III

The various situations determined for the more eminent of George Sand’s

intimate associates would always be independently interesting, thanks to

the intrinsic appeal of these characters and even without the light

reflected withal on the great agent herself; which is why poor Chopin’s

figuration in the events of the year 1847, as Madame Karénine so fully

reconstitutes them, is all that is wanted to point their almost

nightmare quality. Without something of a close view of them we fail of

a grasp of our heroine’s genius—her genius for keeping her head in deep

seas morally and reflectively above water, though but a glance at them

must suffice us for averting this loss. The old-world quality of drama,

which throughout so thickens and tones the air around her, finds

remarkable expression in the whole picture of the moment. Every

connection involved bristles like a conscious consequence, tells for all

it is worth, as we say, and the sinister complexity of reference—for

all the golden clearings-up that awaited it on the ideal plane—leaves

nothing to be desired. The great and odd sign of the complications and

convulsions, the alarms and excursions recorded, is that these are all

the more or less direct fruits of sensibility, which had primarily been

indulged in, under the doom of a preparation of them which no

preparation of anything else was to emulate, with a good faith fairly

touching in presence of the eventual ugliness. Madame Sand’s wonderful

mother, commemorated for us in “L’Histoire de ma Vie” with the truth

surely attaching in a like degree to no mother in all the literature of

so-called confession, had had for cousin a “fille entretenue” who had

married a mechanic. This Adèle Brault had had in the course of her

adventures a daughter in whom, as an unfortunate young relative, Madame

Dupin had taken an interest, introducing her to the heiress of Nohant,

who viewed her with favour—she appears to have been amiable and

commendable—and eventually associated her with her own children. She

was thus the third member of that illegitimate progeny with which the

Nohant scene was to have become familiar, George Sand’s natural brother

on her father’s side and her natural sister on her mother’s representing

this element from the earlier time on. The young Augustine, fugitive

from a circle still less edifying, was thus made a companion of the son

and the daughter of the house, and was especially held to compare with

the latter to her great advantage in the matter of character, docility

and temper. These young persons formed, as it were, with his more

distinguished friend, the virtual family of Chopin during those years of

specifically qualified domestication which affect us as only less of a

mystification to taste than that phase of the unrestricted which had

immediately preceded them. Hence a tangled tissue of relations within

the circle that became, as it strikes us, indescribable for difficulty

and “delicacy,” not to say for the perfection of their impracticability,

and as to which the great point is that Madame Sand’s having taken them

so robustly for granted throws upon her temperamental genius a more

direct light than any other. The whole case belongs doubtless even more

to the hapless history of Chopin himself than to that of his terrible

friend—terrible for her power to flourish in conditions sooner or later

fatal to weaker vessels; but is in addition to this one of the most

striking illustrations possible of that view or theory of social life

handed over to the reactions of sensibility almost alone which, while

ever so little the ideal of the Anglo-Saxon world, has largely governed

the manners of its sister societies. It has been our view, very

emphatically, in general, that the sane and active social body—or, for

that matter, the sane and active individual, addressed to the natural

business of life—goes wrongly about it to _encourage_ sensibility, or

to do anything on the whole but treat it as of no prime importance; the

traps it may lay for us, however, being really of the fewest in a race

to which the very imagination of it may be said, I think, to have been

comparatively denied. The imagination of it sat irremovably, on the

other hand, and as a matter of course, at the Nohant fireside; where

indeed we find the play and the ravage chiefly interesting through our

thus seeing the delicate Chopin, whose semi-smothered appeal remains

peculiarly pathetic, all helpless and foredoomed at the centre of the

whirl. Nothing again strikes us more in the connection than the familiar

truth that interesting persons make everything that concerns them

interesting, or seldom fail to redeem from what might in another air

seem but meanness and vanity even their most compromised states and

their greatest wastes of value. Every one in the particular Nohant drama

here exposed loses by the exposure—so far as loss could be predicated

of amounts which, in general, excepting the said sensibility, were so

scant among them; every one, that is, save the ruling spirit of all,

with the extraordinary mark in her of the practical defiance of waste

and of her inevitable enrichment, for our measure, as by reflection from

the surrounding shrinkage. One of the oddest aspects of the scene is

also one of the wretchedest, but the oddity makes it interesting, by the

law I just glanced at, in spite of its vulgar side. How could it not be

interesting, we ask as we read, to feel that Chopin, though far from the

one man, was the one gentleman of the association, the finest set of

nerves and scruples, and yet to see how little that availed him, in

exasperated reactions, against mistakes of perverted sympathy? It is

relevant in a high degree to our view of his great protectress as

reducible at her best to male terms that she herself in this very light

fell short, missed the ideal safeguard which for her friend had been

preinvolved—as of course may be the peril, ever, with the creature so

transmuted, and as is so strikingly exemplified, in the pages before us,

when Madame Karénine ingenuously gives us chapter and verse for her

heroine’s so unqualified demolition of the person of Madame d’Agoult,

devotee of Liszt, mother to be, by that token, of Richard Wagner’s

second wife, and sometime intimate of the author of “Isidora,” in which

fiction we are shown the parody perpetrated. If women rend each other on

occasion with sharper talons than seem to belong on the whole to the

male hand, however intendingly applied, we find ourselves reflect

parenthetically that the loss of this advantage may well be a matter for

them to consider when the new approximation is the issue.

The great sign of the Nohant circle on all this showing, at any rate, is

the intense personalism, as we may call it, reigning there, or in other

words the vivacity, the acuity and irritability of the personal

relations—which flourished so largely, we at the same time feel, by

reason of the general gift for expression, that gift to which we owe the

general superiority of every letter, from it scarce matters whom, laid

under contribution by our author. How could people not feel with acuity

when they could, when they had to, write with such point and such

specific intelligence?—just indeed as one asks how letters could fail

to remain at such a level among them when they incessantly generated

choice matter for expression. Madame Sand herself is of course on this

ground easily the most admirable, as we have seen; but every one “knows

how” to write, and does it well in proportion as the matter in hand most

demands and most rewards proper saying. Much of all this stuff of

history seems indeed to have been susceptible of any amount of force of

statement; yet we note all the while how in the case of the great

mistress of the pen at least some shade of intrinsic beauty attends even

the presentation of quite abominable facts. We can only see it as

abominable, at least, so long as we have Madame Sand’s words—which are

somehow a different thing from her word—for it, that Chopin had from

the first “sided” with the atrocious Solange in that play of her genius

which is characterised by our chronicler as wickedness for the sake of

wickedness, as art for the sake of art, without other logic or other

cause. “Once married,” says Madame Karénine, “she made a double use of

this wickedness. She had always hated Augustine; she wished, one doesn’t

know why, to break off her marriage, and by calumnies and insinuations

she succeeded. Then angry with her mother she avenged herself on her as

well by further calumnies. Thereupon took place at Nohant such events

that”—that in fine we stop before them with this preliminary shudder.

The cross-currents of violence among them would take more keeping apart

than we have time for, the more that everything comes back, for

interest, to the intrinsic weight of the tone of the principal sufferer

from them—as we see her, as we wouldn’t for the world not see her, in

spite of the fact that Chopin was to succumb scarce more than a year

later to multiplied lacerations, and that she was to override and

reproduce and pre-appointedly flourish for long years after. If it is

interesting, as I have pronounced it, that Chopin, again, should have

consented to be of the opinion of Solange that the relations between her

brother Maurice and the hapless Augustine were of the last impropriety,

I fear I can account no better for this than by our sense that the more

the _genius loci_ has to feed her full tone the more our faith in it, as

such a fine thing in itself, is justified. Almost immediately after the

precipitated marriage of the daughter of the house has taken place, the

Clésinger couple, avid and insolent, of a breadth of old time impudence

in fact of which our paler day has lost the pattern, are back on the

mother’s hands, to the effect of a vividest picture of Maurice well-nigh

in a death-grapple with his apparently quite monstrous “bounder” of a

brother-in-law, a picture that further gives us Madame Sand herself

smiting Clésinger in the face and receiving from him a blow in the

breast, while Solange “coldly,” with an iciness indeed peculiarly her

own, fans the rage and approves her husband’s assault, and while the

divine composer, though for that moment much in the background, approves

the wondrous approval. He still approves, to all appearance, the

daughter’s interpretation of the mother’s wish to “get rid” of him as

the result of an amorous design on the latter’s part in respect of a

young man lately introduced to the circle as Maurice’s friend and for

the intimate relation with whom it is thus desirable that the coast

shall be made clear. How else than through no fewer consistencies of the

unedifying on the part of these provokers of the expressional reaction

should we have come by innumerable fine epistolary passages, passages

constituting in themselves verily such adornments of the tale, such

notes in the scale of all the damaged dignity redressed, that we should

be morally the poorer without them? One of the vividest glimpses indeed

is not in a letter but in a few lines from “L’Histoire de ma Vie,” the

composition of which was begun toward the end of this period and while

its shadow still hung about—early in life for a projected

autobiography, inasmuch as the author had not then reached her

forty-fifth year. Chopin at work, improvising and composing, was apt to

become a prey to doubts and depressions, so that there were times when

to break in upon these was to render him a service.

