The sublime hands of Violante [the beauty and interest of hands
play a great part, in general, in the picture], pressing out in
drops the essence of the tender flowers and letting them fall
bruised to the ground, performed an act which, as a symbol,
corresponded perfectly to the character of my style; this being
ever to extract from a thing its very last scent of life, to
take from it all it could give and leave it exhausted. Was not
this one of the most important offices of my art of life?
The book is a singularly rich exhibition of an inward state, the state
of private poetic intercourse with things, the kind of current that in a
given personal experience flows to and fro between the imagination and
the world. It represents the esthetic consciousness, proud of its
conquests and discoveries, and yet trying, after all, as with the vexed
sense of a want, to look through other windows and eyes. It goes all
lengths, as is of course indispensable on behalf of a personage
constituting a case. “I firmly believe that the greatest sum of future
dominion will be precisely that which shall have its base and its apex
in Rome”—such being in our personage the confidence of the “Latin”
spirit. Does it not really all come back to style? It was to the Latin
spirit that the Renaissance was primarily vouchsafed; and was not, for a
simplified statement, the last word of the Renaissance the question of
taste? That is the esthetic question; and when the Latin spirit after
many misadventures again clears itself we shall see how all the while
this treasure has been in its keeping. Let us as frankly as possible add
that there is a whole side on which the clearance may appear to have
made quite a splendid advance with Signor D’Annunzio himself.
But there is another side, which I have been too long in coming to, yet
which I confess is for me much the more interesting. No account of our
author is complete unless we really make out what becomes of that
esthetic consistency in him which, as I have said, our own collective
and cultivated effort is so earnestly attempting and yet so
pathetically, if not so grotesquely, missing. We are struck,
unmistakably, early in our acquaintance with these productions, by the
fact that their total beauty somehow extraordinarily fails to march with
their beauty of parts, and that something is all the while at work
undermining that bulwark against ugliness which it is their obvious
theory of their own office to throw up. The disparity troubles and
haunts us just in proportion as we admire; and our uneasy wonderment
over the source of the weakness fails to spoil our pleasure only because
such questions have so lively an interest for the critic. We feel
ourselves somehow in presence of a singular incessant _leak_ in the
effect of distinction so artfully and copiously produced, and we apply
our test up and down in the manner of the inquiring person who, with a
tin implement and a small flame, searches our premises for an escape of
gas. The bad smell has, as it were, to be accounted for; and yet where,
amid the roses and lilies and pomegranates, the thousand essences and
fragrances, can such a thing possibly be? Quite abruptly, I think, at
last (if we have been much under the spell) our test gives us the news,
not unaccompanied with the shock with which we see our escape of gas
spring into flame. There is no mistaking it; the leak of distinction is
produced by a positive element of the vulgar; and that the vulgar should
flourish in an air so charged, intellectually speaking, with the
“aristocratic” element, becomes for us straightway the greatest of
oddities and at the same time, critically speaking, one of the most
interesting things conceivable.
The interest then springs from its being involved for us in the “case.”
We recognise so many suggested consequences if the case is really to
prove responsible for it. We ask ourselves if there be not a connection,
we almost tremble lest there shouldn’t be; since what is more obvious
than that, if a high example of exclusive estheticism—as high a one as
we are likely ever to meet—is bound sooner or later to spring a leak,
the general question receives much light? We recognise here the value of
our author’s complete consistency: he would have kept his bottom sound,
so to speak, had he not remained so long at sea. If those imperfect
exponents of his faith whom we have noted among ourselves fail to
flower, for a climax, in any proportionate way, we make out that they
are embarrassed not so much by any force they possess as by a force—a
force of temperament—that they lack. The anomaly I speak of presents
itself thus as the dilemma in which Signor D’Annunzio’s consistency has
inexorably landed him; and the disfigurement breaks out, strikingly
enough, in the very forefront of his picture, at the point where he has
most lavished his colour. It is where he has most trusted and depended
that he is most betrayed, the traitor sharing certainly his tent and his
confidence. What is it that in the interest of beauty he most
elaborately builds on if not on the love-affairs of his heroes and
heroines, if not on his exhibition of the free play, the sincere play,
the play closely studied and frankly represented, of the sexual
relation? It is round this exercise, for him, that expressible,
demonstrable, communicable beauty prevailingly clusters; a view indeed
as to which we all generously go with him, subject to the reserve for
each of us of our own expression and demonstration. It is these things
on his part that break down, it is his discrimination that falls short,
and thereby the very kind of intellectual authority most implied by his
pretension. There is according to him an immense amenity that can be
saved—saved by style—from the general wreck and welter of what is most
precious, from the bankruptcy determined more and more by our basely
democratic conditions. As we watch the actual process, however, it is
only to see the lifeboat itself founder. The vulgarity into which he so
incongruously drops is, I will not say the space he allots to
love-affairs, but the weakness of his sense of “values” in depicting
them.
