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TITLE: THE SAINT
AUTHOR: ANTONIO FOGAZZARO
EBOOK: E06194 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

Since the condemnation of _The Saint_ by the Congregation of the Index,
the publishers of the authorized translation of this novel feel that, in
justice to its author, Senator Antonio Fogazzaro, they owe to the public
a word of explanation by way of making plain (what the author has in
more than one letter made plain to them) how it comes about that, in
spite of the decree of the Index, the Senator sanctions the appearance
of the book in America. The explanation is found in the fact that the
American publishers secured, before the sentence of the Congregation had
been passed, the sanction for the publication of their translation--a
sanction which the author, as a loyal Catholic, could not have given
later, but which, once it was given, he did not feel justified in
withdrawing.

NEW YORK, July, 1906.

THE SAINT

By ANTONIO FOGAZZARO

NOTE:

_The Saint_, though it is independent of Fogazzaro's earlier romances,
and though it explains itself completely when read in its entirety,
will perhaps be more readily understood and enjoyed, especially in the
opening chapters, if a few words are said with regard to certain of its
characters who have made an appearance in preceding stories by the
same author. All needful information of this kind is conveyed in the
following paragraph, for which we are indebted to Mrs. Crawford's
article, "The Saint in Fiction," which appeared in _The Fortnightly
Review_ for April, 1906:

"Readers of Fogazzaro's earlier novels will recognise in Piero Maironi,
the Saint, the son of the Don Franco Maironi who, in the _Piccolo Mondo
Antico_, gives his life for the cause of freedom, while he himself is
the hero of the _Piccolo Mondo Moderno_. For those who have not read
the preceding volumes it should be explained that his wife being in a
lunatic asylum, Maironi, artist and dreamer, had fallen in love with
a beautiful woman separated from her husband, Jeanne Dessalle, who
professed agnostic opinions. Recalled to a sense of his faith and his
honour by an interview with his wife, who sent for him on her death-bed,
he was plunged in remorse, and disappeared wholly from the knowledge
of friends and relatives after depositing in the hands of a venerable
priest, Don Giuseppe Flores, a sealed paper describing a prophetic
vision concerning his life that had largely contributed to his
conversion. Three years are supposed to have passed between the close of
the _Piccolo Mondo Moderno_ and the opening of _Il Santo_, when Maironi
is revealed under the name of Benedetto, purified of his sins by a life
of prayer and emaciated by the severity of his mortifications, while
Jeanne Dessalle, listless and miserable, is wandering around Europe
with Noemi d'Arxel, sister to Maria Selva, hoping against hope for the
reappearance of her former lover."

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION (BY WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER)

CHAPTER

I.--LAC D'AMOUR

II.--DON CLEMENTE

III.--A NIGHT OF STORMS

IV.--FACE TO FACE

V.--THE SAINT

VI.--THREE LETTERS

VII.--IN THE WHIRLPOOL OF THE WORLD

VIII.--JEANNE

IX.--IN THE WHIRLWIND OF GOD

Introduction

By William Roscoe Thayer

Author of "The Dawn of Italian Independence"

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO AND HIS MASTERPIECE

I

Senator Fogazzaro, in _The Saint_, has confirmed the impression of
his five and twenty years' career as a novelist, and now, through
the extraordinary power and pertinence of this crowning work, he has
suddenly become an international celebrity. The myopic censors of the
_Index_ have assured the widest circulation of his book by condemning it
as heretical. In the few months since its publication, it has been
read by hundreds of thousands of Italians; it has appeared in French
translation in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ and in German in the
_Hochland_; and it has been the storm centre of religious and literary
debate. Now it will be sought by a still wider circle, eager to see what
the doctrines are, written by the leading Catholic layman in Italy, at
which the Papal advisers have taken fright. Time was when it was the
books of the avowed enemies of the Church--of some mocking Voltaire,
some learned Renan, some impassioned Michelet--which they thrust on the
_Index_; now they pillory the Catholic layman with the largest following
in Italy, one who has never wavered in his devotion to the Church.
Whatever the political result of their action may be, they have made the
fortune of the book they hoped to suppress; and this is good, for _The
Saint_ is a real addition to literature.