But it was not always possible to induce him to leave the piano,

often so much more his torment than his joy, and he began

gradually to resent my proposing he should do so. I never

ventured on these occasions to insist. Chopin in displeasure was

appalling, and as with me he always controlled himself it was as

if he might die of suffocation.

It is a vision of the possibilities of vibration in such organisms that

does in fact appal, and with the clash of vibrations, those both of

genius and of the general less sanctioned sensibility, the air must have

more than sufficiently resounded. Some eight years after the beginning

of their friendship and the year after the final complete break in it

she writes to Madame Pauline Viardot:

Do you see Chopin? Tell me about his health. I have been unable

to repay his fury and his hatred by hatred and fury. I think of

him as of a sick, embittered, bewildered child. I saw much of

Solange in Paris, the letter goes on, and made her my constant

occupation, but without finding anything but a stone in the

place of her heart. I have taken up my work again while waiting

for the tide to carry me elsewhere.

All the author’s “authority” is in these few words, and in none more

than in the glance at the work and the tide. The work and the tide rose

ever as high as she would to float her, and wherever we look there is

always the authority. “I find Chopin _magnificent_,” she had already

written from the thick of the fray, “to keep seeing, frequenting and

approving Clésinger, who struck me because I snatched from his hands the

hammer he had raised upon Maurice—Chopin whom every one talks of as my

most faithful and devoted friend.” Well indeed may our biographer have

put it that from a certain date in May 1847 “the two _Leitmotive_ which

might have been called in the terms of Wagner the _Leitmotif_ of

soreness and the _Leitmotif_ of despair—Chopin, Solange—sound together

now in fusion, now in a mutual grip, now simply side by side, in all

Madame Sand’s unpublished letters and in the few (of the moment) that

have been published. A little later a third joins in—Augustine Brault,

a motive narrowly and tragically linked to the _basso obligato_ of

Solange.” To meet such a passage as the following under our heroine’s

hand again is to feel the whole temper of intercourse implied slip

straight out of our analytic grasp. The allusion is to Chopin and to the

“defection” of which he had been guilty, to her view, at the time when

it had been most important that she might count on him. What we have

first, as outsiders, to swallow down, as it were, is the state of

things, the hysteric pitch of family life, in which any ideal of

reticence, any principle, as we know it, of minding one’s business, for

mere dignity’s sake if for none other, had undergone such collapse.

I grant you I am not sorry that he has withdrawn from me the

government of his life, for which both he and his friends wanted

to make me responsible in so much too absolute a fashion. His

temper kept growing in asperity, so that it had come to his

constantly blowing me up, from spite, ill-humour and jealousy,

in presence of my friends and my children. Solange made use of

it with the astuteness that belongs to her, while Maurice began

to give way to indignation. Knowing and seeing _la chasteté de

nos rapports_, he saw also that the poor sick soul took up,

without _wanting to_ and perhaps without being able to help it,

the attitude of the lover, the husband, the proprietor of my

thoughts and actions. He was on the point of breaking out and

telling him to his face that he was making me play, at

forty-three years of age, a ridiculous part, and that it was an

abuse of my kindness, my patience, and my pity for his nervous

morbid state. A few months more, a few days perhaps, of this

situation, and an impossible frightful struggle would have

broken out between them. Foreseeing the storm, I took advantage

of Chopin’s predilection for Solange and left him to sulk,

without an effort to bring him round. We have not for three

months exchanged a word in writing, and I don’t know how such a

cooling-off will end.

She develops the picture of the extravagance of his sick irritability;

she accepts with indifference the certainty that his friends will accuse

her of having cast him out to take a lover; the one thing she “minds” is

the force of evil in her daughter, who is the centre of all the

treachery. “She will come back to me when she needs me, that I know. But

her return will be neither tender nor consoling.” Therefore it is when

at the beginning of the winter of this same dreadful year she throws off

the free rich summary of what she has been through in the letter to M.

Charles Poncy already published in her Correspondence we are swept into

the current of sympathy and admiration. The preceding months had been

the heaviest and most painful of her life.

I all but broke down under them utterly, though I had for long

seen them coming. But you know how one is not always overhung by

the evil portent, however clear one may read it—there are days,

weeks, even whole months, when one lives on illusion and fondly

hopes to divert the blow that threatens. It is always at last

the most probable ill that surprises us unarmed and unprepared.

To this explosion of unhappy underground germs joined themselves

sundry contributive matters, bitter things too and quite

unexpected; so that I am broken by grief in body and soul. I

believe my grief incurable, for I never succeed in throwing it

off for a few hours without its coming upon me again during the

next in greater force and gloom. I nevertheless struggle against

it without respite, and if I don’t hope for a victory which

would have to consist of not feeling at all, at least I have

reached that of still bearing with life, of even scarcely

feeling ill, of having recovered my taste for work and of not

showing my distress. I have got back outside calm and cheer,

which are so necessary for others, and everything in my life

seems to go on well.

We had already become aware, through commemorations previous to the

present, of that first or innermost line of defence residing in George

Sand’s splendid mastery of the letter, the gift that was always so to

assure her, on every issue, the enjoyment of the first chance with

posterity. The mere cerebral and manual activity represented by the

quantity no less than the quality of her outflow through the post at a

season when her engagements were most pressing and her anxieties of

every sort most cruel is justly qualified by Madame Karénine as

astounding; the new letters here given to the world heaping up the

exhibition and testifying even beyond the finest of those gathered in

after the writer’s death—the mutilations, suppressions and other

freedoms then used, for that matter, being now exposed. If no plot of

her most bustling fiction ever thickened at the rate at which those

agitations of her inner circle at which we have glanced multiplied upon

her hands through the later ’forties, so we are tempted to find her

rather less in possession of her great _moyens_ when handling the

artificial presentation than when handling what we may call the natural.

It is not too much to say that the long letter addressed to the cynical

Solange in April ’52, and which these pages give us _in extenso_, would

have made the fortune of any mere interesting “story” in which one of

the characters might have been presented as writing it. It is a document

of the highest psychological value and a practical summary of all the

elements of the writer’s genius, of all her indefeasible advantages; it

is verily the gem of her biographer’s collection. Taken in connection

with a copious communication to her son, of the previous year, on the

subject of his sister’s character and vices, and of their common

experience of these, it offers, in its ease of movement, its

extraordinary frankness and lucidity, its splendid apprehension and

interpretation of realities, its state, as it were, of saturation with

these, exactly the kind of interest for which her novels were held

remarkable, but in a degree even above their maximum. Such a letter is

an effusion of the highest price; none of a weight so baffling to

estimation was probably ever inspired in a mother by solicitude for a

clever daughter’s possibilities. Never surely had an accomplished

daughter laid under such contribution a mother of high culture; never

had such remarkable and pertinent things had to flow from such a source;

never in fine was so urgent an occasion so admirably, so inimitably

risen to. Marvellous through it all is the way in which, while a common

recognition of the “facts of life,” as between two perfectly intelligent

men of the world, gives the whole diapason, the abdication of moral

authority and of the rights of wisdom never takes place. The tone is a

high implication of the moral advantages that Solange had inveterately

enjoyed and had decided none the less to avail herself of so little;

which advantages we absolutely believe in as we read—_there_ is the

prodigious part: such an education of the soul, and in fact of every

faculty, such a claim for the irreproachable, it would fairly seem, do

we feel any association with the great fluent artist, in whatever

conditions taking place, inevitably, necessarily to have been. If we put

ourselves questions we yet wave away doubts, and with whatever remnants

of prejudice the writer’s last word may often have to clash, our own is

that there is nothing for grand final rightness like a sufficiently

_general_ humanity—when a particularly beautiful voice happens to serve

it.

