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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
_The Mother_[1] is an unusual book, both in its story and its setting in a remote Sardinian hill village, half civilized and superstitious. But the chief interest lies in the psychological study of the two chief characters, and the action of the story takes place so rapidly (all within the space of two days) and the actual drama is so interwoven with the mental conflict, and all so forced by circumstances, that it is almost Greek in its simple and inevitable tragedy.
The book is written without offence to any creed or opinions, and touches on no questions of either doctrine or Church government. It is just a human problem, the result of primitive human nature against man-made laws it cannot understand.
[1] Translated from the Italian novel _La Madre_.
PREFACE
Novelists who have laid the scenes of their stories almost invariably in one certain country or district, or amongst one certain class of people, or who have dealt with one special topic or interest, are apt to be called monotonous by a public which merely reads to kill time or is always craving for new sensations in its literature. But to another and more serious class of reader this very fidelity to scene and steadfastness of outlook is one of the principal incentives to take up each fresh work of such writers, for it is safe to assume that they are writing about what they really know and understand and their work may be expected to deepen and develop with each succeeding book.
Amongst such writers Grazia Deledda takes high rank. One of the foremost women novelists of Italy, if not the very first, she has been writing for some five and twenty years, and though almost always utilizing the same setting for her novels, each succeeding one has shown a different leading idea, a new variation upon the eternal theme of more or less primitive human nature.
Madame Deledda is a Sardinian by birth and parentage. She was born at Nuoro, the little inland town that figures so often in her books, and there she spent her first youth amongst the shepherds and peasants and small landed proprietors such as live again in her pages. On her marriage to a young Lombard she left Sardinia and went with her husband to Rome, where she still lives and works, with the steadfast aim of yet further perfecting herself in her art.
As may be expected, the action of her numerous novels takes place principally in her native island of Sardinia, with its wild and rugged background of mountain, rock, and wide tracts of thicket and shrub. The people of Sardinia, chiefly shepherds, agriculturists, and fishermen, differ considerably from those of the mainland, and a graver and less vivacious demeanour than most other Italians, a strict sense of honour, and hospitality regarded as an actual duty, makes them more resemble the ancient Spanish race with which indeed they are probably distantly akin.
The life of the poorer islanders is usually one of great privation, and ceaseless hard work is required to win a subsistence from the soil in the mountain uplands, exposed alternately to the scorching summer sun and the fierce gales and icy winds of winter. The native dress is still worn, though the fashion is dying out, and the old traditional superstitions and half pagan beliefs in witchcraft and the evil eye survive side by side with a profound and simple religious faith, a combination only possible in the islands, as in the remoter parts of the mainland, where the people never go far from their native districts and seldom come in contact with outside influences.
Nowhere, perhaps, has Grazia Deledda better portrayed this mingling of inbred superstition with Church-directed religion than in _The Mother_. Here the scene is laid in the remote and only half civilized hill village of Aar, and while the action of the story is dramatic and swift (it takes place all within the space of two days), the chief interest lies in the psychological study of the two principal characters, and the actual drama is so interwoven with the mental conflict, so developed by outward circumstances, that it is almost Greek in its simple and inevitable tragedy.
We meet here many of the inhabitants of the mountain district; the old hunter who has turned solitary through dread of men, the domineering keeper and his dog, the wholly delightful boy sacristan and his friends. But the figures in whom the interest centres are, first and foremost, the mother of the young parish priest of Aar (hence the title “La Madre” in the original Italian), Paul, the priest himself, and Agnes, the lonely woman who wrecks the lives of both mother and son.
The love story of Paul is doubtless common enough. As is generally the case, especially with priests promoted from the humbler ranks of life, he made his vows whilst still too young to understand all that he was professing and renouncing. He had been taught that divine love was all-sufficing, to the exclusion of any other kind, and when human love overtook him he was too inexperienced and too weak to have any chance in the struggle for victory—and he desperately trusted to the hazard of events to save him when his own self-deception and cowardice had failed—when confronted with the greater strength and moral honesty of the woman.
It is the fine and consistently drawn character of Maria Maddalena, however, that claims the reader’s whole sympathy. Poor, ignorant, able neither to read nor write, she has brought up her boy by her own hard work and has achieved the peasant’s ambition of seeing him admitted to the priesthood and given charge of a parish. For a time all goes well, until the inevitable woman appears on the scene, and then suddenly she finds her son gone beyond her reach and exposed to perils she dare not contemplate. In her unquestioning acceptance of the Church’s laws her simple mind is only filled with terror lest Paul should break those laws. But while she is inexorable with the priest her heart yearns over the young man, tender with his grief, and, spurred on by a phantom, a dream, her love and her intelligence begin for the first time to regret the natural happiness he is denied and to question the Church’s right to impose such a denial. And at last the struggle and the suspense grow more than she can bear and live.
It should be stated emphatically that the book is written without the least offence to any creed or opinion whatsoever, and touches on no question of either doctrine or Church government. It is just a human problem, the revolt of primitive human nature in distress against man-made laws it suffers from and cannot understand.
M. G. S.