GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO--POET, PILOT, AND PIRATE
The most conspicuous name in the annals of Italian literature of the
generation now passing is that assumed by a child or a youth when the
voice first whispered to him that he had been chosen to announce the
coming of a new era, to blaze the way for a new social and national
life: Gabriele D'Annunzio. He was born at Pescara in the Regno, March
13, 1863, the son of Francescopaolo D'Annunzio and of his wife, Luisa de
Benedictis of Ortona. A studied effort has been made to envelop his
birth and parentage in a mantle of mystery, but it has been thwarted.
One day of his infancy, in Ferravilla-on-the-Sea, suddenly there came a
sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind. From that moment the
little Annunciator was filled with the gift of verbal expression. He
enhanced the endowment by diligent study in the high school at Prato, in
Tuscany, where he spent his boyhood. Thus did he acquire an unparalleled
mastery of the Italian language. The gods of mythology, the Hellenic
heroes and philosophers, the emperors and courtesans of Pagan Rome were
the loves of his infancy. After Carducci's "Odi Barbari" exploded his
poetic magazine he looked about to find a god and a Greek upon whom to
model his conduct. He recalled Dionysus going through the world with
Priapus ostentatiously displaying the Phallus, and the die was cast.
But he must have a philosophy as well. He who taught that eternal flux
and change is the only actuality; that all phenomena are in a state of
continuous transition from non-existence to existence and vice versa;
that everything is and is not; all things are and nothing remains; that
all things must be reduced by way of quasi-condensation to the primary
matter from which they originated, in brief--Heraclitus, whose name
signified "he who rails at the people," was the one that he selected.
The process of quasi-reduction was to be preceded by purification
through pleasure, and pleasure was to be obtained by stimulation of the
senses. The more they were stimulated the greater became their potency
for purification. When he looked about the world he found others had
been seduced by Heraclitus. Nietzsche, whose activity preceded
D'Annunzio's by a few years, was the most conspicuous exponent of the
Eternal Recurrence. He too taught a master morality, a morality which
says yea to life and nay to morals, rules, and conventions. Christianity
is the moral code of slaves. Instinct is the true wisdom. The genesic
instinct is the basis of all other instincts. Therefore cultivate it,
for in that way one becomes a superman and begets a race of supermen. If
we must have a statue of Apollo, as Socrates and Christ taught, let us
make it a feminine figure and place it beside Dionysus, first erected by
animal men, and around them let us dance a frenzied tarantella while we
intoxicate ourselves with foaming wine, the product of sensuous
fermentation.
No attempt will be made here to put an estimate upon D'Annunzio's
conduct or his accomplishments of the past five years, save to say that
they have been in keeping with his previous life.
Literary criticism is concerned with the genius of the writer and the
way in which he makes that genius manifest. It is not concerned with the
morals or immorality of his writing, and yet it has to take some
cognizance of them, especially if they are at variance with that which
is considered moral or approximately moral. No one who is a public
figure or whose activities are concerned with the welfare of the public,
whether it be with their diversion, instruction, or protection, can
comport himself in a way that is flagrantly offensive to the public
without showing the effect of it in his writings. For instance, a writer
produces a masterpiece of literature, one that has qualities of
conception and construction that evoke universal admiration. It has been
written for one of three reasons, or all of them. First, because the
artist has it in him and he must externalize it, a creative craving that
must be satisfied; second, he has a purpose in doing it--he wants to
amuse, amaze, or instruct people; third, he wants to gain fame or money.
If he is utterly oblivious to the two last, his writings may be as
immoral or unrighteous as he wishes to make them. If the public does not
wish to read them it need not, and if it considers them injurious to
others whose mental capacity does not enable them to judge whether they
are proper or injurious they can be suppressed. If, however, the writer
is animated to production by either of the latter two motives, he must
be reconciled to having an estimate made of his work not only from the
point of view of literary criticism, but also from the point of view of
the fitness of his works for literary consumption. That is, he must be
reconciled to attempts at estimating whether or not the world would not
have been better off without his writings.
