In the world of letters the name of Gabriele d'Annunzio is now famous.
There is no cultured society which does not know something at least of
the author of the _Innocente_ and the _Trionfo_, and is not aware that,
in him, one of the ablest and most delicate of living critics believes
that he has seen the personification of a renascence of Latin genius.
Imprisoned as his novels were in the limits of a language which, however
great its beauty, is but little known except in its own land, he has
been extraordinarily fortunate in finding such sponsors in the outside
world as he has obtained in M. Herelle, in Rene Doumic, and in the
Vicomte de Voguee. Never has any romance been so admirably heralded as
the _Trionfo_ in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and never certainly, since
lyre was strung or laurels were woven, was any praise ever heard so
dulcet and so lavish as that with which he, who has been called the
second Chateaubriand, has welcomed and introduced the new Boccaccio.
The grace and beauty of the style of the Vicomte de Voguee, and the
culture of his intelligence, have gained him in literature this name of
the second Chateaubriand. They are both incontestable. But they are apt
to lead his readers away from the consideration of the value of his
literary judgments. He is a critic of exquisite delicacy and fineness,
but also of great enthusiasms, and these enthusiasms are at times much
stronger than his judgment and overpower it. What he admires he admires
_toto corde_, and is apt to lose in this generous ardour his power of
selection, his accuracy of appraisement.
This fact has been always conspicuous in all his writings on Pasteur,
and it has been equally conspicuous in the unmeasured idolatry with
which he has dipped his pen in all the honey of Hymettus to sing the
praises of the man he loves. But this adoption of D'Annunzio into French
literature has, with its incontestable advantages, equal penalties and
disadvantages for the author; for one reader outside Italy who will read
him in the original text, ten thousand will know him only in the French
version, and twenty thousand will accept De Voguee's description of his
works without attempting to judge those for themselves. In the French
version the romances gain in certain points; their excessive detail is
abridged, their crudities are softened down, their wearisome analyses
and too frequent obscenities are omitted. The translations of M. Herelle
are, as all must know, admirable in grace and elegance, but, though as
perfect as translations which are guilty of continual excisions can be,
they fail to render the genius of D'Annunzio as it is to be seen and
felt by those who read the works in the original tongue. In the French
version they are much milder, much more tempered, much less unbridled,
and much less cynically nude; but they are also much less vigorous,
virile, impassioned, and furiously scornful. Many fine passages have
been esteemed _longueurs_, and have been omitted altogether, and entire
chapters have been sacrificed to the exigencies of taste or of space.
In the French edition of the _Trionfo_, nearly the whole book, entitled
_La Vita Nuova_, containing the pilgrimage to Casalbordino is omitted.
But without perusal of this marvellous reproduction of a scene of
Italian fanaticism and frenzy, and of similar portions of his works, it
is impossible to estimate fully the real D'Annunzio, and judge of his
magnificent powers of observation and description, as well as of his
incessant search for what is loathsome, his cruel exultation in his
examination of physical diseases and moral leprosies.
I know not why this pilgrimage was rejected, for it is not more indecent
than other portions of the book, and it is singularly true to certain
phases of Italian life, in which all the Paganism bred in the blood and
bone of the people is displayed, mixed with the ferocity of Christian
bigotry. Let me here translate the opening of it:--
'It was a marvellous and terrible spectacle, unexpected, unlike
any other assemblage of men and things, composed of mixtures so
diverse, cruel and strange, that it eclipsed the most dreadful
visions of a nightmare. All the hideousness of the eternal
idiot, all the filthiness of vice and its stupidities, all the
spasms and deformities of baptized flesh, all the tears of
penitence, all the laughter of license; the mania, the
cupidity, the craft, the lust, the fraud, the imbecility, the
silent desperation, the sacred choruses, the howls of the
possessed, the shouts of the ambulatory vendors, the clanging
of the bells, the squeal of the trumpets, the lowing, the
neighing, the bleating; the fires crackling under the
cauldrons, the heaps of fruits and sweetmeats, the display of
utensils, of stuffs, of arms, of jewels, of rosaries; the
obscene capers of the dancers, the convulsions of the
epileptic, the blows of the quarrelsome, the rush of flying,
frightened thieves through the crowd; the supreme froth of
corruption poured forth from the filthy lanes of remote cities,
and showered out on to an ignorant and astounded multitude,
like horseflies on the flanks of beasts, shoals of parasites
descended on a compact mass incapable of defending itself, all
the base temptations of brutal appetites, all the treacheries
playing on simplicity and stupidity, all the charlatanisms and
the effronteries bared in full daylight; all the opposing
contrasts were there, boiling and effervescing, around the
House of the Virgin.'
What strength is here? What admirable choice of descriptive phrase, and
truth of design, as in a Callot or Hogarth! what sense conveyed of
press, of haste, of noise, of confusion, of stench, of uproar! We live
in this crowd as we read.
De Voguee asserts that the indecency of D'Annunzio is never 'polisonne ou
grivoise'; that it is never vulgar, although it is unbridled. He admits
the preference for the unclean, which almost amounts, indeed, to an
hallucination, but he urges that in D'Annunzio it is always redeemed by
art.
