e deceptive. By
their language I do not mean merely their words and their grammar--we
also have a grammar, and our dictionary contains words as many and as
expressive as theirs--the romance is rather in their attitude of mind and
the consequent use they make of their words. I have read with disgust in
an English newspaper an account of a squalid Pentonville murder which, as
described in a contemporary Italian journal, appeared worthy to be set to
music by Puccini. We are like the audience in Giovanni's
theatre--dominated by the imposing romance of the language, and we prefer
to be so dominated. Or we are like the audience in the teatrino at
Palermo, when the buffo performs a miracle; as soon as we get behind "la
mala vita" and see it as "the life of the criminal classes" we have
caught a glimpse of how the illusion is worked.

By their gestures I mean something about which in England, in France and
even in Northern Italy, nothing is known. It is true that we Northerners
can and do communicate with one another in gesture, but in England we
mostly omit gesture and use speech, while in France and Northern Italy
the gesture is only slight. A Sicilian sometimes omits words, but if he
omits gestures it is only by exercising great self-control. When he is
talking naturally, every muscle of his body is at work helping him to
express his meaning. It is as though he had not yet learnt to trust
speech, everything must be acted too, as half-educated people have not
yet learnt to trust the written word and if they read must read aloud.
At a cinematograph show, when a letter or telegram or the title of the
piece is shown on the screen, a murmur goes round the hall; it is the
people reading the writing out loud to assure themselves of its meaning.
So the talking Sicilian is telling everything twice, once with his voice
and once with his gestures and there is so much oil in his backbone that
there is nothing creaky, awkward or grudging in his movements; the
gestures are made with an exuberance, an intensity and a natural
unconscious beauty which seem to lift the matter above the plane of
ordinary life. So habitual is this gesticulation that it is often
useless. I have been behind the scenes in a marionette theatre, watching
the man declaiming for the figures. His energy was tremendous, no wonder
he drank out of a black bottle from time to time. I knew he was hidden
from the audience and thought he might be suggesting movemen