Lovers of Italy have regretted that foreigners should judge her
contemporary ideals and literary achievements by the brilliant, but
obscene and degenerate books of Gabriele d'Annunzio. Such books, the
products of disease no matter what language they may be written in,
quickly circulate from country to country. Like epidemics they sweep up
and down the world, requiring no passports, respecting no frontiers,
while benefits travel slowly from people to people, and often lose much
in the passage. D'Annunzio, speaking the universal language--Sin,--has
been accepted as the typical Italian by foreigners who know Carducci
merely as a name and have perhaps never heard of Fogazzaro. Yet it is in
these men that the better genius of modern Italy has recently expressed
itself. Carducci's international reputation as the foremost living poet
in Europe and a literary critic of the first class gains slowly, but its
future is secure. Thanks to the wider circulating medium of fiction,
Fogaz-* *zaro's name is a household word in thousands of Italian
families, and he combines in his genius so many rare and important
strands that the durability of his literary renown cannot be questioned.

II

Antonio Fogazzaro, the most eminent Italian novelist since Manzoni, was
born at Vicenza on March 25th, 1842. He was happy in his parents, his
father, Mariano Fogazzaro, being a man of refined tastes and sound
learning, while his mother, Teresa Barrera, united feminine sweetness
with wit and a warm heart. From childhood they influenced all sides of
his nature, and when the proper time came they put him in charge of a
wise tutor, Professor Zanella, who seems to have divined his pupil's
talents and the best way to cultivate them. Young Fogazzaro, having
completed his course in the classics went on to the study of the law,
which he pursued first in the University of Padua and then at Turin,
where his father had taken up a voluntary exile. For Vicenza, during the
forties and fifties, lay under Austrian subjection, and any Italian
who desired to breathe freely in Italy had to seek the liberal air of
Piedmont.

Fogazzaro received his diploma in due season, and began to practise as
advocate, but in that casual way common to young men who know that their
real leader is not Themis but Apollo. Erelong he abandoned the bar and
devoted himself with equal enthusiasm to music and poetry, for both of
which he had unusual aptitude. Down to 1881 he printed chiefly volumes
of verse which gave him a genuine, if not popular reputation. In that
year he brought out his first romance, _Malombra_, and from time to time
during the past quarter of a century he has followed it with _Daniele
Cortis_, _Il Mistero del Poeta_, _Piccolo Mondo Antico_, _Piccolo Mondo
Moderno_, and finally, in the autumn of 1905, _Il Santo_. This list by
no means exhausts his productivity, for he has worked in many fields,
but it includes the books by which, gradually at first, and with
triumphant strides of late, he has come into great fame in Italy and
has risen into the small group of living authors who write for a
cosmopolitan public.

For many years past Signer Fogazzaro has dwelt in his native Vicenza,
the most honoured of her citizens, round whom has grown up a band of
eager disciples, who look to him for guidance not merely in matters
intellectual or aesthetic, but in the conduct of life. He has conceived
of the career of man of letters as a great opportunity, not as a mere
trade. Nothing could show better his high seriousness than his waiting
until the age of thirty-nine before publishing his first novel, unless
it be the restraint which led him, after having embarked on the career
of novelist to devote four or five years on the average to his studies
in fiction. So his books are ripe, the fruits of a deliberate and rich
nature, and not the windfalls of a mere literary trick. And now the
publication of _The Saint_ confirms all his previous work, and entitles
him, at a little more than threescore years, to rank among the few
literary masters of the time.

III

Many elements in _The Saint_ testify to its importance; but these would
not make it a work of art. And after all it is as a work of art that it
first appeals to readers, who may care little for its religious purport.
It is a great novel--so great, that, after living with its characters,
we cease to regard it as a novel at all. It keeps our suspense on the
stretch through nearly five hundred pages. Will the Saint triumph--will
love victoriously claim its own? We hurry on, at the first reading,
for the solution; then we go back and discover in it another world of
profound interest. That is the true sign of a masterpiece.

In English we have only _John Inglesant_ and _Robert Elsmere_ to compare
it with; but such a comparison, though obviously imperfect, proves at
once how easily _The Saint_ surpasses them both, not merely by
the greater significance of its central theme, but by its subtler
psychology, its wider horizon, its more various contacts with life.
Benedetto, the Saint, is a new character in fiction, a mingling of St.
Francis and Dr. Dollinger, a man of to-day in intelligence, a medieval
in faith. Nothing could be finer than the way in which Signer Fogazzaro
depicts his zeal, his ecstasies, his visions, his depressions, his
doubts; shows the physical and mental reactions; gives us, in a word,
a study in religious morbid psychology--for, say what we will,
such abnormalities are morbid--without rival in fiction. We follow

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