A somewhat similar intensification and stripping away it is at least possible that legend, an enduring legend, gives. Seizing on the individual’s essentially personal dreams, evil or good, divined beneath a few of his inadequate acts, and exaggerating, or perhaps only intensifying, them, legend gives us these as the man. Probably that was not the way the individual appeared to himself. Probably no other individual ever saw him like that, unless, for a moment, his passionate lover or his passionate enemy. Yet that, says legend confidently, is what he was. TRUTH AND FICTION IN ITALY There is in most contemporary Italian fiction a limpness, flaccidity--I hardly know what to call it--which at its least offensive expresses a feeble despair, and at its worst becomes a whine. It is not the expression of a rugged pessimism; there is nothing rugged about it. Rather, it reveals a lack of vitality, a thin-bloodedness, the spirit one is accustomed to think of as ‘womanish,’ though, as a matter of fact, the women writers of Italy appear less guilty in this respect than the men. Grazia Deledda and even Annie Vivanti show more virility than most of their confrères, and there is gusto in the slap-stick prose of Matilde Serao, despite its appalling sentimentality. But Marino Moretti, a fine and sensitive writer, is only too clear an exponent of the fault, Panzini himself often succumbs to it, and even the late Federico Tozzi, cut off by early death from what promised to be real achievement, was far from guiltless. Clear as the fault appears to me, and arousing, as it does, an exasperated distaste, it is difficult for me to make it clear to any one else. This is because it is at bottom the result of an attitude of mind, a conventionally accepted attitude of mind, rather than anything more definite. It is easy to lay an accusing finger on the concomitants, the specifically annoying tricks and habits that go with it (more obviously, of course, in third-rate writers, such as Teresah or Luciano Zuccoli): the tender mournful contemplation of something small and helpless, the employment of pity for its own sweet sake, the abuse of diminutives (‘he took her poor, emaciated, little hand in his’), etc., but the thing itself, the spirit behind all this, remains elusive, and will remain so until we have got at its source. Whatever this may turn out to be, the characteristic is doubly obnoxious: it is obnoxious not only in itself, but also because it grossly misrepresents Italian life and the Italian spirit. It is true that there is a vast deal of sentimentality loose in Italy, always readily on tap, as it were, but this national sentimentality is a hearty thing, a wasted by-product of exuberant life, like the sticky yellow foam churned up by a tumultuous sea; not thin-blooded, careful, and mauve-coloured, like that of the printed page.