'He found the gorse.
'On a tableland the thickly-growing gorse had flowered so
densely as to spread a vast golden mantle over all the soil.
Five maidens were gathering the flowers and filling with them
skips and baskets, singing as they worked. They sang a song of
thirds and fives in perfect harmony. When one of them reached a
special phrase she lifted her whole bust out of the yellow maze
of blossom that the notes might go forth from her throat with
fuller liberty, and held it long sustained in air, looking her
companions in the eyes whilst they applauded with their hands
of flowers.
'When they saw the stranger they stopped and bent again over
the gorse. Stifled saucy laughter rippled under the yellow sea.
Giorgio asked,--
'"Which of you is Favetta?"
'A girl, brown as an olive, raised her head in reply, amazed,
almost terrified: "It is I, sir."
'"Are you not the finest singer of San Vito?"
'"No, sir. That is not true."
'"It is true. It is true!" cried her companions.
'"Sir! make her sing."
'"No, sir, it is not true. I cannot sing."
'She hid herself, laughing, her face all aflame; she twisted
her apron whilst the others teased her. She was of short
stature but well-formed; her bosom was high and large, swollen
with songs. She had curly hair, dark eyebrows, aquiline
profile; something in her carriage wild and free. After the
first resistance she yielded.
'The others, taking her by the arms, held her in their circle.
They were up to their waists in the flowering gorse, whilst
round them the bees were humming.
'Favetta began unsteadily, but with each note her voice grew
firmer. It was limpid, liquid, crystal, clear as a water
spring. She sang a couplet and the others sang in chorus a
ritornello. They prolonged the harmonies, putting their mouths
close to form one single vocal flute; the song rose and fell in
the light air with the slow regularity of a litany.
'Favetta sang:--
'"All the springs are dry,
O poor love of mine!
He dies of thirst.
Where is the water thou broughtest me?
We have brought thee an earthen jar,
But round it is a chain of gold!"
'The others sang:--
'"Long live Love!"
'It was the salutation of May to Passion, pouring from young
breasts, which perchance as yet knew not its sweetness and
perchance never would know its sorrow.'
Or take the following passage which is as essentially true in its
accurate observation as it is beautiful in its expression. Tullio Hermil
and Giuliana are listening at Villa Lilla to the first songster of that
spring.
'The nightingale sang. At first it was like a burst of
melodious glee; a jet of easy trills which fell through the air
like pearls falling on the glass of a harmonium. Then came a
pause. A shake arose, agile, marvellously prolonged, like a
proof of strength, in an impulse of insolence, a challenge to
some unknown rivals.
'A second pause. A phrase of three notes with a tone of
interrogation passed on a chain of light variations repeating
the interrogative phrase five or six times, modulated softly
like a slender reed flute on which is played a pastoral. A
third pause: the song becomes elegiac, turns to a minor key,
tender as a sigh; it is almost a groan; it expresses all the
grief of the lonely lover, a heartrending desire; a vain hope;
it flings out a last appeal, improvised, acute as a scream of
anguish: then it ceases. A longer pause, more ominous. Then one
hears a new accent which scarcely seems to come from the same
throat so humble is it, so timid, so slight; it resembles the
twitter of scarce-fledged birds, the chirrup of sparrows; then,
with a miraculous volubility, this noisy note changes into a
breathless song, more and more rapid in its trills, vibrating
in sustained shakes, turning in daring flights of sound,
leaping, growing, bounding, attaining the highest heights of
the soprano. The songster is drunk with his own song. With
pause so brief that one note scarce ceases ere another succeeds
it, he spends his delirium in ever-varied melody, impassioned
and sweet, subdued and ear-piercing, light and grave, now
interrupted by broken sighs, by lament and supplication, now by
impetuous lyrical improvisation and supreme appeal. It seems
that even the gardens are listening, that the sky stoops over
the old tree from whose summit this poet, invisible to mortal
eyes, pours out such floods of eloquence. The flowers breathe
deeply and silently. A yellow glow lingers in the west. This
last lingering glance of the dying day is sad. But a single
star has risen, alone and tremulous like a drop of luminous
dew.'
He who can write thus is a great writer; and the charm of this passage
is not alone its poetry but its exact truth. The song of the nightingale
varies much in accord with age, with species (for there are two species,
Luscinia Philomela, and Luscinia Major), with climate, with the sense of
security, and the want of security, but the song of a nightingale in its
maturity, who is unalarmed and feels at home in the gardens of his
choice, is precisely such a song as is described in this passage, and is
more completely echoed in it than in the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven.