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO

1902

The great feast-days of all, for the restless critic, are those much

interspaced occasions of his really meeting a “case,” as he soon enough

learns to call, for his convenience and assistance, any supremely

contributive or determinant party to the critical question. These are

recognitions that make up for many dull hours and dry contacts, many a

thankless, a disconcerted gaze into faces that have proved

expressionless. Always looking, always hoping for his happiest chance,

the inquirer into the reasons of things—by which I mean especially into

the reasons of books—so often misses it, so often wastes his steps and

withdraws his confidence, that he inevitably works out for himself,

sooner or later, some handy principle of recognition. It may be a rough

thing, a mere home-made tool of his trade, but it serves his purpose if

it keeps him from beginning with mistakes. He becomes able to note in

its light the signs and marks of the possible precious identity, able to

weigh with some exactitude the appearances that make for its reality. He

ends, through much expenditure of patience, by seeing when, how, why,

the “case” announces and presents itself, and he perhaps even feels that

failure and felicity have worked together to produce in him a sense for

it that may at last be trusted as an instinct. He thus arrives at a view

of all the candidates, frequently interesting enough, who fall short of

the effective title, because he has at need, perhaps even from afar,

scented along the wind the strongest member of the herd. He may perhaps

not always be able to give us the grounds of his certainty, but he is at

least never without knowing it in presence of one of the full-blown

products that are the joy of the analyst. He recognises as well how the

state of being full-blown comes above all from the achievement of

consistency, of that last consistency which springs from the

unrestricted enjoyment of freedom.

Many of us will doubtless not have forgotten how we were witnesses a

certain number of years since to a season and a society that had found

themselves of a sudden roused, as from some deep drugged sleep, to the

conception of the “esthetic” law of life; in consequence of which this

happy thought had begun to receive the honours of a lively appetite and

an eager curiosity, but was at the same time surrounded and manipulated

by as many different kinds of inexpertness as probably ever huddled

together on a single pretext. The spectacle was strange and finally was

wearisome, for the simple reason that the principle in question, once it

was proclaimed—a principle not easily formulated, but which we may

conveniently speak of as that of beauty at any price, beauty appealing

alike to the senses and to the mind—was never felt to fall into its

place as really adopted and efficient. It remained for us a queer

high-flavoured fruit from overseas, grown under another sun than ours,

passed round and solemnly partaken of at banquets organised to try it,

but not found on the whole really to agree with us, not proving

thoroughly digestible. It brought with it no repose, brought with it

only agitation. We were not really, not fully convinced, for the state

of conviction is quiet. This was to have been the state itself—that is

the state of mind achieved and established—in which we were to know

ugliness no more, to make the esthetic consciousness feel at home with

us, or learn ourselves at any rate to feel at home with _it_. That would

have been the reign of peace, the supreme beatitude; but stability

continued to elude us. We had mustered a hundred good reasons for it,

yet the reasons but lighted up our desert. They failed to flower into a

single concrete esthetic “type.” One authentic, one masterful specimen

would have done wonders for us, would at least have assuaged our

curiosity. But we were to be left till lately with our curiosity on our

hands.

This is a yearning, however, that Signor D’Annunzio may at last strike

us as supremely formed to gratify; so promptly we find in him as a

literary figure the highest expression of the reality that our own

conditions were to fail of making possible. He has immediately the value

of giving us by his mere logical unfolding the measure of our

shortcomings in the same direction, that of our timidities and penuries

and failures. He throws a straighter and more inevitable light on the

esthetic consciousness than has, to my sense, in our time, reached it

from any other quarter; and there is many a mystery that properly

interrogated he may help to clear up for us, many an explanation of our

misadventure that—as I have glanced at it—he may give. He starts with

the immense advantage of enjoying the invoked boon by grace and not by

effort, of claiming it under another title than the sweat of his brow

and the aspiration of his culture. He testifies to the influence of

things that have had time to get themselves taken for granted. Beauty at

any price is an old story to him; art and form and style as the aim of

the superior life are a matter of course; and it may be said of him, I

think, that, thanks to these transmitted and implanted instincts and

aptitudes, his individual development begins where the struggle of the

mere earnest questioner ends. Signor D’Annunzio is earnest in his way,

quite extraordinarily—which is a feature of his physiognomy that we

shall presently come to and about which there will be something to say;

but we feel him all the while in such secure possession of his heritage

of favouring circumstance that his sense of intellectual responsibility

is almost out of proportion. This is one of his interesting special

marks, the manner in which the play of the esthetic instinct in him

takes on, for positive extravagance and as a last refinement of freedom,

the crown of solicitude and anxiety. Such things but make with him for

ornament and parade; they are his tribute to civility; the essence of

the matter is meanwhile in his blood and his bones. No mistake was

possible from the first as to his being of the inner literary camp—a

new form altogether of perceptive and expressive energy; the question

was settled by the intensity and variety, to say nothing of the

precocity, of his early poetic production.

Born at Pescara, in the Regno, the old kingdom of Naples, “toward” 1863,

as I find noted by a cautious biographer, he had while scarce out of his

teens allowed his lyric genius full opportunity of scandalising even the

moderately austere. He defined himself betimes very much as he was to

remain, a rare imagination, a poetic, an artistic intelligence of

extraordinary range and fineness concentrated almost wholly on the life

of the senses. For the critic who simplifies a little to state clearly,

the only ideas he urges upon us are the erotic and the plastic, which

have for him about an equal intensity, or of which it would be doubtless

more correct to say that he makes them interchangeable faces of the same

figure. He began his career by playing with them together in verse, to

innumerable light tunes and with an extraordinary general effect of

curiosity and brilliancy. He has continued still more strikingly to play

with them in prose; they have remained the substance of his intellectual

furniture. It is of his prose only, however, that, leaving aside the

Intermezzo, L’Isottèo, La Chimera, Odi Navali and other such matters, I

propose to speak, the subject being of itself ample for one occasion.

His five novels and his four plays have extended his fame; they suggest

by themselves as many observations as we shall have space for. The group

of productions, as the literary industry proceeds among us to-day, is

not large, but we may doubt if a talent and a temperament, if indeed a

whole “view of life,” ever built themselves up as vividly for the reader

out of so few blocks. The writer is even yet enviably young; but this

solidity of his literary image, as of something already seated on time

and accumulation, makes him a rare example. Precocity is somehow an

inadequate name for it, as precocity seldom gets away from the element

of promise, and it is not exactly promise that blooms in the hard

maturity of such a performance as “The Triumph of Death.” There are

certain expressions of experience, of the experience of the whole man,

that are like final milestones, milestones for his possible fertility if

not for his possible dexterity; a truth that has not indeed prevented

“Il Fuoco,” with its doubtless still ampler finality, from following the

work just mentioned. And we have had particularly before us, in verse, I

must add, “Francesca da Rimini,” with the great impression a great

actress has enabled this drama to make.

Only I must immediately in this connection also add that Signor

D’Annunzio’s plays are, beside his novels, of decidedly minor weight;

testifying abundantly to his style, his romantic sense and his command

of images, but standing in spite of their eloquence only for half of his

talent, largely as he yet appears in “Il Fuoco” to announce himself by

implication as an intending, indeed as a pre-eminent dramatist. The

example is interesting when we catch in the fact the opportunity for

comparing with the last closeness the capacity of the two rival

canvases, as they become for the occasion, on which the picture of life

may be painted. The closeness is never so great, the comparison never so

pertinent, as when the separate efforts are but different phases of the

same talent. It is not at any rate under this juxtaposition that the

infinitely greater amplitude of portrayal resident in the novel strikes

us least. It in fact strikes us the more, in this quarter, for Signor

D’Annunzio, that his plays have been with one exception successes. We

must none the less take “Francesca” but for a success of curiosity; on

the part of the author I mean even more than on the part of the public.

It is primarily a pictorial and ingenious thing and, as a picture of

passion, takes, in the total collection, despite its felicities of

surface and arrangement, distinctly a “back seat.” Scarcely less than

its companions it overflows with the writer’s plenitude of verbal

expression, thanks to which, largely, the series will always prompt a

curiosity and even a tenderness in any reader interested precisely in

this momentous question of “style in a play”—interested in particular

to learn by what esthetic chemistry a play would as a work of art

propose to eschew it. It is in any such connection so inexpugnable that

we have only to be cheated of it in one place to feel the subject cry

aloud for it, like a sick man forsaken, in another.