'A Rabelais, a Boccaccio, a Loti, or a D'Annunzio, give expression to a
certain temperament, with the artistic resources which that temperament
imposes on them,' writes De Voguee, in his celebrated criticism,[1] 'they
have nothing in common with tradesmen, who painfully produce the filth
demanded by a publisher and a certain public. An abyss separates the
former from the latter writers. This difference between them which our
judgment perceives, we do not show by critical demonstration; our taste
is conscious of it as our eyes distinguish a flower, venomous perhaps,
but natural, from an artificial flower coloured by poisonous dyes.'
[Footnote 1: _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1^re janvier 1895.]
Now, in this passage there is much truth, but it is not equally true
that D'Annunzio is at no time to be placed in the lower class. There is
too frequently in his indecency a strain, an effort, a mannerism, an
extravagance, sought, and unnecessary. The reader, if he desires to
understand what I mean by this, can turn to page 320 in the _Trionfo_,
or to Chapter X., in the _Piacere_ (Italian version), in which there are
ingenuities of indecency introduced which have no relation whatever to
the narrative, nor any obligation to appear.
What is, I think, more offensive to taste, and more injurious to art
than any sensual excess in description, is mere nastiness, mere filth;
and of this D'Annunzio is as guilty as Zola is, and as Zola has been,
always.
De Voguee may pour out his scorn as he will on the _industriel_ who
composed _La Bete Humaine_, and may cover with the roses and lilies of
his exquisite garlands of praise the creator of the _Trionfo_, the fact
remains that the Satyr shows his cloven hoof as much in one as in the
other; and the motives which move either of the writers we have no right
to condemn or to appraise, for the entrance into personal motive is
surely an intrusion which should never be attempted.
We may, nevertheless, suggest as probable that, however dissimilar be
their atmosphere and circumstances, both Zola and D'Annunzio have been
moved to study chiefly what is called immoral, and prurient, by a
sincere desire to reach to the very depths of human nature, to shrink
from no investigation, to deny no evidence, and to protest against the
hypocrisy with which literary art has so frequently covered its eyes and
turned away from the truth. 'Let us study life alone,' says D'Annunzio,
as Zola said it; and if he seek life in its corruption, coming upon the
corpse of putrid pleasure as the gay riders in the Campo Santo of Pisa
check their startled steeds before the open biers, he does no more, and
no less, offend art than Zola offends it in _Nana_.
Indeed, so little is De Voguee's statement in this matter justified, that
almost every Italian who has read D'Annunzio's works will, in speaking
of him, regret his incessant recurrence to obscenity. Not from prudery,
for Italians are never prudes, but from an artistic sense, that this
perpetually intruded indecency is an error in taste, and becomes quite
as tiresome as any other form of perpetual repetition.
The most conspicuous error of modern literature is, beyond doubt, its
verbiage. It has completely forgotten the great canon of 'Ars est celare
artem'; the supreme ability of conveying immeasurable suggestion in a
mere word, in concentrating all the music of the soul in one brief note.
All the arts err at this epoch in the same manner; literature has the
common malady; it is prolix. The indecencies of D'Annunzio, like his
other descriptions, are prolix; and the prolixity is not redeemed by the
indecency, nor the indecency by the prolixity.
This tendency of redundancy is not his fault alone; it is that of his
time. The enormous canvases and numerous figures of modern paintings,
the crowded groups and tortured attitudes of modern sculpture, the
elaborate scenic effects, and mechanical appliances, and endless acts,
of modern opera and drama, are all forms of the same malady of
repetition; of ignorance of how, and when, to break the laurel bough
before it withers; of lack of skill to master the subtleties of
concentration and suggestion. The descriptions of the modern writer are
frequently mere inventories; they are painfully minute; they are like a
mosaic, in which millions of little cubes are grouped to make a whole.
As before a modern painting we are often unimpressed by the whole, but
struck by the dexterity of the brush-work, so in modern literature we
are little interested in the conception, but allured by the dexterity of
the treatment. Too frequently, unappily, this multiplicity of words
covers a sad poverty of ideas. But in D'Annunzio's works there is not a
page without ideas; ideas which may displease or may disgust the reader
at times, but which are, nevertheless, always worthy to arrest
attention, even when they are only studies of depravity.
D'Annunzio is a greater writer than Zola, not because he has emulated or
surpassed Zola's indecencies, but because he is what Zola never was--a
scholar and a poet. His culture is of the most varied and classical
kind, profound as well as brilliant; and his poetic powers were shown in
his sonnets and lyrics before he wrote his romances. Zola is no scholar,
and is not, either in temperament or expression, a poet. It would be
impossible to conceive him creating such a poem as the _Villa Chigi_ or
the _Riccordi di Ripetta_ of D'Annunzio. There are passages in Zola's
works, notably in _La Terre_, which are, I think, as great as it is
possible for prose to be, but they are never touched by any poetry of
phrase or feeling.
Also, when De Voguee states that the indecency of D'Annunzio is not
indecency because the Italian language is never indecent, and alleges
that what would be insupportable in any other tongue is possible in
Italian, because Italian enjoys the privilege which pertained to its
mother, Latin, _i.e._, to say with grace and impunity what in any other
tongue would disgust the hearer, he says what is absolutely untrue; and
one can only wonder if he knows anything of the Italian of the streets,
of the fields, of the wine-houses, of the popular theatres. In this
affirmation, as in others, he has imagined what he says to be the fact,
and founded on the fabrications of his imagination a positive statement.