This sympathy with the melody of birds is the more singular in
D'Annunzio, because Italians are almost invariably indifferent to such
melody, and snare the divine songster in the net, or shoot him whilst he
shouts his nuptial _Io Triumphe!_ with the most stolid indifference. And
it may, perhaps, be that D'Annunzio does not care for the bird himself
more than the rest of his countrymen, but only cares for his own
eloquence concerning it. It may be said, without risk of injustice to
him, that great tenderness is at no moment found in him. He has not 'the
pathetic fallacy'; but he approaches it very nearly at times. When women
shall have lost for him some of the intensity of their physical charm,
nature in her wider and more profound meanings will, perhaps, become
more visible and more dear to him. Perhaps, however, it will not, for
the Italian is rarely impersonal.
Something of the affectation to which the delicate taste of my Italian
correspondent justly objects must be admitted to mar, by its
artificiality, the many magnificent pages dedicated by him to the sea.
Magnificent they are, true also, entirely true; but some mannerism there
is in them, some over-intricate embroidery of phrase. The sea he knows
best, and remembers always, is the Adriatic, of which the extreme beauty
of the colour, like the leaves of the silverweed, as wind and sun pass
over the meadows, has always before him been too little noted except, I
may venture to say, by myself.
'O, fair, clear seas of September!' he cries in the _Piacere_.
'The water is calm and innocent as a sleeping child, and lies
outstretched under a pearl-like sky. Sometimes it is all green
of the brilliant and intense green of malachite, and on it the
small rosy sails seem like wandering fires. Sometimes it is all
azure, of an intense blue, like the ultramarine which heralds
use for blazonries, veined with gold like lapis-lazuli, and on
it the painted sails seem like a procession of standards, of
banners, of spears borne on a Catholic holy day. And yet again
at other moments it takes on a metallic gleam, a silvery
paleness, the hues of a ripening lemon, something indefinable
and strange, and on this mystical surface the boats then glide
and fade, and are seen no more as the illumined wings of
cherubim sink into the faint fundamental hues of an old
Giottesque fresco.
'The sea was not alone for him a delight for the eyes, but it
was a perennial wave in which he steeped his thirsting
thoughts; a magical fountain of youth in which his body
recovered health and his mind nobility. The sea had for him the
mysterious attraction of a native country, and he abandoned
himself to it with filial confidence, as a weak child in the
arms of an omnipotent father; and he derived consolation from
it, for no one had ever confided his sorrows, his desires, or
his dreams to the ear of the sea in vain.'
So, we are told by D'Annunzio, thinks Andrea Sperelli, and so thought
also Giorgio Aurispa. But the sea has no permanent power on the soul of
either; the one returns from his contemplations of it to his life of
voluptuous pleasure, and the other drowns both himself and the woman,
whom he has adored to frenzy, in its waves, whilst the dog mourns
'forsaken beneath the olive trees, and the waters murmur softly, rocking
as in a cradle the reflections of the stars.'
Only once in D'Annunzio's work does genuine and yearning regret, of
which it is impossible to doubt the spontaneity and sincerity, thrill
through him, and move him to intense emotion and unstudied eloquence. It
is when, in the person of Claudio Cantelmo, he speaks in furious
invective of the modern desecration of Rome; in these passages he is
strong without effort, eloquent without study, and veracious alike in
sorrow and in scorn. His invective is poured from his heart's depths,
and thrills with the force of the Latin orators of the ruined Forum.
'I have lived several years in Rome; in that third Rome which
should have represented "Love reigning by Latin blood on Latin
soil," and have seen radiant on its heights the wondrous lights
of a new Ideal. I have been witness to its most ignominious
evolutions, to the most obscene unions that have ever
desecrated a sacred place. And I have understood the symbolism
hidden in that act of an Asiatic conqueror, who cast myriads of
human heads in the fountains of Samarcand, when he desired to
create a capital. The wise and cruel tyrant meant to signify
the necessity of merciless destruction in the creation of a new
order of things.
* * * * *
'The ship which bore the Thousand of Marsala only set sail that
the art of exchange and barter should be protected and covered
by the State!
* * * * *
'It was the epoch of the most frenzied fury of the destroyers
and contractors on the site of Rome. With the storms of dust
there were propagated a sort of lunacy of gain, a malignant
delirium, seizing not only on the tradesman and money-lenders,
and the workers in brick and mortar, but also on the elect
heirs of the papal _majorat_, who primarily had looked with
scorn and disgust on the newcomers from the windows of their
palaces of travertine, indestructible under the encrustations
of ages.
'The magnificent patrician races founded there, renewed and
strengthened by nepotism, and the strife of opposing houses,
descended and abased themselves one by one, slid down into the
new mud, sank, and vanished. The illustrious riches, amassed
through centuries of gorgeous pillage and Maecenic luxury, were
thrown into the whirlpool of the speculations of the Bourse.