There are few writers to whom these remarks apply with greater force
than Gabriele D'Annunzio. It is generally admitted that he is the most
consummate master of Italian verse now living. Though his prose writings
show that he is not a literary craftsman of the first order, he has
understood that art rises out of our primal nature and that it is
instinctive. He has sung the praises of sensualism as they never have
been sung in modern times, and he has panoplied the preliminaries to
love's embrace with garlands made of flowers of forced blooming,
artificially perfumed and colored so that the average human being does
not recognize them as products of nature. He has preached and practised
a moral code the antithesis of Christianity, and yet no one has sought
seriously to save his soul.
In truth, D'Annunzio had tired the world of him. The people of it were
tired of him as they might have been of a radiantly beautiful woman who
had become a gorgeously decorated strumpet constantly walking up and
down in the world seeking praise and admiration. When he went to Paris
the world seemed to be satisfied that he should disappear in that
maelstrom, as it was willing that a contemporary sensuous egocentrist
should disappear when he left Reading Gaol, but D'Annunzio must enter
upon the final stage of his mission from the gods, and the Great War
gave him the opportunity.
Although so long a conspicuous figure in the public eye, he has managed
to wrap certain layers of the mantle of mystery about him so closely
that little is known of his origin or of the forces that contributed to
the making and development of his extraordinary career. It is
confidently stated by those who pretend to know him that he is a Jew,
but he is not claimed by Hebrew writers, who are proud of enrolling
Bergson and Brandes, Spinoza and Strauss in their list. Vainly offering
his life for Italy, he is not somatically, mentally, or emotionally an
Italian. Knowing her history, her traditions, and her reactions as few
of her sons have known them, until the war he had not sung her virtues
or mirrored her wondrous accomplishments of nation-building. His face
has steadily been turned not toward the east, where the sun of her glory
is arising, but toward the west, where he has revelled in the
resurrected glows of sunsets of pagan and Renaissance days. He has
treated his friends disdainfully when it suited his whim; he has meted
out contumely to his adulators when it pleased his fancy; he has
disdained those who have accused him; he has passed unnoticed those who
have sought to belittle him; and he has gone among his superiors as if
he were their king. He has been called everything save Philistine and
fool. He has been called the greatest literary figure of modern Italy
and it is likely that he merits it.
He is a poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist, politician, critic,
propagandist, prophet, aviator, hero, dictator, and self-constituted
arbiter of Italy's destinies.
Neither his peer nor his superior has ever denied him a rare
imagination, an artistic intelligence of extraordinary range, depth and
exquisiteness, a stupendous versatility and productiveness, a tireless
energy, a fearless daring and a supreme contempt for the feelings,
beliefs, and accomplishments of others.
There are two ways of approaching an estimate of D'Annunzio. One is to
analyze him--to set him up as a god or a monster and to dissect him and
study the elements of his complex mechanism, then put them together
patiently and laboriously as one puts together a jigsaw picture-puzzle.
It is the tempting way, but it risks injuring the sensibilities of his
admirers and the judicially minded who are so constituted that they
cannot pass judgment unless they are in possession of all the facts
concerning him and his career: what he did and the circumstances
attending the doing of them, that is, the environment in which they were
done--both that which he created and that which was thrust upon him.
Finally they want to view him in rest and in action. Then they are ready
to render a verdict in much the same way as a jury renders a verdict
with or without the analysis and summing up of the testimony and
evidence by proponent or opponent advocate. The way of synthesis would
be the way to approach an interpretation of D'Annunzio if the man were
under discussion, but here only an estimate of his literary career is
attempted.
There is no dearth of evidence to show that he was a precocious child
and a youth of prodigious intellectual acumen and prehensility, of
boundless self-confidence and fathomless egocentrism. His first
collection of verse, "Primo Vere" ("First Beginnings"), was published
when he was fifteen years old, and two years later he published a second
edition "corrected with pen and fire and augmented." From the beginning
it was pointed out by critic and commentator that he plagiarized line
and verse from poets of Italy, such as Giambattista Marino, Niccolo
Tommaseo, and Giosuè Carducci, and of other countries; but if the
accusations made any impression upon him it was not evident in his
future conduct, for later he took from Verga and Capuana, from Nietzsche
and Tolstoy, from Maeterlinck and Flaubert, from Ibsen and Dostoievsky,
and from countless others that which it pleased him to take.