I may mention at all events the slightly perverse fact that, thanks, on

this side, to the highest watermark of translation, Signor D’Annunzio

makes his best appeal to the English public as a dramatist. Of each of

the three English versions of other examples of his work whose titles

are inscribed at the beginning of these remarks it may be said that they

are adequate and respectable considering the great difficulty

encountered. The author’s highest good fortune has nevertheless been at

the hands of his French interpreter, who has managed to keep constantly

close to him—allowing for an occasional inconsequent failure of courage

when the directness of the original _brave l’honnêteté_—and yet to

achieve a tone not less idiomatic, and above all not less marked by

“authority,” than his own. Mr. Arthur Symons, among ourselves, however,

has rendered the somewhat insistent eloquence of “La Gioconda” and the

intricate and difficult verse of “Francesca” with all due sympathy, and

in the latter case especially—a highly arduous task—with remarkably

patient skill. It is not his fault, doubtless, if the feet of his

English text strike us as moving with less freedom than those of his

original; such being the hard price paid always by the translator who

tries for correspondence from step to step, tries for an identical

order. Even less is he responsible for its coming still more home to us

in a translation that the meagre anecdote here furnishing the subject,

and on which the large superstructure rests, does not really lend itself

to those developments that make a full or an interesting tragic

complexity. Behind the glamour of its immense literary association the

subject of “Francesca” is for purposes of essential, of enlarged

exhibition delusive and “short.”

These, however, are for the moment side-issues; what is more relevant is

the stride taken by our author’s early progress in his first novel and

his second, “Il Piacere” and “L’Innocente”; a pair from the freshness,

the direct young energy of which he was, for some of his admirers, too

promptly and to markedly to decline. We may take it as characteristic of

the intensity of the literary life in him that his brief career falls

already thus into periods and supplies a quantity of history sufficient

for those differences among students by which the dignity of history

appears mainly to be preserved. The nature of his prime inspiration I

have already glanced at; and we are helped to a characterisation if I

say that the famous enthroned “beauty” which operates here, so straight,

as the great obsession, is not in any perceptible degree moral beauty.

It would be difficult perhaps to find elsewhere in the same compass so

much expression of the personal life resting so little on any picture of

the personal character and the personal will. It is not that Signor

D’Annunzio has not more than once pushed his furrow in this latter

direction; but nothing is exactly more interesting, as we shall see,

than the seemingly inevitable way in which the attempt falls short.

“Il Piacere,” the first in date of the five tales, has, though with

imperfections, the merit of giving us strongly at the outset the

author’s scale and range of view, and of so constituting a sort of

prophetic summary of his elements. All that is done in the later things

is more or less done here, and nothing is absent here that we are not

afterwards also to miss. I propose, however, that it shall not be

prematurely a question with us of what we miss; no intelligible

statement of which, for that matter, in such considerations as these, is

ever possible till there has been some adequate statement of what we

find. Count Andrea Sperelli is a young man who pays, pays heavily, as we

take it that we are to understand, for an unbridled surrender to the

life of the senses; whereby it is primarily a picture of that life that

the story gives us. He is represented as inordinately, as quite

monstrously, endowed for the career that from the first absorbs and that

finally is to be held, we suppose, to engulf him; and it is a tribute to

the truth with which his endowment is presented that we should scarce

know where else to look for so complete and convincing an account of

such adventures. Casanova de Seingalt is of course infinitely more

copious, but his autobiography is cheap loose journalism compared with

the directed, finely-condensed iridescent epic of Count Andrea.

This young man’s years have run but half their course from twenty to

thirty when he meets and becomes entangled with a woman more infernally

expert even than himself in the matters in which he is most expert—and

he is given us as a miracle of social and intellectual

accomplishment—the effect of whom is fatally to pervert and poison his

imagination. As his imagination is applied exclusively to the

employments of “love,” this means, for him, a frustration of all

happiness, all comfortable consistency, in subsequent relations of the

same order. The author’s view—this is fundamental—is all of a world in

which relations of any other order whatever mainly fail to offer

themselves in any attractive form. Andrea Sperelli, loving,

accordingly—in the manner in which D’Annunzio’s young men love and to

which we must specifically return—a woman of good faith, a woman as

different as possible from the creature of evil communications, finds

the vessel of his spirit itself so infected and disqualified that it

falsifies and dries up everything that passes through it. The idea that

has virtually determined the situation appears in fact to be that the

hero _would_ have loved in another manner, or would at least have wished

to, but that he had too promptly put any such fortune, so far as his

capacity is concerned, out of court. We have our reasons, presently

manifest, for doubting the possibility itself; but the theory has

nevertheless given its direction to the fable.

For the rest the author’s three sharpest signs are already unmistakable:

first his rare notation of states of excited sensibility; second his

splendid visual sense, the quick generosity of his response to the

message, as we nowadays say, of aspects and appearances, to the beauty

of places and things; third his ample and exquisite style, his curious,

various, inquisitive, always active employment of language as a means of

communication and representation. So close is the marriage between his

power of “rendering,” in the light of the imagination, and whatever he

sees and feels, that we should much mislead in speaking of his manner as

a thing distinct from the matter submitted to it. The fusion is complete

and admirable, so that, though his work is nothing if not “literary,” we

see at no point of it where literature or where life begins or ends: we

swallow our successive morsels with as little question as we swallow

food that has by proper preparation been reduced to singleness of

savour. It is brought home to us afresh that there is no complete

creation without style any more than there is complete music without

sound; also that when language becomes as closely applied and impressed

a thing as for the most part in the volumes before us the fact of

artistic creation is registered at a stroke. It is never more present

than in the thick-sown illustrative images and figures that fairly bloom

under D’Annunzio’s hand. I find examples in “Il Piacere,” as elsewhere,

by simply turning the pages. “His will”—of the hero’s

weakness—“useless as a sword of base temper hung at the side of a

drunkard or a dullard.” Or of his own southern land in September: “I

scarce know why, looking at the country in this season, I always think

of some beautiful woman after childbirth, who lies back in her white

bed, smiling with a pale astonished inextinguishable smile.” Or the

incision of this: “Where for him now were those unclean short-lived

loves that left in the mouth the strange acidity of fruit cut with a

steel knife?” Or the felicity of the following, of a southern night seen

and felt from the terrace of a villa. “Clear meteors at intervals

streaked the motionless air, running over it as lightly and silently as

drops of water on a crystal pane.” “The sails on the sea,” he says of

the same look-out by day, “were as pious and numberless as the wings of

cherubim on the gold grounds of old Giottesque panels.”

But it is above all here for two things that his faculty is admirable;

one of them his making us feel through the windows of his situation, or

the gaps, as it were, of his flowering wood, the golden presence of

Rome, the charm that appeals to him as if he were one of the pilgrims

from afar, save that he reproduces it with an authority in which, as we

have seen, the pilgrims from afar have mainly been deficient. The other

is the whole category of the phenomena of “passion,” as passion prevails

between his men and his women—and scarcely anything else prevails; the

states of feeling, of ecstasy and suffering engendered, the play of

sensibility from end to end of the scale. In this direction he has left

no dropped stitches for any worker of like tapestries to pick up. We

shall here have made out that many of his “values” are much to be

contested, but that where they are true they are as fresh as

discoveries; witness the passage where Sperelli, driving back to Rome

after a steeplechase in which he has been at the supreme moment worsted,

meets nothing that does not play with significance into his vision and

act with force on his nerves. He has before the race had “words,” almost

blows, on the subject of one of the ladies present, with one of the

other riders, of which the result is that they are to send each other

their seconds; but the omens are not for his adversary, in spite of the

latter’s success on the course.

From the mail-coach, on the return, he overtook the flight

toward Rome of Giannetto Rutolo, seated in a small two-wheeled

trap, behind the quick trot of a great roan, over whom he bent

with tight reins, holding his head down and his cigar in his

teeth, heedless of the attempts of policemen to keep him in

line. Rome, in the distance, stood up dark against a zone of

light as yellow as sulphur; and the statues crowning St. John

Lateran looked huge, above the zone, in their violet sky. _Then

it was that Andrea fully knew the pain he was making another

soul suffer._

Nothing could be more characteristic of the writer than the way what has

preceded flowers into that last reality; and equally in his best manner,

doubtless, is such a passage as the following from the same volume,

which treats of the hero’s first visit to the sinister great lady whose

influence on his soul and his senses is to become as the trail of a

serpent. She receives him, after their first accidental meeting, with

extraordinary promptitude and the last intimacy, receives him in the

depths of a great Roman palace which the author, with a failure of taste

that is, unfortunately for him, on ground of this sort, systematic,

makes a point of naming. “Then they ceased to speak. Each felt the

presence of the other flow and mingle with his own, with her own, very

blood; till it was _her_ blood at last that seemed to have become his

life, and his that seemed to have become hers. The room grew larger in

the deep silence; the crucifix of Guido Reni made the shade of the

canopy and curtains religious; the rumour of the city came to them like

the murmur of some far-away flood.” Or take for an instance of the

writer’s way of showing the consciousness as a full, mixed cup, of

touching us ourselves with the mystery at work in his characters, the

description of the young man’s leaving the princely apartments in

question after the initiation vouchsafed to him. He has found the great

lady ill in bed, with remedies and medicine-bottles at her side, but not

too ill, as we have seen, to make him welcome. “Farewell,” she has said.