We begin to ask ourselves at an early stage what this queer passion may
be in the representation of which the sense of beauty ostensibly finds
its richest expression and which is yet attended by nothing else at
all—neither duration, nor propagation, nor common kindness, nor common
consistency with other relations, common congruity with the rest of
life—to make its importance good. If beauty is the supreme need so let
it be; nothing is more certain than that we can never get too much of it
if only we get it of the right sort. It is therefore on this very
ground—the ground of its own sufficiency—that Signor D’Annunzio’s
invocation of it collapses at our challenge. The vulgarity comes from
the disorder really introduced into values, as I have called them; from
the vitiation suffered—that we should have to record so mean an
accident—by taste, impeccable taste, itself. The truth of this would
come out fully in copious examples, now impossible; but it is not too
much to say, I think, that in every principal situation presented the
fundamental weakness causes the particular interest to be inordinately
compromised.
I must not, I know, make too much of “Il Piacere”—one of those works of
promising youth with which criticism is always easy—and I should indeed
say nothing of it if it were also a work of less ability. It really,
however, to my mind, quite gives us the key, all in the morning early,
to our author’s general misadventure. Andrea Sperelli is the key; Donna
Maria is another key of a slightly different shape. They have neither of
them the esthetic importance, any more than the moral, that their
narrator claims for them and in his elaborate insistence on which he has
so hopelessly lost his way. If they _were_ important—by which I mean if
they showed in any other light than that of their particular erotic
exercise—they would justify the claim made for them with such superior
art. They have no general history, since their history is only, and
immediately and extravagantly, that of their too cheap and too easy
romance. Why should the career of the young man be offered as a sample
of pathetic, of tragic, of edifying corruption?—in which case it might
indeed be matter for earnest exhibition. The march of corruption, the
insidious influence of propinquity, opportunity, example, the ravage of
false estimates and the drama of sterilising passion—all this is a
thinkable theme, thinkable especially in the light of a great talent.
But for Andrea Sperelli there is not only no march, no drama, there is
not even a weakness to give him the semblance of dramatic, of plastic
material; he is solidly, invariably, vulgarly strong, and not a bit more
corrupt at the end of his disorders than at the beginning. His
erudition, his intellectual accomplishments and elevation, are too
easily spoken for; no view of him is given in which we can feel or taste
them. Donna Maria is scarcely less signal an instance of the apparent
desire on the author’s part to impute a “value” defeated by his
apparently not knowing what a value is. She is apparently an immense
value for the occasions on which the couple secretly meet, but how is
she otherwise one? and what becomes therefore of the beauty, the
interest, the pathos, the struggle, or whatever else, of her
relation—relation of character, of judgment, even of mere taste—to her
own collapse? The immediate physical sensibility that surrenders in her
is, as throughout, exquisitely painted; but since nothing operates for
her, one way or the other, _but_ that familiar faculty, we are left
casting about us almost as much for what else she has to give as for
what, in any case, she may wish to keep.
The author’s view of the whole matter of durations and dates, in these
connections, gives the scale of “distinction” by itself a marked
downward tilt; it confounds all differences between the trivial and the
grave. Giuliana, in “L’Innocente,” is interesting because she has had a
misadventure, and she is exquisite in her delineator’s view because she
has repented of it. But the misadventure, it appears, was a matter but
of a minute; so that we oddly see this particular romance attenuated on
the ground of its brevity. Given the claims of the exquisite, the
attenuation should surely be sought in the very opposite quarter; since,
where these remarkable affections are concerned, how otherwise than by
the element of comparative duration do we obtain the element of
comparative good faith, on which we depend for the element, in turn, of
comparative dignity? Andrea Sperelli becomes in the course of a few
weeks in Rome the lover of some twenty or thirty women of fashion—the
number scarce matters; but to make this possible his connection with
each has but to last a day or two; and the effect of that in its order
is to reduce to nothing, by vulgarity, by frank grotesqueness of
association, the romantic capacity in him on which his chronicler’s
whole appeal to us is based. The association rising before us more
nearly than any other is that of the manners observable in the most
mimetic department of any great menagerie.
