then (but not until then) be hung in every gallery, and their music performed at every theatre, of their native land. The tyranny over literature is not quite so great as that over music, for the obvious reason that a book is read in solitude by an individual, not performed before a very articulate audience, and also because the reading public is smaller than the opera public. Nevertheless, if small, it is of the same kind and only a little more alert to new impressions. It, too, knows what it wants and that this is art. The result is to weaken and emasculate literature. Not, of course, that a writer of integrity will deliberately seek to give the public what it wants, but he can hardly avoid being discouraged by the knowledge that it wants only a repetition of something that has already been done. Moreover, the writer is, after all, himself an Italian, with the Italian’s thorough early grounding in verbosity, rhetoric and sentimentality, and with his instinct to keep life and literature separate. He attempts, even desperately, to write about life, but somehow the attempt does not often succeed. The result is thin and tired. Some spark is lacking. The stuff does not ring true. It remains ‘literary.’ But have not writers, and other artists, in all countries had to struggle with difficulties, from which they have emerged more or less triumphantly? Surely English literature has sprung from a milieu hostile to all the arts, and is but the more vigorous for that? True, and so do they struggle in Italy; but it is as though they must start from farther back and overcome elementary handicaps that they should surely be spared. Even to nullify that persistent early training in opulent rhetoric and that in verbosity must demand heroic effort; yet most of them have conquered the former, and some the latter. It is a triumph that they do actually write freshly. But that attitude toward literature as a thing in itself is hard to overcome. And there are other dangers and difficulties.