It is a frequent habit with him, and makes the weakness of his arguments
in many instances, on other themes than this.
We know that Italian is heard only occasionally by him during his visits
to Italy, and is then heard by him only in its polished speech. To those
by whom it is heard every day, as spoken by all classes, it certainly
possesses nothing of this privilege which he claims for it. It can be,
on the contrary, very coarse and crude; it has none of the subtleties
and graces, and delicate gradations of French: it calls a spade a spade
with the rudest frankness; and its curses are of an appalling ferocity
and filthiness.
Nor can it be said that D'Annunzio ever tries to give it delicacy or
veiled suggestion; his language is as broad and as gross as that of Ovid
or Catullus. He never allows the smallest doubt about his meaning to
exist at any time; and he is most especially explicit when treating of
those subjects which in modern literature are generally considered
forbidden. Indeed, this anxiety to paint the brothel and the madhouse as
carefully and minutely as the miniaturist paints on the ivory, leads to
his great defect, over-elaboration. He does not trust enough to the
power of suggestion, which is so strong in a great writer over the mind
of a reader. He does not remember that half a chord may fill the ear
with melody, and that a hint may rouse the senses to nausea or to
desire.
Paradoxical as it may appear to say so, I think his wide culture has
injured his style. I think he would have been a greater Italian writer
if he had known no language save Italian and, of course, Latin and
Greek.
The extreme culture and over-variety of modern education tends to
destroy, or at least disturb, originality; it encumbers the mind under
too vast a load of riches, it enlightens, but it also obstructs; if
Shakespeare had been less ignorant he might, perhaps, have been also
less great.
Foreign influence is not beneficial to the Italian. It makes him unreal;
it makes him lose his charming natural grace and abandonment, it renders
him artificial; he never really becomes what is implied by the word
cosmopolitan (such a cosmopolitan as Lord Dufferin or the late Prince
Lobanoff), and he does lose much of his own national qualities. It is
very rarely that an Italian can, like the late lamented scholar Enrico
Nencioni, steep his mind deeply in all the riches of foreign literature
without in the least losing his own Italian individuality. D'Annunzio,
on the contrary, allows himself to be absorbed and assimilated by
foreign influences, to be dominated by them, to so great an extent
indeed that his style is frequently bastardised by them, and many of his
sentences read as though they were translations from foreign sources. He
claims to have greatly embellished and amplified the Italian language;
he has certainly rendered it more colloquial and more copious; but he
has often grafted foreign idioms upon it, and he has perhaps robbed it
of some of its dignity and grace. He considers that the artist should
always remodel the instrument he uses; but the figure will not hold good
in other arts, for Sarasate does not carve the shell of his violin,
Clausen does not weave the canvas he uses, Bartolome does not blast the
marble out of the hill-side. The writer should use the language he
writes in as it comes pure from its natural springs; he will but
contaminate it if he pour into it alien streams.
D'Annunzio would probably protest that the patchwork effects of the
foreign languages he introduces, do but correctly represent the mixture
of tongues common in our days in those phases of life which pass under
the generic name of society. In such protest there would, no doubt, be
truth; but it could only apply to certain social scenes in the
_Piacere_, and my objection is less to the introduction of foreign
phrases directly than it is to the foreign complexion and contour which
he so frequently gives to his own language; a fault never before him
known in an Italian writer. Many of his phrases are of foreign
construction. But he is not on that account a plagiarist, as has been
said of him; he is never a plagiarist, but is a too highly educated, and
a too sensitively susceptible, mental organisation. The mean charge of
plagiarism is one so easy to bring and so difficult to refute, that it
is cast by envy and inferiority at all those whose genius, like that of
D'Annunzio, is proud, passionate, and defiant of criticism. That which
has in it the elements of true greatness has always these pellets of mud
thrown at it. In some ways, on the contrary, he seems to seek an
exaggeration of original idiosyncrasies, and to no writer would
conscious imitation be more odious or impossible.
There is unhappily, in all his works, an absolute absence of wit, of
mirth, of humour. There is not a laugh, scarcely even a smile, in any
of his pages; if we except the cruel laughter of a lover at his
mistress's physical defects. Over all his genius there broods that
'green melancholy,' which is the too-common hue of modern thought, that
dull greyness of death which has spread from the laboratories of science
over all the worlds of literature. Not only is no joyous laugh ever
heard, there is not even the indulgent smile which relieves melancholy
and bitterness in many writers whose views of life are gloomy. Nowhere
is this more seen than in the almost savage cruelty with which the poor
old _devote_, Gioconda Aurispa, is drawn; the merciless description of
her senile love of sweetmeats, of her disappointment when her nephew
forgets to bring them, of her expectant eyes, 'almost impudent in their
entreaty,' of her short breath with its foetid odour, of her tottering
steps amongst her flowers; all is cruel, merciless, without a grain of
pity or of sympathy to redeem its biting satire of so feeble and
harmless a creature.
