail to be tme and impartial. Asor Rosa explains that

...truth, therefore, does not coincide with the exactness o f the document, but with the significance and the profundity o f every narrated story.

The critic points out that in this way Verga can be considered a poet, but, and this is a very important aspect o f Verga’s art, he never represented the events or the characters as different in any ways from what they really were; his representation o f reality was faithful, what he had done was just ‘...to broaden the interpretation o f it in order to stress the universality o f the situation described’.

4) The Influence o f Positivism on Eliot and Verga’s Art

It is worth underlining at this point o f our discussion that both George Eliot and Verga could give a representation o f reality so characterised thanks to the influence Positivism had had on their cultural backgrounds.