The Soul of Young Italy
Sencourt, Robert
42 THE COMMONWEAL May i9, 1926 which interests a child in literature, but coming in con- of music. Yet the number...
...You not cease to fight or suffer with our eyes upon the will have your hands, but you will neither reap nor stars...
...hood like the marvel of a vanishing dream, looked You went between the lilac row, from a short day to a lifetime of darkness...
...Mary Baker Eddy, been or he would not have turned with such disadsuffering, against which human nature revolts in any vantages to make himself a doctor of law in the Unicase, has been treated either as cowardice or a de- versity of Siena, or aspired to wed the lovely daughter lusion...
...their eyes saw the soul: when it knows them, it will recognize misbehind the hideous mask to the soul of the man, and fortunes as no longer fate but providence...
...like them he had found the sufferings cA r for Viola da Gamba of his body negligible in comparison with the anguish Do you remember now how rain of heart and mind in the loss of something more than Ran thickly down each window pane, a physical pleasure...
...It is only imaginais, and suffering is both glorious and inevitable...
...maimed...
...some drama of the individual soul: and the words of Delcroix is not simply a Fascista : but his books in Delcroix in their sensitiveness and passion are docutheir terrible eloquence and beauty are the evangel of ments of his own history, of the life which admitted that new enthusiasm which gave to Italy an impulse all the ghastliness of his calamity, and in doing so from victorious war that contrasts with the disillusion- made it an inspiration...
...No is, so much the fuller is the power both of effort and one will accuse you-but you will be condemned: no of feeling...
...the mystery of his ardors and his longings...
...A thousand dollars judiciously spent can afford so much pleasure," bears little weight...
...Take it away, and Delcroix melts all our hearts...
...if you wish to be taken in, knock at the doors vanquishes the night...
...will flee from your caresses, and you will cry for the Let us rather, he argues, realize that the fuller life night when you neither will see nor will be seen...
...And who could fail to with the love of all his soul and all his blood...
...The ages are given freely by the vanquished...
...It is far more important to stimulate an interest in To date, the greatest credit for the musical education any kind of music than to insist upon a purely classical of the public must be given to the phonograph and diet...
...The fact that, as Stendhal remarked of the Emthe music collections in our circulating libraries should peror Titus's Arch of Triumph, "anything so useless be improved...
...Yet he has done both of these, belose one's hands and one's eyes in one sudden ghastly cause suffering has developed in him a greatness of explosion is, when all is said by Christian Scientists which in his first happy days his companions never and done by medical scientists, still a calamity...
...was a mask, covered with bleeding scars, formless and There is a truth behind Mrs...
...the image of his life was order to chaos...
...In accepting the truth serted...
...Eddy's contentions...
...they knew his whole has still to know the powers and mysteries of voice and heard that it was sweet...
...the mercy which look back on a history of nature's secrets being opened, you have asked in vain from the triumphant will be and her powers put under the yoke...
...A young mind can- a collection is ridiculously small...
...Mirrors had been no effort, and where there was no effort, there could removed from the house, but he found his image in be no heroism...
...If it was simply and solely the horrible dewy meadow...
...Let us will look upon you and you will feel yourself a crave for light and truth as a man in a parched land stranger, all will love and you will feel yourself dethirsts for a cooling stream...
...expressionless, as though it had been contracted in Evil is outside the scheme of things: in itself it does a spasm...
...Likewise public or semi- achievement...
...Giuliano We sat beside a hemlock blaze lost his religion, Andrea lost his hope of martial And felt the glow of coming days...
...He returned home a mass of bandages : his family Life is more mysterious than it first looks: and could not reach through them to kiss him : they be- though pain is, indeed, the shadow thrown by the lieved that beneath them there still remained a counte- black form of evil, it is also the means of heroism...
...And clouds of lilac were as blurred But in the case of the other three sufferers, As old sonatas dimly heard...
...We denied will be offered by a beggar...
...Women stomach was the reason for blood beating from the will be horrified at the sight of you, and children heart...
...But the cure was worse than the disease, and In a life in which there was no pain there would be he sorrowed when his eyes opened...
...Through Fascismo Italy found in hands and his eyes, Carlo Delcroix is now one of the the war an inspiration, and Delcroix is the prophet of most powerful speakers in the Chamber of Deputies, the salvation she has won from ardors and endurances...
...tion...
...The writings of Del- Beauty, he begins by saying, is God's best gift to croix are an impassioned comment on the moral that man, and the countenance is the expression of the soul...
...It tion that can make sympathy real...
...his soul to fire and his heart to bronze, found himself It is the pains of fire by which man images his eter- disabled before he could once face conscious danger...
...Nothing is more ravaging to an inferior work But on the whole, the adult can be taught precious than repetition...
...But, as many know, it is not a delusion...
...nance...
...with it...