“Love me! Remember!”

It seemed to him, crossing the threshold again, that he heard

behind him a burst of sobs. But he went on, a little uncertain,

wavering like a man who sees imperfectly. The odour of the

chloroform clung to his sense like some fume of intoxication;

but at each step something intimate passed away from him,

wasting itself in the air, so that, impulsively, instinctively,

he would have kept himself as he was, have closed himself in,

have wrapped himself up to prevent the dispersion. The rooms in

front of him were deserted and dumb. At one of the doors

“Mademoiselle” appeared, with no sound of steps, with no rustle

of skirts, standing there like a ghost. “This way, signor conte.

You won’t find it.” She had an ambiguous, irritating smile, and

her curiosity made her grey eyes more piercing. Andrea said

nothing. The woman’s presence again disconcerted and troubled

him, affected him with a vague repugnance, stirred indeed his

wrath.

Even the best things suffer by detachment from their context; but so it

is that we are in _possession_ of the young man’s exit, so it is that

the act interests us. Fully announced from the first, among these

things, was D’Annunzio’s signal gift of never approaching the thing

particularly to be done, the thing that so presents itself to the

painter, without consummately doing it. Each of his volumes offers thus

its little gallery of episodes that stand out like the larger pearls

occurring at intervals on a string of beads. The steeplechase in “Il

Piacere,” the auction sale of precious trinkets in Via Sistina on the

wet afternoon, the morning in the garden at Schifanoia, by the southern

sea, when Donna Maria, the new revelation, first comes down to Andrea,

who awaits her there in the languor of convalescence from the almost

fatal wound received in the duel of which the altercation on the

race-course has been the issue: the manner of such things as these has

an extraordinary completeness of beauty. But they are, like similar

pages in “Il Trionfo” and “Il Fuoco,” not things for adequate citation,

not things that lend themselves as some of the briefer felicities. Donna

Maria, on the September night at Schifanoia, has been playing for Andrea

and their hostess certain old quaint gavottes and toccatas.

It lived again wondrously beneath her fingers, the

eighteenth-century music, so melancholy in its

dance-tunes—tunes that might have been composed to be danced,

on languid afternoons of some St. Martin’s summer, in a deserted

park, among hushed fountains and pedestals without their

statues, over carpets of dead roses, by pairs of lovers soon to

love no more.

Autobiographic in form, “L’Innocente” sticks closely to its theme, and

though the form is on the whole a disadvantage to it the texture is

admirably close. The question is of nothing less than a young husband’s

relation to the illegitimate child of his wife, born confessedly as

such, and so born, marvellous to say, in spite of the circumstance that

the wife adores him, and of the fact that, though long grossly, brutally

false to her, he also adores his wife. To state these data is

sufficiently to express the demand truly made by them for superiority of

treatment; they require certainly two or three almost impossible

postulates. But we of course never play the fair critical game with an

author, never get into relation with him at all, unless we grant him his

postulates. His subject is what is given him—given him by influences,

by a process, with which we have nothing to do; since what art, what

revelation, can ever really make such a mystery, such a passage in the

private life of the intellect, adequately traceable for us? His

treatment of it, on the other hand, is what he actively gives; and it is

with what he gives that we are critically concerned. If there is nothing

in him that effectually induces us to make the postulate, he is then

empty for us altogether, and the sooner we have done with him the

better; little as the truly curious critic enjoys, as a general thing,

having publicly to throw up the sponge.

Tullio Hermil, who finally compasses the death of the little “innocent,”

the small intruder whose presence in the family life has become too

intolerable, retraces with a master’s hand each step of the process by

which he has arrived at this sole issue. Save that his wife dumbly

divines and accepts it his perpetration of the deed is not suspected,

and we take the secret confession of which the book consists as made for

the relief and justification of his conscience. The action all goes

forward in that sphere of exasperated sensibility which Signor

D’Annunzio has made his own so triumphantly that other story-tellers

strike us in comparison as remaining at the door of the inner precinct,

as listening there but to catch an occasional faint sound, while he

alone is well within and moving through the place as its master. The

sensibility has again in itself to be qualified; the exasperation of

feeling is ever the essence of the intercourse of some man with some

woman who has reduced him, as in “L’Innocente” and in “Il Trionfo,” to

homicidal madness, or of some woman with some man who, as in “Il Fuoco,”

and also again by a strange duplication of its office in “L’Innocente,”

causes her atrociously to suffer. The plane of the situation is thus

visibly a singularly special plane; that, always, of the more or less

insanely demoralised pair of lovers, for neither of whom is any other

personal relation indicated either as actual or as conceivably possible.

Here, it may be said on such a showing, is material rather alarmingly

cut down as to range, as to interest and, not least, as to charm; but

here precisely it is that, by a wonderful chance, the author’s magic

comes effectively into play.

Little in fact as the relation of the erotically exasperated _with_ the

erotically exasperated, when pushed on either side to frenzy, would

appear to lend itself to luminous developments, the difficulty is

surmounted each time in a fashion that, for consistency no less than for

brilliancy, is all the author’s own. Though surmounted triumphantly as

to interest, that is, the trick is played without the least

falsification of the luckless subjects of his study. They remain the

abject victims of sensibility that his plan has originally made them;

they remain exasperated, erotic, hysterical, either homicidally or

suicidally determined, cut off from any personal source of life that

does not poison them; notwithstanding all of which they neither starve

dramatically nor suffer us to starve with them. How then is this

seemingly inevitable catastrophe prevented? We ask it but to find on

reflection that the answer opens the door to their historian’s whole

secret. The unfortunates are deprived of any enlarging or saving

personal relation, that is of any beneficent reciprocity; but they make

up for it by their relation both to the _idea_ in general and to the

whole world of the senses, which is the completest that the author can

conceive for them. He may be described as thus executing on their behalf

an artistic _volte-face_ of the most effective kind, with results

wonderful to note. The world of the senses, with which he surrounds

them—a world too of the idea, that is of a few ideas admirably

expressed—yields them such a crop of impressions that the need of other

occasions to vibrate and respond, to act or to aspire, is superseded by

their immense factitious agitation. This agitation runs its course in

strangely brief periods—a singular note, the brevity, of every

situation; but the period is while it lasts, for all its human and

social poverty, quite inordinately peopled and furnished. The

innumerable different ways in which his concentrated couples are able to

feel about each other and about their enclosing cage of golden wire, the

nature and the art of Italy—these things crowd into the picture and

pervade it, lighting it scarcely less, strange to say, because they are

things of bitterness and woe.

It is one of the miracles of the imagination; the great shining element

in which the characters flounder and suffer becomes rich and beautiful

for them, as well as in so many ways for us, by the action of the

writer’s mind. They not only live in his imagination, but they borrow it

from him in quantities; indeed without this charitable advance they

would be poor creatures enough, for they have in each case almost

nothing of their own. On the aid thus received they start, they get into

motion; it makes their common basis of “passion,” desire, enchantment,

aversion. The essence of the situation is the same in “Il Trionfo” and

“Il Fuoco” as in “L’Innocente”: the temporarily united pair devour each

other, tear and rend each other, wear each other out through a series of

erotic convulsions and nervous reactions that are made

interesting—interesting to _us_—almost exclusively by the special

wealth of their consciousness. The medium in which they move is

admirably reflected in it; the autumn light of Venice, the afterglow of

her past, in the drama of the elderly actress and the young rhetorician

of “Il Fuoco”; the splendour of the summer by the edge of the lower

Adriatic in that of the two isolated erotomaniacs of “Il Trionfo,”

indissolubly linked at last in the fury of physical destruction into

which the man drags the woman by way of retribution for the fury of

physical surrender into which she has beguiled him.