Compare with such treatment the exquisite tenderness of Pierre Loti's
Tante Claire, think with how gentle a respect Thackeray drew the death
of an old man, remember the touch with which Maupassant makes us akin
even to poor Boule de Suiffe. Tragedy is not necessarily cruelty, nor
accuracy necessarily brutality. Shakespeare makes us indignant for Lear
and sharers in his sorrows; but D'Annunzio would concentrate our
thoughts only on his ridiculous thin hair blown by the winter winds, the
tremor of his toothless jaws, and palsy of his bent, unsteady limbs. In
the highest art there is always pity because there is always
comprehension. D'Annunzio has as yet no more pity than the demonstrator
in a physiological amphitheatre. But it is not impossible that such pity
may come to him later on, for pity is rarely a passion of youth; it is
usually the fruit of reflection, comparison, realisation of what is
alien and impersonal. That sense which he already feels of the inner
life of all things cannot leave him for ever insensible to the
sufferings of that life.
At present he is absorbed in the sensual ecstasies of early manhood, and
the fumes of voluptuous delights obscure his sight to much else which
surrounds him, and which finds him callous and negligent of it. De Voguee
sees in him the leader of a new school, but there is as yet little that
is new in his manner of judging life. It is the manner of _Le Disciple_,
though touched with warmer tones, and placed in richer landscapes, and
vibrating with stronger passions, because Italian in scene and in
temper.
If ever there be a true Latin renascence, which is scarcely to be hoped
for, it will come, not from a writer who is saturated with French,
Russian, German, and English influences, but one who has the Latin
genius, the Latin temper, unalloyed. But does this now exist anywhere?
If it do, it is in remote mountain sides and by lonely lake waters, not
in clubhouses and on racecourses. Such a writer will more probably come,
if he come at all, from the extreme south than from the north, perhaps
even from the great and almost virgin island of the west. In the dense
cork woods and on the desolate shores of Sardinia, a Salvator Rosa of
literature might well be begotten, for there is also there a companion
whom the Muses fear not--Misery.
I imagine that De Voguee does not know much of the popular songs of the
south and the west of Italy. I venture to think that in those
_stornelli_, _cantileni_ _rispetti_, and the rest, there is more of the
genuine spirit of the Italian soil than in any of the works hitherto
written by D'Annunzio, because, despite their intensity of passion, they
are full of a pure poetical beauty and an idealised tenderness, which in
his pictures of love are absent.
Even in the views which De Voguee holds of the characters of these
romances, there seems frequently a curious misconstruction of their
salient points. For instance, he sees in the tragedy, with which the
_Trionfo_ closes, the fact that Aurispa loved so intensely that he felt
impelled to destroy what he possessed, as the only absolute means of
fully possessing it. But I do not see this. I see in Aurispa a young man
habitually self-indulgent and constitutionally feeble; who gradually
passes from frantic adoration of a woman possessed, to the nausea which
so frequently follows on such possession. The proof of this lies in the
cruel cynical criticism with which he discovers and enumerates her
physical and mental defects, with which he views the deformity of her
feet as they push the warm sand of the beach to and fro, and with which
he realises the growing disgust which she awakes in him physically and
morally. He feels that he can neither live with her, nor live without
her; that she will be his destroyer in one way or the other; it is in a
frenzy of hatred and of impotence that he seizes her in his last
embrace, and plunges with her over the cliff, into the starlit depths of
the sea below. To ignore this is to miss the whole meaning of the final
act, and the absolute veracity of the whole work.
I have seen such physical jealousy in the man of feeble health of the
vigorous strength of the woman whom he loved, and there is no form of
jealousy more cruel or more incurable, and it is likely to become
frequent in modern life, which develops the physical strength and social
liberties of the female to so vast an extent. This is a painful fact,
but it is one which cannot be disputed. Go wherever a crowd of both
sexes congregate, and there you will see an Ippolita in all her splendid
vitality and magnificent growth, and beside her, nine times out of ten,
there will be a Giorgio Aurispa, small, frail, half-blind, pallid,
bloodless, beardless, sickly, and prematurely decrepit.
I should myself have preferred to trace the destroying influence of
sensual passion eating its way gradually into the health and strength of
a complete masculine sanity, and of a robust masculine health, like
aquafortis biting into a copper plate. Aurispa is already mentally
diseased before the fateful day on which he sees Ippolita in the dusk of
the chapel in Rome. He views all things animate and inanimate, human and
animal, real and ideal, through that distorted medium which the mentally
deformed habitually see through as through a convex and smoked glass. He
is more than feeble, he is not sane. If he had not sought death on
account of his mistress, he would have done so because Demetrius Aurispa
had died before by his own hand; or for some other reason which in his
cerebral condition would have seemed to him imperative and irresistible,
as imaginary conditions do seem to those not sane.
We are told throughout the book to realise this extreme weakness,
physical and moral, which ultimately drives him to destroy himself and
her.
'"You love life?" he murmured, with a veiled bitterness.
'"Yes, life delights me," she answered, almost with vehemence.
'She had, in her voice, in her attitude, in all her person, a
brightness of unusual joy and pleasure. She had in her whole
aspect that satisfaction which the living creature only feels
in those hours when life runs harmoniously in all its currents,
in which there is a perfect balance in all the vital forces in
accord with the favour and fairness of all surrounding
circumstances. As in other similar moments, her whole being
seemed to unclose in the freshness of the sea air, in the
coolness of the summer evening, like one of those magnificent
night-blooming flowers which only open the heart of their
petals as the sun passes and sets.'