...To be belied by one's own aspect, to be eternally idea of that absurdity for a noble reminder of what betrayed by the very image of oneself, to think and life really is: "Man has always suffered, and always feel and give no sign of it more than a revolting and will suffer, and there is war every day, on every road, monotonous disfigurement : that is a torment few have at every turn of life, in the very heart of the furnace, realized, a sacrifice which the soldier who faces fear in the depths of the consciousness, sadder and not less and death calmly fails to take into his prospect, an fatal than that other war which is fought with canons, ordeal of which the bravest are afraid...
...Let us suffer from fevers of desire and one will proscribe you-but you will be an exile...
...named after these conquests...
...Andrea, (How does that old sonata go...
...Faith dreamed...
...The praise of what was future : my heart was one of bronze which at every sacrificed begins each of his studies, so that we shall blow rang louder with songs and prayers burning with know the poignant meaning of the blessings we often devotion and trembling into harmony...
...It is just the opposite of that divine a lie...
...over the absurd picture of the vegetable man...
...The Canadian professor makes us laugh can do the work of our hands, or even of our eyes...
...Unfortunately, our boards of educapublic rehearsals of our principal orchestras...
...What if anyand in which sometimes one finds death sweetness...
...Let us yes : but no one will know you and you will not know leave, then, to the people the altar of sacrifice, let us yourself, you will lament and you will shudder...
...life which gives us the model of human life in its creaOne summer evening, between the fireflies and the tive sacrifice, in restoring to patterns of perfection the stars, he saw the crucifix, and it spoke to him with a guilty life it drew from out the void before its guilt...
...message brighter than the lights upon the altar: "If And therefore it illuminates the dignity of heroes...
...enjoy without conscious appreciation : he then turns This is the philosophy of life which Delcroix dis- to the horror of the surrender of them, and finally covered from his sorrow : pain is one with the struggle he points to the philosophy which transforms the of life, and being the struggle with the powers of de- affliction into a glory...
...If the students like Tschaikowsky, stuff them which cannot be had in the concert hall...
...the loss was of inward things only...
...In the modern age, and most of A man of will and courage he must always have all among the admirers of Mrs...
...not exist...
...Once it is gotten across that music little about amusing himself...
...you wish to be understood, speak to the soul of the "Exalted into the eternal," says Delcroix, "sorrow sufferer...
...struction, as Christianity showed us at the Crucifixion, Let us take the case of Giovanni, and see with is part of the mystery of the Divine nature...
...own ghastly deprivations, and so finding the worth of Giovanni had loved, had loved as a healthy young sorrow, he learned to bless what had first driven him peasant would love : humbly but not without violence, to the frenzies of despair...
...Evil then exists only in things which every look of compassion was like a fresh blow...
...glory, and Massiano lost his sense of death as the Ah, there were only just we two, crowning and consecration of life...
...cannot restore the loss...
...The agony is acute...
...The treasure which the rich have ize our heritage as the children of redemption...
...But the world as a He went to the refuge of the blind...
...You will, indeed, return to your home, but that life is a warfare, and in seeing that afflictions are all will mourn for you and your mother herself will its heroism, Delcroix found the way to deal with his weep for you as one who is dead...
...His writings tell how it happened that, The theme which Delcroix repeats with variations, being a young man of no particular mark at the time and with an increase of mastery and power, is the of his disaster, he has become famous in a few years...
...like Luciano, Pietro, and the failures by which they mar the order it had made...
...lost his eyes, Pietro had lost his hands, Francesco was The hut in which he slept was set on fire by a bomb, cut off by an injury to the spine from love in its con- and from the burning rafters one fell which set his 44 THE COMMONWEAL May 19, 1926 hair on fire, and burnt away all the flesh of his face...
...still exist, uniting men with the sacrifice of love which, It has led him not by a bright star to the cradle of with unending toil and pain, drew patterns of eternal the Redeemer, but by the deadly shadow of His pas- perfection from chaos and old night, and which offers sion and cross to the heavens of His resurrection...
...against the will which changed menaces into smiles, Delcroix makes clear to us what those sufferings really and proscriptions into blessings...
...Only Giuli- Comes timidly and wanders in...
...And exist apart from it, as disease exists only in a body his mother who knew him as she had borne him, whole which should be healthy, and it tends to reduce them and beautiful, lit a candle before his picture as of one to annihilation or at least to formlessness...
...Misfortune lent me her greatness, calamity that it was, if it led to the glory of victory weeping opened her poesy to me and, in conflict with May i9, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 4 the night, my wretched human lot became transfigured...
...Likes and dislikes will change periodically...
...We know that things of this of the arising soul, and destiny itself was impotent kind happened in the war wherever it was fought...
...nal castigation by God...
...All feel how heavy is the burden of the flesh...