As for “L’Innocente” again, briefly, there is perhaps nothing in it to

match the Roman passages of “Il Piacere”; but the harmony of the

general, the outer conditions pervades the picture; the sweetness of the

villeggiatura life, the happiness of place and air, the lovability of

the enclosing scene, all at variance with the sharpness of the inner

tragedy. The inner tragedy of “L’Innocente” has a concentration that is

like the carrying, through turns and twists, upstairs and down, of some

cup filled to the brim, of which no drop is yet spilled; such cumulative

truth rules the scene after we have once accepted the postulate. It is

true that the situation as exhibited involves for Giuliana, the young

wife, the vulgarest of adventures; yet she becomes, as it unfolds, the

figure of the whole gallery in whom the pathetic has at once most of

immediate truth and of investing poetry. I much prefer her for beauty

and interest to Donna Maria in “Il Piacere,” the principal other image

of faith and patience sacrificed. We see these virtues as still supreme

in her even while she faces, in advance, her ordeal, in respect to which

it has been her hope, in fact her calculation, that her husband will

have been deceived about the paternity of her child; and she is so

truthfully touching when this possibility breaks down that even though

we rub our eyes at the kind of dignity claimed for her we participate

without reserve in her predicament. The origin of the infant is frankly

ignoble, whereas it is on the nobleness of Giuliana that the story

essentially hinges; but the contradiction is wonderfully kept from

disconcerting us altogether. What the author has needed for his

strangest truth is that the mother shall feel exactly as the husband

does, and that the husband shall after the first shock of his horror

feel intimately and explicitly with the mother. They take in this way

the same view of their woeful excrescence; and the drama of the child’s

advent and of the first months of his existence, his insistent and hated

survival, becomes for them in respect to the rest of the world a drama

of silence and dissimulation, in every step of which we feel a terror.

The effect, I may add, gains more than one kind of intensity from that

almost complete absence of _other_ contacts to which D’Annunzio

systematically condemns his creatures; introducing here, however, just

the two or three that more completely mark the isolation. It may

doubtless be conceded that our English-speaking failure of insistence,

of inquiry and penetration, in certain directions, springs partly from

our deep-rooted habit of dealing with man, dramatically, on his social

and gregarious side, as a being the variety of whose intercourse with

his fellows, whatever forms his fellows may take, is positively half his

interesting motion. We fear to isolate him, for we remember that as we

see and know him he scarce understands himself save in action, action

which inevitably mixes him with his kind. To see and know him, like

Signor D’Annunzio, almost only in passion is another matter, for passion

spends itself quickly in the open and burns hot mainly in nooks and

corners. Nothing, too, in the picture is more striking than the manner

in which the merely sentimental abyss—that of the couple brought

together by the thing that might utterly have severed them—is

consistently and successfully avoided. We should have been certain to

feel it in many other hands yawning but a few steps off. We see the

dreadful facts in themselves, are brought close to them with no

interposing vaguenesses or other beggings of the question, and are

forcibly reminded how much more this “crudity” makes for the

communication of tenderness—what is aimed at—than an attitude

conventionally more reticent. We feel what the tenderness can be when it

rests on _all_ the items of a constituted misery, not one of which is

illogically blinked.

For the pangs and pities of the flesh in especial D’Annunzio has in all

his work the finest hand—those of the spirit exist with him indeed only

as proceeding from these; so that Giuliana for instance affects us,

beyond any figure in fiction we are likely to remember, as living and

breathing under our touch and before our eyes, as a creature of organs,

functions and processes, palpable, audible, pitiful physical conditions.

These are facts, many of them, of an order in pursuit of which many a

spectator of the “picture of life” will instinctively desire to stop

short, however great in general his professed desire to enjoy the

borrowed consciousness that the picture of life gives us; and nothing,

it may well be said, is more certain than that we have a right in such

matters to our preference, a right to choose the kind of adventure of

the imagination we like best. No obligation whatever rests on us in

respect to a given kind—much light as our choice may often throw for

the critic on the nature of our own intelligence. _There_ at any rate,

we are disposed to say of such a piece of penetration as “L’Innocente,”

there is a particular dreadful adventure, as large as life, for those

who can bear it. The conditions are all present; it is only the reader

himself who may break down. When in general, it may be added, we see

readers do so, this is truly more often because they are shocked at

really finding the last consistency than because they are shocked at

missing it.

“Il Trionfo della Morte” and “Il Fuoco” stand together as the amplest

and richest of our author’s histories, and the earlier, and more rounded

and faultless thing of the two, is not unlikely to serve, I should

judge, as an unsurpassable example of his talent. His accomplishment

here reaches its maximum; all his powers fight for him; the wealth of

his expression drapes the situation represented in a mantle of

voluminous folds, stiff with elaborate embroidery. The “story” may be

told in three words: how Giorgio Aurispa meets in Rome the young and

extremely pretty wife of a vulgar man of business, her unhappiness with

whom is complete, and, falling in love with her on the spot, eventually

persuades her—after many troubled passages—to come and pass a series

of weeks with him in a “hermitage” by the summer sea, where, in a

delirium of free possession, he grows so to hate her, and to hate

himself for his subjection to her, and for the prostration of all honour

and decency proceeding from it, that his desire to destroy her even at

the cost of perishing with her at last takes uncontrollable form and he

drags her, under a pretext, to the edge of a sea-cliff and hurls her,

interlocked with him in appalled resistance, into space. We get at an

early stage the note of that aridity of agitation in which the narrator

has expended treasures of art in trying to interest us. “Fits of

indescribable fury made them try which could torture each other best,

which most lacerate the other’s heart and keep it in martyrdom.” But

they understand, at least the hero does; and he formulates for his

companion the essence of their _impasse_. It is not her fault when she

tears and rends.

Each human soul carries in it for love but a determinate

quantity of sensitive force. It is inevitable that this quantity

should use itself up with time, as everything else does; so that

when it _is_ used up no effort has power to prevent love from

ceasing. Now it’s a long time that you have been loving me;

nearly two years!

The young man’s intelligence is of the clearest; the woman’s here is

inferior, though in “Il Fuoco” the two opposed faculties are almost

equal; but the pair are alike far from living in their intelligence,

which only serves to bestrew with lurid gleams the black darkness of

their sensual life. So far as the intelligence is one with the will our

author fundamentally treats it as cut off from all communication with

any other quarter—that is with the senses arrayed and encamped. The

most his unfortunates arrive at is to carry their extremely embellished

minds with them through these dusky passages as a kind of gilded

glimmering lantern, the effect of which is merely fantastic and

ironic—a thing to make the play of their shadows over the walls of

their catacomb more monstrous and sinister. Again in the first pages of

“Il Trionfo” the glimmer is given.

He recognised the injustice of any resentment against her,

because he recognised the fatal necessities that controlled them

alike. No, his misery came from no other human creature; it came

from the very essence of life. The lover had not the lover to

complain of, but simply love itself. Love, toward which his

whole being reached out, from within, with a rush not to be

checked, love was of all the sad things of this earth the most

lamentably sad. And to this supreme sadness he was perhaps

condemned till death.

That, in a nutshell, is D’Annunzio’s subject-matter; not simply that his

characters see in advance what love is worth for them, but that they

nevertheless need to make it the totality of their consciousness. In “Il

Trionfo” and “Il Fuoco” the law just expressed is put into play at the

expense of the woman, with the difference, however, that in the latter

tale the woman perceives and judges, suffers in mind, so to speak, as

well as in nerves and in temper. But it would be hard to say in which of

these two productions the inexhaustible magic of Italy most helps the

effect, most hangs over the story in such a way as to be one with it and

to make the ugliness and the beauty melt together. The ugliness, it is

to be noted, is continually _presumed_ absent; the pursuit and

cultivation of beauty—that fruitful preoccupation which above all, I

have said, gives the author his value as our “case”—being the very

ground on which the whole thing rests. The ugliness is an accident, a

treachery of fate, the intrusion of a foreign substance—having for the

most part in the scheme itself no admitted inevitability. Against it

every provision is made that the most developed taste in the world can

suggest; for, ostensibly, transcendently, Signor D’Annunzio’s _is_ the

most developed taste in the world—his and that of the ferocious yet so

contracted _conoscenti_ his heroes, whose virtual identity with himself,

affirmed with a strangely misplaced complacency by some of his critics,

one would surely hesitate to take for granted. It is the wondrous

physical and other endowments of the two heroines of “Il Piacere,” it is

the joy and splendour of the hero’s intercourse with them, to say

nothing of the lustre of his own person, descent, talents, possessions,

and of the great general setting in which everything is offered us—it

is all this that makes up the picture, with the constant suggestion that

nothing of a baser quality for the esthetic sense, or at the worst for a

pampered curiosity, might hope so much as to live in it. The case is the

same in “L’Innocente,” a scene all primarily smothered in flowers and

fruits and fragrances and soft Italian airs, in every implication of

flattered embowered constantly-renewed desire, which happens to be a

blighted felicity only for the very reason that the cultivation of

delight—in the form of the wife’s luckless experiment—has so awkwardly

overleaped itself. Whatever furthermore we may reflectively think either

of the Ippolita of “Il Trionfo” or of her companion’s scheme of

existence with her, it is enchanting grace, strange, original,

irresistible in kind and degree, that she is given us as representing;

just as her material situation with her young man during the greater

part of the tale is a constant communion, for both of them, with the

poetry and the nobleness of classic landscape, of nature consecrated by

association.