This is one of the innumerable beautiful images in which D'Annunzio
excels, and nothing can surely be finer of its kind than the whole
passage which I have quoted. But it clearly proves, especially if
compared with its context, that the passion which Aurispa once felt for
her had now become a furious envy of her more abounding life, of her
perennial and indestructible capacity of enjoyment.
And that night, indeed, he kills her, not from excess of love, but from
envy of her exultant and exuberant vitality and hatred of its contrast
to his own impotence; from the sense, as I have said, that he could
neither live with her nor without her. In this, D'Annunzio has linked
cause and effect with excellent precision. Every minutia of feeling
described is correctly described, and such feeling is made to arise from
a natural source, precisely as dislike follows on satiety in real life.
But very frequently there is no such natural connection in his treatment
of circumstance and character.
The _Trionfo_ is admirably balanced from its opening to its closing
pages; and the tragedy on the Pincio, with which the work opens,
fittingly and perfectly strikes the keynote of the whole, and the
_motif_ of the opera is suggested in the overture. But in the other
romances there is too often a want of unison between the action
described and its motives or sources. There is, at times, even an
absolute lack of any rational cause at all; so that, in some degree, all
his characters have in them more or less of the irresponsibility and
unconnectedness of the insane. He leaves too much unexplained; too many
actions motiveless; too many portraits floating indistinct like the
night and river studies of Whistler. It is curious that this vagueness,
this uncertainty and obscurity, should exist in one who is on the other
hand so frequently and wearisomely minute in microscopic details. He
constantly calls on us to believe what he gives us no data for
believing. Even in the _Trionfo_ he constantly introduces persons and
incidents having no connection with the narrative. The whole family of
Giorgio, the whole action passing at Guardiagrele, so elaborately
painted, lead to nothing; we neither see nor hear of them again; neither
they nor Guardiagrele ever enter his pages any more; and the momentous
scene with Giorgio's father leads to nothing, but ends in a blind alley.
Now this is a great fault in composition, and one which disappoints and
irritates the reader. Of Demetrius Aurispa, again, much is made, but
nothing is explained or continued; and his long exposition of one of
Tennyson's poems is as unnecessary as the long disquisition upon Wagner
further on in the book.
D'Annunzio is so profoundly engrossed in the psychology of his
characters, that he frequently forgets to make their antecedents and
actions consistent or credible. For instance, few women have been drawn
in fiction more lovable, more real, more refined, more profoundly
interesting, or more truly feminine, than Giuliana Hermil, in the
_Innocente_. There is nothing in her character or in her circumstances
which can render it the least probable to us that such a woman as she is
described to be, would have been led into the half-unconscious sensual
impulse which makes her unfaithful to her conjugal vows without the
smallest excuse of passion or temptation. Nor is it conceivable for an
instant that Tullio Hermil, on hearing her confession of this
_inconsapevole_ adultery, would serenely submit to remain in ignorance
of the name of this lover of an hour, merely suspecting who it was from
an inscription found in a novel, and would merely answer with gentle
irony to her apology that the soul had had no share in her undoing!
'_Povera anima!_' he murmurs with an indulgent smile!
I will not say that this is impossible, for nothing is so in the
relations of the sexes; but it is certainly improbable and incongruous,
since Giuliana is throughout described as the gentlest, most timid, and,
despite the infidelity in which we are asked to believe, the purest of
her sex, submissive to desertion as Griselda, and incapable of an impure
thought. It is contrary to all truth to human nature to make such a
woman err in so common, stupid, and unintelligible a manner, and to make
Tullio Hermil continue under such circumstances to live in the same
house with her until the time of her delivery.
D'Annunzio has also a total lack of perception when the ridiculous mars
the pathetic. This is a very common defect in his countrymen, and is one
frequently traceable to a want of the humorous faculty. There is
something ridiculous, which goes far to spoil all which is intended to
be tragic in the motive or action of the _Innocente_, in the details
accompanying and explaining its culminating act. The idea of this act is
fine, and the hatred of the man for the child is natural, whilst the
conception and carrying out of the semi-crime are subtle and original.
But the filthy description of the infant (almost identical with that of
the new-born babe in Zola's _Joie de Vivre_) and the perpetual
references to its swaddling clothes, and the tedious profusion of
details with which the subject is elaborated, destroy in the mind of the
reader all sense of pity for the victim, and all blame for the act which
sends it to its grave. One feels that the little squalling, dribbling,
shapeless creature, with its scabby head and cat-like miawling, is much
better destroyed, and this is not the sensation which the author desires
to arouse; he would wish us to feel at once horror at, and compassion
for, Tullio Hermil, but we can feel nothing except a vague contempt for
this helpless young man. Had the semi-murder of it followed immediately
on its birth, or had it been found by him after absence a fair
two-year-old child, with all the rosebud loveliness of that age, this
bathos would have been avoided; and the stealthy sin of its effacement
would have carried in it the force of a powerful tragedy undiminished,
as it actually is, by gross and comic images, which may be realism but
are none the less bathos. It is perfectly natural that Tullio Hermil's
abhorrence of this spurious offspring should grow with every day until
the desire to destroy it becomes at last an over-mastering impulse; but
to make this act tragic, and to awaken that sympathy for the victim
which all true tragedy excites, the latter should be so described that
the heart of the reader should bleed for it when exposed to the icy air
which kills it, and that its martyred infancy should seem fitly lamented
by those echoes of the distant _Novena_, which at the supreme moment
float through all the silent house.