'And around them, on these patrician lawns, where, only the
previous spring, the violets had blossomed more numberless than
the blades of grass, there were now mounds of lime, heaps of
bricks, the wheels of stone-laden carts creaked on the turf, on
the air were the oaths of the drivers, the shouts of the
overseers, while every hour hastened on the brutal work which
was to efface and occupy the sacred soil once dedicated to
Beauty and to Dreams. There passed over Rome a blighting
blizzard of barbarism, menacing all that greatness and
loveliness which were without equals in the memory of the
world. Even the laurels and the rose trees of the Villa
Schiarra, for so many nights of so many summers hymned by their
nightingales, fell destroyed, or remained in their desecration
behind the gates of little gardens parcelled out to the little
cockney boxes of tradesmen. The gigantic Ludovisian cypresses,
those of the Aurora, those which spread the clouds of their
solemn and mystic antiquity above the Olympian brows of Goethe,
were now laid prone in line one after another, with all their
dishonoured roots stretching towards the pallid sky, the black
dishonoured roots which still seemed to hold in their immense
network the web of a life greater than our own.
'Even over the box alleys of the Villa Albani, which had seemed
as immortal as their Caryatides and their Hermes, there hung
that shadow of a vandal's ruin. The contagion of destruction
spread everywhere. In the ceaseless combat of gain, in the
savage fury of avaricious greed and passions, in the disordered
haste of commercial activity, every sense of common decency was
forgotten, all respect for the past was trampled under foot.
The struggle for gain was carried on with blind fury, with
neither check nor curb. The pickaxe, the shovel, and the
cunning of fraud were the weapons employed. And week after
week, with incredible velocity, there arose on the violated
earth the huge foolish cages of brick and mortar, pierced with
square holes, surmounted with sham cornices, encrusted with
shameful stucco ornaments. A kind of immense white tumour rose
and spread on the wounded and bleeding side of the great Urbs
and drained away its life.
'And then, day after day, at sunset, along the princely avenues
of the Borghese Park, we could see in gorgeous brand-new
equipages the new elect of Fortune, from whom not barber, nor
tailor, nor boot-maker, had power to take away the ignoble
stamp. We could see them pass and repass with the sonorous trot
of their shining bay and brown horses; they were recognisable
at a glance by the insolence of their pose and the awkward
carriage of their rapacious and vulgar hands; and they seemed
to cry aloud,--
'"We are the new rulers of Rome. Bow down to us!"
'In truth such are its rulers; such the present masters of that
Rome which prophets and poets once likened to the bow of
Ulysses.'
Often have I myself written similar things, but in me they have been
considered exaggerations. They cannot be so considered in Gabriele
D'Annunzio of Francavilla.
All who love Rome and loathe her modern violation must thank him from
their hearts for such passages, and must mourn with him that we cannot
drive out the spoilers from our desecrated temples.
This is, indeed, his greatest strength, that, whilst still a young man,
he yet has the courage to resist the intellectual tendencies of his
contemporaries, to refuse to worship their gods, to see and despise the
falseness of those scientific pretensions which enslave the multitude in
modern life. His intellect, richly stored by learning, is, in a large
measure, free of prejudice. This is a great and rare distinction in a
generation which more completely than any which has preceded it, is the
timid slave of formula and the credulous servant of professional
bigotry.
He has kept a complete mental liberty; free from the superstitions of
religion, which, in this day, it is easy to be; but also free from the
superstitions of science, which is far harder, and incurs far greater
obloquy and opposition.
In his study on Giorgione, he says what it needs much courage to say in
these days:--
'The scientific spirit has invaded the generation of the second
half of our century. Struck by the surprising results of
physics and calculation, men were inclined to believe for a
time, that by the aid of the one or the other, they would be
able to penetrate into all mysteries and solve all problems.
But to this proud exaltation has now succeeded a discouragement
mingled with suspicion. They say to themselves, and not without
reason: "Where is this certainty that science promised us?" If
ever certainty were incomplete, deprived of solid criterion, it
is that offered by natural science. As for the sciences called
exact, some, like geometry, repose on a tottering base of
arbitrary affirmations; others, like algebra, on mere methods
of reasoning, and contain as much or as little certainty as the
formula of a syllogism.'
This is emphatically true; but it is a fact which is by no means
recognised by all, and which is still violently denied by those fanatics
whose form of bigotry is either experimental or exact science.
The mind of D'Annunzio refuses all bondage. It is a law to itself, as
the mind of the great writer should be. I imagine that the opinion of
him held by others, is to him of the most absolute unimportance. His
teaching is always to preserve the independence of the Ego, to live
without attention to formula or usage, to be, both materially and
spiritually, that which we were created to be by nature.