The mixture reaches its maximum, however, in “Il Fuoco,” if not perhaps

in “The Virgins of the Rocks”; the mixture I mean of every exhibited

element of personal charm, distinction and interest, with every

insidious local influence, every glamour of place, season and

surrounding object. The heroine of the first-named is a great tragic

actress, exquisite for everything but for being unfortunately

middle-aged, battered, marked, as we are constantly reminded, by all the

after-sense of a career of promiscuous carnal connections. The hero is a

man of letters, a poet, a dramatist of infinite reputation and resource,

and their union is steeped to the eyes in the gorgeous medium of Venice,

the moods of whose melancholy and the voices of whose past are an active

part of the perpetual concert. But we see _all_ the persons introduced

to us yearn and strain to exercise their perceptions and taste their

impressions as deeply as possible, conspiring together to interweave

them with the pleasures of passion. They “go in” as the phrase is, for

beauty at any cost—for each other’s own to begin with; their creator,

in the inspiring quest, presses them hard, and the whole effect becomes

for us that of an organised general sacrifice to it and an organised

general repudiation of everything else. It is not idle to repeat that

the value of the Italian background has to this end been inestimable,

and that every spark of poetry it had to contribute has been struck from

it—with what supreme felicity we perhaps most admiringly learn in “The

Virgins of the Rocks.” To measure the assistance thus rendered, and

especially the immense literary lift given, we have only to ask

ourselves what appearance any one of the situations presented would have

made in almost any Cisalpine or “northern” frame of circumstance

whatever. Supported but by such associations of local or of literary

elegance as _our_ comparatively thin resources are able to furnish, the

latent weakness in them all, the rock, as to final effect, on which they

split and of which I shall presently speak, would be immeasurably less

dissimulated. All this is the lesson of style, by which we here catch a

writer in the very act of profiting after a curious double fashion.

D’Annunzio arrives at it both by expression and by material—that is, by

a whole side of the latter; so that with such energy at once and such

good fortune it would be odd indeed if he had not come far. It is verily

in the very name and interest of beauty, of the lovely impression, that

Giorgio Aurispa becomes homicidal in thought and finally in act.

She would in death become for me matter of thought, pure

ideality. From a precarious and imperfect existence she would

enter into an existence complete and definitive, forsaking

forever the infirmity of her weak luxurious flesh. Destroy to

possess—there is no other way for him who seeks the absolute in

love.

To these reflections he has been brought by the long, dangerous past

which, as the author says, his connection with his mistress has behind

it—a past of recriminations of which the ghosts still walk. “It dragged

behind it, through time, an immense dark net, all full of dead things.”

To quote here at all is always to desire to continue, and “Il Trionfo”

abounds in the illustrative episodes that are ever made so masterfully

concrete. Offering in strictness, incidentally, the only exhibition in

all the five volumes of a human relation other than the acutely sexual,

it deals admirably enough with this opportunity when the hero pays his

visit to his provincial parents before settling with his mistress at

their hermitage. His people are of ancient race and have been much at

their ease; but the home in the old Apulian town, overdarkened by the

misdeeds of a demoralised father, is on the verge of ruin, and the dull

mean despair of it all, lighted by outbreaks of helpless rage on the

part of the injured mother, is more than the visitor can bear, absorbed

as he is in impatiences and concupiscences which make everything else

cease to exist for him. His terror of the place and its troubles but

exposes of course the abjection of his weakness, and the sordid

squabbles, the general misery and mediocrity of life that he has to

face, constitute precisely, for his personal design, the abhorred

challenge of ugliness, the interference of a call other than erotic. He

flees before it, leaving it to make shift as it can; but nothing could

be more “rendered” in detail than his overwhelmed vision of it.

So with the other finest passages of the story, notably the summer day

spent by the lovers in a long dusty dreadful pilgrimage to a famous

local miracle-working shrine, where they mingle with the multitude of

the stricken, the deformed, the hideous, the barely human, and from

which they return, disgusted and appalled, to plunge deeper into

consoling but too temporary transports; notably also the incident,

masterly in every touch, of the little drowned contadino, the whole

scene of the small starved dead child on the beach, in all the beauty of

light and air and view, with the effusions and vociferations and

grimnesses round him, the sights and sounds of the quasi-barbaric life

that have the relief of antique rites portrayed on old tombs and urns,

that quality and dignity of looming larger which a great feeling on the

painter’s part ever gives to small things. With this ampler truth the

last page of the book is above all invested, the description of the

supreme moment—for some time previous creeping nearer and nearer—at

which the delirious protagonist beguiles his vaguely but not fully

suspicious companion into coming out with him toward the edge of a dizzy

place over the sea, where he suddenly grasps her for her doom and the

sense of his awful intention, flashing a light back as into their

monstrous past, makes her shriek for her life. She dodges him at the

first betrayal, panting and trembling.

“Are you crazy?” she cried with wrath in her throat. “Are you

crazy?” But as she saw him make for her afresh in silence, as

she felt herself seized with still harsher violence and dragged

afresh toward her danger, she understood it all in a great

sinister flash which blasted her soul with terror. “No, no,

Giorgio! Let me go! Let me go! Another minute—listen, listen!

Just a minute! I want to say——!” She supplicated, mad with

terror, getting herself free and hoping to make him wait, to put

him off with pity. “A minute! Listen! I love you! Forgive me!

Forgive me!” She stammered incoherent words, desperate, feeling

herself overcome, losing her ground, seeing death close.

“Murder!” she then yelled in her fury. And she defended herself

with her nails, with her teeth, biting like a wild beast.

“Murder!” she yelled, feeling herself seized by the hair, felled

to the ground on the edge of the precipice, lost. The dog

meanwhile barked out at the scuffle. The struggle was short and

ferocious, as between implacable enemies who had been nursing to

this hour in the depths of their souls an intensity of hate. And

they plunged into death locked together.

The wonder-working shrine of the Abruzzi, to which they have previously

made their way, is a local Lourdes, the resort from far and wide of the

physically afflicted, the evocation of whose multitudinous presence, the

description of whose unimaginable miseries and ecstasies, grovelling

struggles and supplications, has the mark of a pictorial energy for such

matters not inferior to that of Émile Zola—to the degree even that the

originality of the pages in question was, if I remember rightly, rather

sharply impugned in Paris. D’Annunzio’s defence, however, was easy,

residing as it does in the fact that to handle any subject successfully

handled by Zola (his failures are another matter) is quite inevitably to

walk more or less in his footsteps, in prints so wide and deep as to

leave little margin for passing round them. To which I may add that,

though the judgment may appear odd, the truth and force of the young

man’s few abject days at Guardiagrele, his _casa paterna_, are such as

to make us wish that other such corners of life were more frequent in

the author’s pages. He has the supremely interesting quality in the

novelist that he _fixes_, as it were, the tone of every cluster of

objects he approaches, fixes it by the consistency and intensity of his

reproduction. In “The Virgins of the Rocks” we have also a _casa

paterna_, and a thing, as I have indicated, of exquisite and wonderful

tone; but the tone here is of poetry, the truth and the force are less

measurable and less familiar, and the whole question, after all, in its

refined and attenuated form, is still that of sexual pursuit, which

keeps it within the writer’s too frequent limits. Giorgio Aurispa, in

“Il Trionfo,” lives in communion with the spirit of an amiable and

melancholy uncle who had committed suicide and made him the heir of his

fortune, and one of the nephew’s most frequent and faithful loyalties is

to hark back, in thought, to the horror of his first knowledge of the

dead man’s act, put before us always with its accompaniment of loud

southern resonance and confusion. He is in the place again, he is in the

room, at Guardiagrele, of the original appalled vision.