The _Innocente_ has many passages in its pages of perfect beauty like
this episode of the _Novena_; its defects are due to its author's
incapacity to perceive where the ludicrous damages the pathetic and
destroys the terrible. The writer's artistic instinct moved him to
create a situation unique, and full of the keenest interest, abounding
in opportunity for the analysis of temptations and emotions; and of such
analysis he is a master, if too prolix in his expositions of it. But a
want of the perception which warns us off the line of demarcation
dividing the dramatic from the grotesque, has allowed him to pass this
line, and merge the dramatic in a flood of trivial and commonplace
minutiae. Nor is it natural that, loathing this new-born bastard as
Tullio Hermil does, he should accompany his brother to invite an old
peasant to be its sponsor. The beauty and simplicity of this passage are
great, but they cannot reconcile us to the improbability of such an
errand.
'As we drew near the place where Giovanni de Scordio dwelt, my
brother saw in the field the tall figure of the old man.
'"Look! There he is. He is sowing. We bring our invitation in a
solemn hour."
'We approached. I trembled within myself as though I were about
to commit a profanation. I did indeed profane a thing in itself
sacred and beautiful. I went to solicit the spiritual paternity
of a venerable life for an adulterous creature.
'"Look at his height," exclaimed Frederigo, pointing to the
sower. "He is no taller than other men, and yet he looks a
giant."
'We paused under a tree, and watched the labourer from a
distance. Giovanni had not perceived us.
'He came straightway towards us up the field with measured
slowness. He wore a woollen cap, black and green, with two
wings which covered his ears in the ancient fashion. A white
sack hung by a leathern strap from throat to waist, the sack
being full of grain. With his left hand he held the sack open,
with the right he took the grain and scattered it. His gesture
was large, easy, sweeping, moderated to a serene rhythm. The
corn, flying from his hand, shone in the sun like gold dust,
falling with regularity upon the wet furrows. He advanced
slowly, his feet sinking in the moist soil, his head sometimes
lifted to the holiness of the light; all his attitude was
simple, noble, grand.
* * * * *
'We entered the glebe.
'"Good health, Giovanni," said Frederigo, going up to the old
man. "Be your seed blessed. Be blessed your bread of the
future."
'"Good health to you," I repeated.
'The peasant left off work; he uncovered his head.
'"Cover yourself, Giovanni, or we also must stand with bare
heads in the sun," said my brother.
'The old man put on his cap, confused, almost shy, smiling.
'He asked humbly, "Why so much honour?"
'I said with a voice which vainly strove to be steady, "I am
come to beg you to hold my son at the baptismal font."
'The peasant looked at me astounded, then at my brother. His
embarrassment increased. He murmured:
'"Why to me so much honour?"
'"What do you reply?" I asked.
'"I am thy servant; God render the grace for the honour thou
dost me to-day, and God be praised for the joy that He gives
to my old age. All the benedictions of Heaven rest on thy
son."'
Nothing can be finer, simpler, more effective than this scene, but when
we are conscious that the son thus spoken of is the spurious offspring
which Tullio Hermil loathes, our sympathies are turned aside by a sense
of incongruity and disgust. We are conscious that the young man would
never have gone on such an errand, never have consecrated by such
expressions the spawn of his wife's incomprehensible and unexplained
amour. It is impossible to bring one's self to believe in any part of
the story of the _Innocente_, strong as the treatment is in realism of a
certain kind, and seductive as is the admirable ease and limpidity of
the narrative, which for smoothness of recital, and wonderful semblance
of being a true narrative of real events, is not surpassed by any
novelist and has been equalled by very few writers indeed.
In all his works D'Annunzio draws women with exquisite veracity and
skill; and a rare intuition into the workings of their minds and the
beatings of their hearts. Of men he has as yet only drawn one type,
whatever they are called, Sperelli, Aurispa, Cantelmi, Hermil, they are
always the same person: 'touched to fine issues,' steeped in
scholarship, refined, susceptible, voluptuous, but all sick with the
_maladie du siecle_; all infirm from the neurasthenia of too early and
too unbridled self-indulgence. But his women are infinitely more varied
and more intricate. They are wondrous presentments of breathing life.
