Italy is overflowing with life, perhaps even lawless with it; for the race is too much alive, individual by individual, to permit of successful organization, still less of being standardized either in behaviour or thought. The foreigner who has come to know Italy will have encountered various national traits that displease him as conflicting too much with those of his own country, but nowhere in the whole peninsula will he have found the grey devitalized dullness of Anglo-Saxon suburbia or the poetic musical languor popularly ascribed to the Italian race--why, I have no idea, unless because Neapolitans frequently sing at night and because _dolce far niente_ is the one Italian phrase with which all foreigners are acquainted. Misled in advance by a prolific and incredibly wayward literature, the foreigner, like a reversed Columbus, expects to find Cathay and instead discovers the New World. There are in Italians old, old traits that suddenly crop out at unexpected moments, there are roots that go down into an unfathomable past, but the spirit of the race is young, vivid, almost raw. Foreigners unacquainted with Italy were surprised by the phenomenon of Fascismo. No one with any knowledge of Italy can have been surprised either by Fascismo or by the sturdy opposition to it. Nothing, in short, can be falser than the conception of Italy as a country of dreamers and idealists. On the contrary, the people, by and large, are matter-of-fact, hard-headed and practical; they like American bathrooms, central heating and the early operas of Verdi; I often wonder that no American business-man has had the acumen to open a branch five-and-ten-cent store in Italy. A full-blooded corkscrew at two lire, a hearty can-opener at one lira, would sell and sell and sell. Italians of my acquaintance fairly pore over the advertisements in the _Saturday Evening Post_; they would love the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. Then, in the name of consistency, why this mournful emasculated prose? Well, it is a long story. I think at bottom it goes back to the schools. At Harvard I went through a number of courses in English composition, in each of which I had to write a one-page theme every day and a three-page theme once a fortnight. It took me years to recover from the discipline, and I have an almost guilty feeling that even now when I have learned to write in my own way a Harvard professor would still cover my pages with red marks; but at least we were urged to write simply. Our rhetorical passages were ruthlessly stricken out; we were held down, even contemptuously, to a positive bareness of expression. ‘Say what you have to say, if anything, in as few words as possible’ was the message (only the word would never have been allowed) dinned into our ears. I still think it an excellent training.