The most serious relation depicted—in the sense of being in some degree
the least suggestive of mere zoological sociability—is that of the
lovers in “Il Fuoco,” as we also take this pair for their creator’s
sanest and most responsible spirits. It is a question between them of an
heroic affection, and yet the affection appears to make good for itself
no place worth speaking of in their lives. It holds but for a scant few
weeks; the autumn already reigns when the connection begins, and the
connection is played out (or if it be not the ado is about nothing) with
the first flush of the early Italian spring. It suddenly, on our hands,
becomes trivial, with all our own estimate of reasons and realities and
congruities falsified. The Foscarina has, on professional business, to
“go away,” and the young poet has to do the same; but such a separation,
so easily bridged over by such great people, makes a beggarly climax for
an intercourse on behalf of which all the forces of poetry and tragedy
have been set in motion. Where then we ask ourselves is the
weakness?—as we ask it, very much in the same way, in respect to the
vulgarised aspect of the tragedy of Giorgio Aurispa. The pang of pity,
the pang that springs from a conceivable community in doom, is in this
latter case altogether wanting. Directly we lift a little the
embroidered mantle of that gift for appearances which plays, on Signor
D’Annunzio’s part, such tricks upon us, we find ourselves put off, as
the phrase is, with an inferior article. The inferior article is the
hero’s poverty of life, which cuts him down for pathetic interest just
as the same limitation in “Il Piacere” cuts down Donna Maria. Presented
each as victims of another rapacious person who has got the better of
them, there is no process, no complexity, no suspense in their story;
and thereby, we submit, there is no esthetic beauty. Why _shouldn’t_
Giorgio Aurispa go mad? Why shouldn’t Stelio Effrena go away? We make
the inquiry as disconcerted spectators, not feeling in the former case
that we have had any communication with the wretched youth’s sanity, and
not seeing in the latter why the tie of all the passion that has been
made so admirably vivid for us should not be able to weather change.
Nothing is so singular with D’Annunzio as that the very basis and
subject of his work should repeatedly go aground on such shallows as
these. He takes for treatment a situation that is substantially
none—the most fundamental this of his values, and all the more
compromising that his immense art of producing illusions still leaves it
exposed. The idea in each case is superficially specious, but _where_ it
breaks down is what makes all the difference. “Il Piacere” would have
meant what it seems to try to mean only if a provision had been made in
it for some adequate “inwardness” on the part either of the nature
disintegrated or of the other nature to which this poisoned contact
proves fatal. “L’Innocente,” of the group, comes nearest to justifying
its idea; and I leave it unchallenged, though its meaning surely would
have been written larger if the attitude of the wife toward her
misbegotten child had been, in face of the husband’s, a little less that
of the dumb detached animal suffering in her simplicity. As a picture of
such suffering, the pain of the mere dumb animal, the work is indeed
magnificent; only its connections are poor with the higher dramatic, the
higher poetic, complexity of things.
I can only repeat that to make “The Triumph of Death” a fruitful thing
we should have been able to measure the triumph by its frustration of
some conceivable opportunity at least for life. There is a moment at
which we hope for something of this kind, the moment at which the young
man pays his visit to his family, who have grievous need of him and
toward whom we look to see some one side or other of his fine
sensibility turn. But nothing comes of that for the simple reason that
the personage is already dead—that nothing exists in him but the
established _fear_ of life. He turns his back on everything but a
special sensation, and so completely shuts the door on the elements of
contrast and curiosity. Death really triumphs, in the matter, but over
the physical terror of the inordinate woman; a pang perfectly
communicated to us, but too small a surface to bear the weight laid on
it, which accordingly affects us as that of a pyramid turned over on its
point. It is throughout one of D’Annunzio’s strongest marks that he
treats “love” as a matter not to be mixed with life, in the larger sense
of the word, at all—as a matter all of whose other connections are
dropped; a sort of secret game that can go on only if each of the
parties has nothing to do, even on any _other_ terms, with any one else.