All the contradictions of feminine nature are portrayed with marvellous
exactitude in the vicious, cruel, and frenzied sensualism of Ippolita,
of which we watch the gradual growth as we watch Vesuvius on a summer
night pass from slumber into fury. With what inimitable dexterity he
makes us conscious of the plebeian grossness underlying her physical
sorcery, the commonness of her base birth seen here and there through
the dazzling sorcery of her attractions; and how natural she is in her
buoyant spirits, in her gay sportiveness, in her rapid changes of mood
and humour, in her mingling of cruelty and compassion! Equally does he
convey to the reader the consciousness of the perfect high breeding in
the _Virgine delle Rocce_, of the three sisters of sorrow, so alike yet
so dissimilar; three figures stepped down from the canvas of the
Veronese, but dimmed by solitude and long neglect. Not less admirably
has he given the delicate distinction and infinite sweetness of the
Siennese, Maria Ferres (although she is indeed an almost exact
reproduction of Giuliana Hermil), whilst that patrician courtesan Donna
Elena Muti, shameless, lascivious, and conscienceless, is nevertheless
always a high-bred woman. He has incarnated the incomparable charm of
the Italian woman, the most graceful, the most impassioned, the most
seductive woman on earth, although also perhaps the most imperious,
pitiless, and fiercely exacting in her passions. Even Ippolita, vicious
as she is, is 'l'adorable Ippolita,' as De Voguee calls her, and her
portrait is surely one which will become as precious to future
generations as that of Manon Lescaut is to us.
I much fear that the only work of his which will become known to the
English public in general will be the _Virgine delle Rocce_, because
(as far as it has gone) it is not indecent. The other works could not be
reproduced in English; and the _Virgine delle Rocce_ unhappily gives no
just measure of the talent and strength of the writer. At present it is
but the first of a triune romance of which the two latter parts are as
yet unpublished. It is the cleanest, the simplest, and the most romantic
of his works, but it will probably be caviare to the crowd, and it
wholly lacks the great qualities of its predecessors. It is not
well-constructed like the _Innocente_, it is not daring and intense like
the _Trionfo_; it is not brilliant like _Il Piacere_; it is rambling,
and vague, and shadowy, and it is difficult to collect the threads of
the narrative. It is published in a fragment, which is always an unwise
method of publication, but it is to be feared that when entire it will
never equal the _Innocente_ or the _Trionfo_. Indeed when severed from
the theme of sensual psychology D'Annunzio loses in strength and in
colour; he becomes desultory, almost indifferent; and wanders through
his own garden of romance with little interest in it, much as in this
latest story his own Oddo and Antonello stray through the ruins of
Linturno and drift through the water-lilies of the lonely stream.
But this story, defective though it be, has a great charm for those
conversant with certain phases of Italian life. I have known just such a
grand old palace in the solitude of a deserted country, just such young
daughters growing up in stately poverty and perpetual joylessness; just
such paternal obsession in clinging to ruined thrones and perished
faiths; just such an interminable sequence of colourless, uninterested,
imprisoned days where the life is the life of the Lady of Shalott, and
no eyes are lifted to see that the almond-trees are in flower.
Every page of this short book, which Frederic Leighton would have
delighted to illustrate, is impressed with Italian verity of a kind
which few foreigners have ever occasion to verify. The vast stone stairs
of the approach, the huge dim archways, the great fountains where the
stone Tritons spout and the ghosts rise with the spray in the moonlight
of midnight, the dry fish-ponds full of odorous plants self sown, the
neglected, wild, beautiful, fragrant gardens, the immense halls and
chambers frescoed, water-gilt, marble-encrusted; the silent corridors,
the ceilings lofty as the cupolas of cathedrals, the fading tapestries,
the soft grey dust, the abandonment, the poverty, the stateliness, the
infinite pathos and charm of this splendour, 'which dies so slowly
because born of true art and of what was once an heroic nobility.' All
these are portrayed with perfect fidelity in this strange and too slight
story of the three daughters of the fallen House of Montega, and no less
true to the facts of Italian life is the destiny which weighs upon them,
the insanity which dwells amongst them in the person of their mother,
whom we see living before us as she passes, carried in her perfumed and
painted sedan chair, with her strange fixed regard, her tiara of ebon
hair, her pallid face, her jewelled hands. Madness is a frequent malady
in Italy, and few noble families are without some insane member. The
afflicted person is usually kept in his or her apartments in the palace,
or in one of the villas of the family, and is courteously inquired for
by all visitors as Claudio in this story asks after the health of Donna
Aldoina. Italians are usually kind to their insane relatives and not at
all ashamed of them, but _il pazzo_ or _la pazza_ lends a weird
fantastic gloom to the ancient and stately houses which saw their birth,
and shelter their infirmity, and will hold their coffins in their
crypts.
Possibly there seems more to me in this story than there actually is,
because I know so well the tenor of the life therein depicted; and the
absence of all objective interest, of all care for nature and for art,
of all perception of the consolations to be found in both, which render
that life so much more barren than it need be.
D'Annunzio has typified such barrenness of thought, such narrowness of
horizon, in the family which dwells in the grand old villa of Tregento,
and many a time he must, no doubt, with his own mind filled by classic
memories, and knowledge of the arts, and touched to impassioned
appreciation of all natural beauty, have suffered acutely from the
apathy, ignorance, and unconscious self-absorption of such a domestic
atmosphere. He has no doubt constantly been met with the incapacity to
understand, the wonder of ignorance, the blank dulness of unopened
minds, such as he suggests in the following passage:--
'We were near Rebursa. The rocky chain, with its sharp and
broken peaks turned to the right following the winding Saurgo,
rising tier on tier towards the massive summit of Mount Caran.
On the left of the road, the soil was smooth and undulating
like the large dunes of a seashore, becoming further off a
succession of hills, tawny and humped like camels of the
desert.
'"Look, look!" I cried, seeing another silver cloud of blossom.