...His see that there is blessedness in an affliction which de- grace and vigor were full of promises and invitations: veloped in a young soldier the power of writing with his youth of desires and chastity gave even his body so much force and beauty...
...ano, who had even lost that memory of prayer which You took my heart that rainy day even those who do not pray recall from their child- And then you went went far away...
...It we solve the problem of evil...
...after the Prince of Piemonte the most famous of The People's War, and The Sacrifice of the Lord are Italy's young men, and a writer whose prose, as the the titles of his two earlier books, and such words as world is beginning to realize, is not only prose but "Holy Sacrifice" would do as a title for any of them...
...If we accept our lot, we realof those who love...
...what is left to raise humanity...
...it is extraordinary in one blind and Seven Uncanonized Saints...
...Professor Stephen Leacock drew from one of his no wound, therefore, is more terrible than that which humorous pictures of a life from which effort was deprives the soul of its power of being revealed: others eliminated...
...It needed what exquisite sensitiveness of appreciation he realizes God Himself, he tells us, to show how noble suffering the story of the disfigured soldier...
...Yet the number of libraries possessing such tact with stimulating experiences...
...at it as the gateway of eternity...
...THE SOUL OF YOUNG ITALY By ROBERT SENCOURT T HE political movement which dominates Italy and revival in a country, then it involved some mysterihas found in Carlo Delcroix a literary genius ous conflict, some tragic philosophical significance, whose fame may live with that of Mussolini...
...In an No one can do anything to remedy the loss of a man's eager apostrophe, the young Italian exchanges the face...
...I lament," he writes, which brought such a disaster to all the fervors and "my days of sadness when with eyes full of tears the activities of youth cannot simply be accepted or dis- soul never thirsted, but was fresh and lively as a missed...
...one were to say to a healthy young peasant like GioWar is the synonym of life, and men's nails are always vanni something of this kind: "You will come back, more poisonous than their bayonets...
...It attacks who had passed away...
...But even Massiano felt that in accepting the utter desperation, the finality And do you know how still the rain Is, now, upon each leaded pane, of slavery and sorrow was the beginning of a victory And breath of lilacs, wet and thin, and the opening of an eternal freedom...
...Francesco he had discovered a nobler blessedness through pain...
...And for tion are not noted for their sponsoring of the useless the benefit of those who sing, or play instruments, arts...
...42 THE COMMONWEAL May i9, 1926 which interests a child in literature, but coming in con- of music...
...Not a contheir blindness gave him a beauty no fire could de- tagion, not a condemnation, not a shame, suffering will stroy, no time could change...
...the imagination of is the privilege of being human...
...And yet between vice and virtue there is And he had all his senses, all his strength...
...To of a nobleman...
...men a more perfect blessedness in exchange for all So it was with Giovanni...
...things than the most manly of ambitions...
...life would be more vain and death more bitter sow...
...Love and Each of his seven uncanonized saints is one who has youth had consecrated his lodging to life as though suffered a grievous affliction in the war: Luciano had it were a chapel prepared for a first communion...
...summation as generative joy, the face of Giovanni had The anguish of the crashed universe, of enchained been so terribly disfigured that people shuddered when youth and vanquished flesh was forgotten in the joy they looked at him...
...It burns into the very fibres But his return to his family told him there were other of his flesh and annihilates the trace of form...
...Still, will constitute a collection of all the important works what is life if not the pursuit of happiness...
...praise of suffering...
...The channels into which is a pleasure and not a chore, the development of his tastes have fallen solidify with age beyond alterataste will largely take care of itself...
...But a contrariety...
...He had his epiphany...
...whose life had known the sacred hunger which turned JOSEPH FRANT-WALSH...
...In solving the problem of suffering, a pool where he used to lead the flocks to drink...
...It would be much for any young man of But the others are Dialogues with the Crowd, and thirty to be...
...That This is the story he tells in his last and best book, was the discovery of Carlo Delcroix, and the war Seven Uncanonized Saints...
...In Europe the prinnot be expected to show any more interest in Bach cipal music sellers have circulating pay collections, but than it would take in Chaucer...
...Every renunciation meant and mean still to many who are still among was a new wealth, every wound an archway into the us, sometimes forgotten...
...ment that has touched France and made much of Eng- A young captain in the bersaglieri when he lost his land pro-German...
...A the radio, uniquely because they afford that intimate taste for jazz at fifteen will be largely outgrown at acquaintance and opportunity for repeated hearings twenty...
...He had lost the most imme- society as artillery attacks a town, reducing it from diate means of expression...
...you will have your eyes, but you will never look if the altar became merely a table, and only the out of them with delight at what you see...
...the idea does not seem to have found favor here...
...he ceased to look And laughter leaping up the flue...
...On the other hand, juvenile education in music As for adult education, free or low-priced concerts -as well as in singing and playing-would be a real will always be valuable...
Vol. 4 • May 1926 • No. 2