I have dwelt on the fact that the sentimental intention in “Il Fuoco”
quite bewilderingly fails, in spite of the splendid accumulation of
material. We wait to the end to see it declare itself, and then are
left, as I have already indicated, with a mere meaningless anecdote on
our hands. Brilliant and free, each freighted with a talent that is
given us as incomparable, the parties to the combination depicted have,
for their affection, the whole world before them—and not the simple
terraqueous globe, but that still vaster sphere of the imagination in
which, by an exceptionally happy chance, they are able to move together
on very nearly equal terms. A tragedy is a tragedy, a comedy is a
comedy, when the effect, in either sense, is _determined_ for us,
determined by the interference of some element that starts a
complication or precipitates an action. As in “Il Fuoco” nothing
whatever interferes—or nothing certainly that need weigh with the high
spirits represented—we ask why such precious revelations are made us
for nothing. Admirably made in themselves they yet strike us as,
esthetically speaking, almost cruelly wasted.
This general remark would hold good, as well, of “Le Vergini,” if I
might still linger, though its application has already been virtually
made. Anatolia, in this tale, the most robust of the three sisters,
declines marriage in order to devote herself to a family who have, it
would certainly appear, signal need of her nursing. But this, though it
sufficiently represents _her_ situation, covers as little as possible
the ground of the hero’s own, since he, quivering intensely with the
treasure of his “will,” inherited in a straight line from the
_cinque-cento_, only asks to affirm his sublimated energy. The
temptation to affirm it erotically, at least, has been great for him in
relation to each of the young women in turn; but it is for Anatolia that
his admiration and affection most increase in volume, and it is
accordingly for her sake that, with the wonderful moral force behind him
(kept as in a Florentine casket,) we most look to see him justified. He
has a fine image—and when has the author not fine images?—to
illustrate the constant readiness of this possession. The young woman
says something that inspires him, whereupon, “as a sudden light playing
over the dusky wall of a room causes the motionless sword in a trophy to
shine, so her word drew a great flash from my suspended _volontà_. There
was a virtue in her,” the narrator adds, “which could have produced
portentous fruit. Her substance might have nourished a superhuman germ.”
In spite of which it never succeeds in becoming so much as a question
that his affection for her shall _act_, that this grand imagination in
him shall operate, that he himself is, in virtue of such things, exactly
the person to come to her aid and to combine with her in devotion. The
talk about the _volontà_ is amusing much in the same way as the
complacency of a primitive man, unacquainted with the uses of things,
who becomes possessed by some accident of one of the toys of
civilisation, a watch or a motor-car. And yet artistically and for our
author the will _has_ an application, since without it he could have
done no rare vivid work.
Here at all events we put our finger, I think, on the very point at
which his esthetic plenitude meets the misadventure that discredits it.
We see just where it “joins on” with vulgarity. That sexual passion from
which he extracts such admirable detached pictures insists on remaining
for him _only_ the act of a moment, beginning and ending in itself and
disowning any representative character. From the moment it depends on
itself alone for its beauty it endangers extremely its distinction, so
precarious at the best. For what it represents, precisely, is it
poetically interesting; it finds its extension and consummation only in
the rest of life. Shut out from the rest of life, shut out from all
fruition and assimilation, it has no more dignity than—to use a homely
image—the boots and shoes that we see, in the corridors of promiscuous
hotels, standing, often in double pairs, at the doors of rooms. Detached
and unassociated these clusters of objects present, however obtruded, no
importance. What the participants do with their agitation, in short, or
even what it does with them, _that_ is the stuff of poetry, and it is
never really interesting save when something finely contributive in
themselves makes it so. It is this absence of anything finely
contributive in themselves, on the part of the various couples here
concerned, that is the open door to the trivial. I have said, with all
appreciation, that they present the great “relation,” for intimacy, as
we shall nowhere else find it presented; but to see it related, in its
own turn, to nothing in the heaven above or the earth beneath, this
undermines, we definitely learn, the charm of that achievement.
And so it is, strangely, that our esthetic “case” enlightens us. The
only question is whether it be the only case of the kind conceivable.
May we not suppose another with the elements differently mixed? May we
not in imagination alter the proportions within or the influences
without, and look with cheerfulness for a different issue? _Need_ the
esthetic adventure, in a word, organised for real discovery, give us no
more comforting news of success? Are there not, so to speak, finer
possible combinations? are there not safeguards against futility that in
the example before us were but too presumably absent? To which the sole
answer probably is that no man can say. It is Signor D’Annunzio alone
who has really sailed the sea and brought back the booty. The actual
case is so good that all the potential fade beside it. It has for it
that it exists, and that, whether for the strength of the original
outfit or for the weight of the final testimony, it could scarce
thinkably be bettered.