"Can you not see it, Antonello?"
'He did not look at the almond trees with my eyes; he looked,
but with a faint smile, wondering probably at the childlike joy
awakened in me at the sight of the first flowers. Yet, what
fairer spectacle could this rude and stony country offer to us?
'"If my sisters only were here!" cried Oddo, to whom my
pleasure communicated itself. "Oh, if they were here!"
'His voice was full of regret.
'"They need to be brought where flowers bloom," said Antonello,
softly.
'"Look, look!" I cried again, giving myself up to my delight
with fuller ease, now that I saw some reflection of it at least
awakened in these poor shut souls. "I am glad these flowers are
mine, Oddo."
'"My sisters must come to them," sighed Antonello, like one who
speaks in a dream of sleep.
'It seemed as if his feverish eyes refreshed themselves with
that vision of things so pure....
'They both looked at me, somewhat confused, faintly smiling, as
if they had been brought unexpectedly before some extraordinary
sight which stupefied them, yet filled them with delicious
sensations. They had shown me their malady, had revealed to me
their suffering, had spoken to me of that melancholy prison
whence they had come and whither they would return; and I, on
the common highway open to all, had invited them to recognise
and celebrate the spring--the spring which they had both
forgotten, which they seemed to see now for the first time
after many years, which they gazed at with a mingling of fear
and joy as at a miracle.'
Is not this delicate in expression as the sprays of the almond blossoms
themselves?
An Italian scholar, in writing to me to-day, does indeed say with
considerable accuracy that the affectation in the style of D'Annunzio
takes from it its freedom and sincerity, that when he is writing of
almond boughs and nightingales he does not give us the impression that
these things are dear to him, but rather that he is endeavouring to say
the most beautiful things he can think of about them. 'His style,' says
my Italian correspondent, 'is the one occupation of his life, the one
absorbing interest of his work; he cares but little for nature or for
human nature, except as these are strings to his lyre.' This is in a
great measure a correct, if a too severe, censure. There is in him
nothing of that genuine emotion which wells up in the heart of Pierre
Loti as he writes; D'Annunzio is always outside that which he describes;
there is in him much of the virtuoso; he reminds me of a friend of mine,
a London celebrity, who once invited a party of artists to see a fine
work of art in his London house. When the curtain was drawn aside, the
work of art was found to be a young nude woman, of singularly beautiful
proportions, extended on a rug of black bear-skins to set off the ambers
and ivories and blue-vein traceries of her skin. D'Annunzio stretches
his subject thus bare before him in a well-adjusted light, and calls the
world to see: for the subject he has no compassion. This _preciosita_
(Anglice, affectation) is still more apparent in his prefaces than in
his works which they precede. These prefaces are long, elaborate, ornate
disquisitions, with much of the euphuism of pedantic scholarship; and
when in the preface to the _Trionfo_ the author claims that this
licentious romance is intended to hasten and welcome the coming of the
Uebermensch, it is impossible not to smile at such a pretension, and, as
even De Voguee admits, at this point we are driven to sigh for the return
of the _mandolinata_. He confirms the justice of a charge of
_preciosita_ himself in his introduction to _Il Piacere_, in which he
speaks of 'the long and grave fatigue, the disgust which follows the
painful and capricious artifices of style.' This is not the language of
a true artist, for in the beauties and intricacies of style which should
all have one aim--simplicity--the writer who is a true artist finds the
same intimate satisfaction as the musician, the painter, the sculptor,
each finds in the pursuit of his art. In style is the _sfogo_ of the
writer's procreative passion. It should bring with it neither fatigue
nor disgust, but the serene joys of a satisfied desire.
However, apart from this fault of _preciosita_ which De Voguee does not
appear to have perceived, but which seems to many Italians
incontestable, the style of D'Annunzio is very fine; finest of all when
it is spent on the portraiture of natural scenes, and of characters
unhampered by conventionality. Read this brief episode of the simplest
kind; how alive with actuality it is! It is taken from the earlier part
of the residence of Aurispa and Ippolita at the Hermitage.
'Hearing a rattle of plates, he asked, "Are you hungry?" And
the question suggested by the little homely sound, put eagerly,
with childlike insistence, made Ippolita smile.
'"Yes, a little," she answered, smiling; and both of them
looked at the table ready spread under the oak tree. In a few
minutes more their dinner was ready.
'"You must be content with what there is," said Giorgio. "It is
very humble fare."
'"Oh, I should be satisfied with herbs."
'And with a gay air she drew near the table, examined curiously
the tablecloth, the silver, the glass, the plates, finding
everything charming, delighted like a child with the blue
flowers which ornamented the fine white pottery.
'"Everything delights me here!"
'She bent over the big, round loaf, which was still warm under
its golden and crisp crust.
'"Ah! what a good smell it has!" And, as if impelled by her
childlike joy in the fresh bread, she broke off a piece of its
crust.
'"What good bread!"
'Her strong, white teeth shone as they bit and closed, and all
the movements of her curving lip expressed the pleasure which
she felt; and from her whole person there seemed to emanate a
rare, fresh grace, which attracted and amazed her lover with a
new and unexpected charm.
'"Oh, how good! Taste, how good it is!"'
What can be more graphic, more simple, more radiant, than this picture
painted in words so few?