He heard, in the stillness of the air and of his arrested soul,

the small shrill of an insect in the wainscot. And the little

fact sufficed to dissipate for the moment the extreme violence

of his nervous tension, as the puncture of a needle suffices to

empty a swollen bladder. Every particular of the terrible day

came back to his memory: the news abruptly brought to Torretta

di Sarsa, toward three in the afternoon, by a panting messenger

who stammered and whimpered: the ride on horseback, at lightning

speed, under the canicular sky and up the torrid slopes, and,

during the rush, the sudden faintnesses that turned him dizzy in

his saddle; then the house at home, filled with sobs, filled

with a noise of doors slamming in the general scare, filled with

the strumming of his own arteries; and at last his irruption

into the room, the sight of the corpse, the curtains inflated

and rustling, the tinkle on the wall of the little font for holy

water.

This young man’s great mistake, we are told, had been his insistence on

regarding love as a form of enjoyment. He would have been in a possible

relation to it only if he had learned to deal with it as a form of

suffering. This is the lesson brought home to the heroine of “Il Fuoco,”

who suffers indeed, as it seems to us, so much more than is involved in

the occasion. We ask ourselves continually why; that is we do so at

first; we do so before the special force of the book takes us captive

and reduces us to mere charmed absorption of its successive parts and

indifference to its moral sense. Its defect is verily that it has no

moral sense proportionate to the truth, the constant high style of the

general picture; and this fact makes the whole thing appear given us

simply because it has happened, because it was material that the author

had become possessed of, and not because, in its almost journalistic

“actuality,” it has any large meaning. We get the impression of a direct

transfer, a “lift,” bodily, of something seen and known, something not

really produced by the chemical process of art, the crucible or retort

from which things emerge for a new function. Their meaning here at any

rate, extracted with difficulty, would seem to be that there is an

inevitable leak of ease and peace when a mistress happens to be

considerably older than her lover; but even this interesting yet not

unfamiliar truth loses itself in the great poetic, pathetic, psychologic

ceremonial.

That matters little indeed, as I say, while we read; the two

sensibilities concerned bloom, in all the Venetian glow, like wondrous

water-plants, throwing out branches and flowers of which we admire the

fantastic growth even while we remain, botanically speaking, bewildered.

They are other sensibilities than those with which we ourselves have

community—one of the main reasons of their appearing so I shall

presently explain; and, besides, they are isolated, sequestrated,

according to D’Annunzio’s constant view of such cases, for an exclusive,

an intensified and arid development. The mistress has, abnormally, none

of the protection, the alternative life, the saving sanity of other

interests, ties, employments; while the hero, a young poet and dramatist

with an immense consciousness of genius and fame, has for the time at

least only those poor contacts with existence that the last intimacies

of his contact with his friend’s person, her poor _corpo non più

giovane_, as he so frequently repeats, represent for him. It is not for

us, however, to contest the relation; it is in the penetrating way again

in which the relation is rendered that the writer has his triumph; the

way above all in which the world-weary interesting sensitive woman, with

her infinite intelligence, yet with her longing for some happiness still

among all her experiments untasted, and her genius at the same time for

familiar misery, is marked, featured, individualised for us, and, with

the strangest art in the world—one of those mysteries of which great

talents alone have the trick—at once ennobled with beauty and

desecrated by a process that we somehow feel to be that of exposure, to

spring from some violation of a privilege. “ ‘Do with me,’ ” says the

Foscarina on a certain occasion, “ ‘whatever you will’; and she smiled

in her offered abjection. She belonged to him like the thing one holds

in one’s fist, like the ring on one’s finger, like a glove, like a

garment, like a word that may be spoken or not, like a draught that may

be drunk or poured on the ground.” There are some lines describing an

hour in which she has made him feel as never before “the incalculable

capacity of the heart of man. And it seemed to him as he heard the

beating of his own heart and divined the violence of the other beside

him that he had in his ears the loud repercussion of the hammer on the

hard anvil where human destiny is forged.” More than ever here the pitch

of the personal drama is taken up by everything else in the

scene—everything else being in fact but the immediate presence of

Venice, her old faded colour and old vague harmonies, played with

constantly as we might play with some rosy fretted faintly-sounding

sea-shell.

It would take time to say what we play with in the silver-toned “Virgins

of the Rocks,” the history of a visit paid by a transcendent young

man—always pretty much the same young man—to an illustrious family

whose fortunes have tragically shrunken with the expulsion of the

Bourbons from the kingdom of Naples, and the three last lovely daughters

of whose house are beginning to wither on the stem, undiscovered,

unsought, in a dilapidated old palace, an old garden of neglected pomp,

a place of fountains and colonnades, marble steps and statues, all

circled with hard bright sun-scorched volcanic scenery. They are tacitly

candidates for the honour of the hero’s hand, and the subject of the

little tale, which deals with scarce more than a few summer days, is the

manner of their presenting themselves for his admiration and his choice.

I decidedly name this exquisite composition as my preferred of the

series; for if its tone is thoroughly romantic the romance is yet of the

happiest kind, the kind that consists in the imaginative development of

observable things, things present, significant, related to us, and not

in a weak false fumble for the remote and the disconnected.

It is indeed the romantic mind itself that makes the picture, and there

could be no better case of the absolute artistic vision. The mere facts

are soon said; the main fact, above all, of the feeble remnant of an

exhausted race waiting in impotence to see itself cease to be. The

father has nothing personal left but the ruins of his fine presence and

of his old superstitions, a handful of silver dust; the mother, mad and

under supervision, stalks about with the delusion of imperial greatness

(there is a wonderful page on her parading through the gardens in her

rococo palanquin, like a Byzantine empress, attended by sordid keepers,

while the others are hushed into pity and awe); the two sons,

hereditarily tainted, are virtually imbecile; the three daughters,

candidly considered, are what we should regard in our Anglo-Saxon world

as but the stuff of rather particularly dreary and shabby, quite

unutterably idle old maids. Nothing, within the picture, occurs; nothing

is done or, more acutely than usual, than everywhere, suffered; it is

all a mere affair of the rich impression, the complexity of images

projected upon the quintessential spirit of the hero, whose own report

is what we have—an affair of the quality of observation, sentiment and

eloquence brought to bear. It is not too much to say even that the whole

thing is in the largest sense but a theme for style, style of substance

as well as of form. Within this compass it blooms and quivers and

shimmers with light, becomes a wonderful little walled garden of

romance. The young man has a passage of extreme but respectful

tenderness with each of the sisters in turn, and the general cumulative

effect is scarcely impaired by the fact that “nothing comes” of any of

these relations. Too little comes of anything, I think, for any very

marked human analogy, inasmuch as if it is interesting to be puzzled to

a certain extent by what an action, placed before us, is designed to

show or to signify, so we require for this refined amusement at least

the sense that some general idea _is_ represented. We must feel it

present.

Therefore if making out nothing very distinct in “Le Vergini” but the

pictorial idea, and yet cleaving to the preference I have expressed, I

let the anomaly pass as a tribute extorted by literary art, I may seem

to imply that a book may have a great interest without showing a perfect

sense. The truth is undoubtedly that I am in some degree beguiled and

bribed by the particularly intense expression given in these pages to

the author’s esthetic faith. If he is so supremely a “case” it is

because this production has so much to say for it, and says it with such

a pride of confidence, with an assurance and an elegance that fairly

make it the last conceivable word of such a profession. The observations

recorded have their origin in the narrator’s passionate reaction against

the vulgarity of the day. All the writer’s young men react; but

Cantelmo, in the volume before us, reacts with the finest contempt. He

is, like his brothers, a _raffiné_ conservative, believing really, so

far as we understand it, only in the virtue of “race” and in the grand

manner. The blighted Virgins, with all that surrounds them, are an

affirmation of the grand manner—that is of the shame and scandal of

what in an odious age it has been reduced to. It consists indeed of a

number of different things which I may not pretend to have completely

fitted together, but which are, with other elements, the sense of the

supremacy of beauty, the supremacy of style and, last not least, of the

personal will, manifested for the most part as a cold insolence of

attitude—not manifested as anything much more edifying. What it really

appears to come to is that the will is a sort of romantic ornament, the

application of which, for life in the present and the future, remains

awkwardly vague, though we are always to remember that it has been

splendidly forged in the past. The will in short _is_ beauty, is style,

is elegance, is art—especially in members of great families and

possessors of large fortunes. That of the hero of “Le Vergini” has been

handed down to him direct, as by a series of testamentary provisions,

from a splendid young ancestor for whose memory and whose portrait he

has a worship, a warrior and virtuoso of the Renaissance, the model of

his spirit.

He represents for me the mysterious meaning of the power of

style, not violable by any one, and least of all ever by myself

in my own person.