His morality is of the most primitive kind; or rather, he has none
whatever, no more than has a South-Sea islander lying in the sun under a
cocoa-nut tree whilst the surf bathes his naked limbs. It would be
absurd to accuse him of immorality because the indulgence of the senses
is as natural and as legitimate in his estimation, as Favetta's song
amongst the golden furze, or the reapers' welcome of the purple wine.
Yet by a not rare anomaly, this demand for perfect freedom of the
passions is accompanied by a tendency to desire tyranny in political
matters. He is disposed to deify force. In one or two expressions there
is an echo of Carlyle which sounds oddly and jarringly amongst the
amorous liberties and artistic debaucheries of the rest; and is not
worthy of a writer who has so much courage in opposing scientific
pharisaism and the thraldom of the schools. He is disposed to admire
what is strong simply because it is strong, forgetful that such strength
is sustained and nourished by the suffering of the weak. It is true that
he has lived in an atmosphere in which the verities embodied in the
aspirations, abortive but always noble, of the higher efforts of
revolution have been received with fear and misunderstanding. The
tendencies and training of the _Codini_ are visible through the
eloquence of the poet and the conclusions of the philosopher. The entire
lack in him of all altruism comes from this. Mazzini must be as
unintelligible to him as Tolstoi. The mass of humanity is always to him
the filthy, surging, bestial multitudes of the crowd at Casalbordino.
But even this absence of benevolence is better than the pitiful
sycophancy of writers who are as fulsome in their flattery to Demos as
to kings; is manlier than the nauseating self-worship of a Humanity at
once its own pimp and pander, its own adorer and assassin.
In his scorn of the human flocks of sheep, he forgets, I admit, too
entirely the justice to which the humblest unit amongst these flocks has
right, but that scorn, even when misdirected, is fresh and bracing as
the dash of his own Adriatic waves, when the east wind drives them
hurrying on to the shingle beach. He has no fear; and he never stoops to
that base flattery of his own species which is the most nauseous feature
of modern politics and of modern science.
'This alone is your office,' he cries to his contemporaries, if
they would resist the debasing influences of their time,
'defend the dream which is in you. Since in this day mortals no
longer bring tribute of love and honour to the choristers of
the Muses, defend yourselves, O poets, with all your weapons,
steep the point of your rapiers in the most biting poisons. Let
your satires bear such corrosive acid in them that they shall
pierce to the very pith of the spine and destroy it. Brand to
the very bone the stupid forehead of those fools who would mark
every soul with the same label, and make every brain like
another, as the heads of nails are beaten into a common
likeness by the blows of the nailmaker. Let your mordant
laughter reach to heaven when you hear the stablemen of the
Great Beast shouting in the parliaments of the earth.... Defend
the thought which they menace, defend the beauty which they
outrage, defend the antique freedom of your masters and the
future freedom of your disciples, against the insane assaults
of drunken slaves. Despair not, though you be few in number.
You have the supreme force of the world: the written word.'
The written word is indeed in his hand a scourge, a sword, a sheaf of
arrows from the quiver of the divine Python Slayer.
And in no country more than in the Italy of his generation is such a
scourge, such a sword, such flame-tipped arrows, needed to slay the
courtiers, the usurers, the sycophants, the knaves, the brutes, the
sellers of justice who fasten like leeches on her body.
This son of Italy is a great writer; a great poet. Read his works in the
original text all ye who can, men and women for whom life has no secrets
and truth has no terror.
He is young; the time will come, as it comes to all, when the joys of
the senses will fade for him as the roses of the summer are scattered by
autumn winds.
Let us hope that there will be later a second period of his creative
art, in which there will be developed an original genius free of exotic
influences, and untrammelled by the search for idioms and pruriencies.
Genius, like the river at its source, takes the colour of the earth it
springs from. It is only when it has reached its full volume, its
deepest currents, that it becomes clear and reflects the sky alone.
Let us hope that such a future awaits him, and that more and more fully
will he realise what he has already said in noble words:--
'Art! Here is the one faithful passion ever youthful, nay,
immortal; here is the fountain of pure joy unknown to the
multitude; here is the divine food which makes men like to
gods. How could he have stooped to drink at other cups when he
had once tasted of this?[3] How could he have bent to taste of
other joys, once having known this ecstasy? How could his
senses have let themselves be weakened and debased to lowest
lusts when they had once been stirred to that highest
sensibility which beholds the invisible, which touches the
impalpable, which divines the most hidden secrets in the heart
of nature?'
[Footnote 3: He is writing of Andrea Sperelli in _Il Piacere_.]
With these words, which are the greatest in meaning that he has hitherto
written, I will, for the present moment, take my leave of him.