The Italians are a people of great emotional complexity, displaying a strange mixture of idealism and realism. They are at present engaged in constructing an edifice which shall be the admiration of the world for all time, to wit, a third Italy. Naturally the designers, the architects, the builders and the prospective inhabitants hope that it will be more ideal, more commodious, more adapted to its purposes than its predecessors. To the sympathetic observer, however, they appear to limit themselves narrowly to old building material. There is nothing which mirrors the individual and composite mind of a country so illuminatingly as its literature. The man craving for power prefers the allegiance of a country's song-writers to that of its lawgivers. That a tremendous change has taken place to-day, not only in the songs of Italy but in all her literature, must be admitted. This change has been in process for a generation and is going on with increasing rapidity. Italian literature is now going through a phase quite as distinct as that which characterized the romanticism initiated by Manzoni and which ended with the advent of Carducci. It would be difficult to find a word which would adequately express the spirit of it--perhaps the most descriptive one is _protest_. The new writers protest against the social, political, and religious acceptances of the past fifty years. They object to the acceptance of alleged facts substantiated only by tradition; they refuse adherence to teachings, doctrines, modes of thought and expression merely because they are old; they reject dogma originating in self-constituted authority, no matter how long or by whom it has been sanctioned and privileged, no matter how securely rooted. They will have none of the conventionalism which is out of harmony with the present conditions of life and with the present yearning for liberty. They stand against the teaching that the flesh must be punished in order that the soul may be purified, as they do against all slavish stereotypy, moss-covered convention, and archaic laws.