Given this methodical corruption of minors, it is not strange that the prose style of the average mature Italian and of Italian journalism should be hopelessly verbose and weighted with rhetorical emotional platitudes that do not express the genuine feelings of the writer. For example, boxing matches have become very popular in Italy of late, and there is little perceptible difference between the Italian crowd at one of these and the crowd at an American fight. There is the same doggy masculine smell, the same blue haze of smoke drifting across the glare of the arc-lights above the ring, the same fierce excitement--nothing, in short, that could possibly have come out of _Cuore_. Such was the audience at a recent match in Milan when Bruno Frattini, the Italian champion, was defeated on points by Ted Lewis. But the newspaper account in the _Ambrosiano_ next day! ‘Could it be that Bruno, our Bruno, was defeated? For a moment we were silent, dazed. Our eyes were full of tears.’ I wish I had kept that reporter’s story. It was worth translating in full--only it would have demanded ten pages. Here in this absurd instance, perhaps because it is so absurd, we somehow get a flash of insight into the origin of the problem. For even with a comment on school training I did not go deep enough. The real problem is to discover why mature, fairly intelligent Italians permit that kind of training to continue, and approve of its results. This, I think, is the answer: to an Italian life is pragmatic, art academic. The Italian takes life as it comes, with no theories about it, with no belief in its having a meaning; but for the printed word he has hard and fast rules. He does not think of art as an interpretation of life; he thinks of it as something quite separate. (But if you ask me why this should be true, I confess that I am beyond my depth and do not know--unless it is simply that the average Italian is too sceptical and matter-of-fact to believe any interpretation of life possible). Nowhere--not even in the America of ten years ago, where the majority of people struggled, as they must always struggle everywhere, to make a difficult living, but read sunny fairytales by Myrtle Reed and Eleanor Porter--nowhere have life and art been kept so distinct as they are still kept in Italy. It is grateful (especially to a writer) to discover that in Italy more esteem is felt for an author than for a millionaire, but it is saddening to discover, a little more gradually, that this is not because the author is held to know more about life than the millionaire, but that, instead, he is worshipped as the priest of an esoteric cult with a well-established ritual.