His fame in Italy as a poet was heralded by the poet Giuseppe Chiarini,
who published an article which did for him what Octave Mirabeau's
article in the _Figaro_ of August 24, 1890, did for Maeterlinck. Before
he had reached his maturity he was hailed as the coming poet, whose
originality was admirable, whose sensuality was shocking but acceptable,
whose versatility was marvellous. There is nothing morbid, decadent, or
blatant in his early poems. In the "Canto Novo," published in 1882, he
displayed the torridity of his temperament, the splendor of his
imagination, the ardency of his loves, and the implacability of his
hatreds. It swept like a fire over Italy. It was a lyric of the joy of
life, "the immense joy of living, of being strong, of being young, of
biting with eager teeth the fruits of the earth, of looking with flaming
eyes upon the divine face of the world, as a lover looks upon his
mistress." It was followed in quick succession by "Terra Vergine,"
"Intermezzo di Rime," and "Il libro delle Vergini" ("The Book of the
Virgins"), which enhanced his reputation and caused the Italians to hail
him intemperately.
He then went to Rome and began work as a journalist, but this did not
interfere with his output of poetry, and by 1892, when he began
publishing romances, he had established, by the publication of "Isaotta
Guttadauro," the "Elegie romane" and the "Odi navali," a reputation with
the reading public of being the most appealing, most satisfying poet in
Italy, and the critics were not at all sure he would not surpass
Carducci, who was then considered Italy's greatest poet and whose fame
has steadily increased.
His fame as a poet being established to his own satisfaction he turned
to the field of romance, and in the next five years (1893-1898) there
flowed from the printing-presses a series of romances that veritably
flooded literary Italy: "L'Innocente," "Il Piacere," "Giovanni
Episcopo," "Trionfo della Morte," "Le Vergini delle Rocce," "Forse che
si forse che no," and the "Novelle della Pescara." They had a quality
that is not easily characterized by word or brief description. They were
"sensuous," "decadent," "daring," "shocking," "brilliant." They were
modelled on Flaubert, Prevost, Huysmans; they were saturated with the
philosophy of Nietzsche, the psychology of Ibsen, the mysticism of
Maeterlinck, the morality of Petronius; they reek of the bestialities of
Wilde and Verlaine; they are the glorification of pagan ethics; they are
the apotheosis of lust. But they were read, discussed, admired, praised,
not only in Italy but the world over. I doubt that praise was ever given
so lavishly, so widely, and so unjustifiably as was given to this series
of romances, which to-day, a generation after their publication, are as
constant a reminder of a wayward step which Italian literature took at
the end of the nineteenth century as the linea alba on the torso of a
woman whose reputation for virtue is established and admitted reminds
her of a faux pas of her youth.
In these volumes the author showed that he had a marvellous capacity to
depict states of exalted sensibility; that he had an extraordinary,
almost superhuman sensitiveness to beauty as it is revealed in nature
and in art; that he had a clairvoyant knowledge of the activity of the
unconscious mind of human beings and how it conditions their behavior
under circumstances and environments fortuitous or chosen--in other
words, until it is revealed to them behavioristically; that he had a
comprehensive familiarity with plastic and pictorial art; an intimacy
with ancient history and modern literature that was stupendous, and
withal a capacity to externalize his visions, his emotional elaboration,
and his mental content in words so linked together that the very
juxtaposition of them is a pleasure to the eye and a satisfaction to the
soul.
But that which he knew best of all was the history of eroticism. Not
only was he familiar with its ancestry to the remotest time, but he had
guarded its infant days with such solicitude that he knew every
impression that worldly contact made upon its plastic consciousness, and
when it got its growth he set to work to ornament it so that contact
with it would be the apogee of all beauty, intimacy with it the purpose
of all ambition, union with it the object of all strife.
There are features of his romances that cannot be adequately praised;
there are features that cannot be sufficiently condemned. A poem that
contains no particular thought may excite our profoundest admiration,
just as does a _papier-mâché_ triumphal arch or monument; but a romance
or novel depicts some phase or aspect of life, reveals man's aspirations
or accomplishments, his behaviors and reactions under certain
conditions, reflects his nobilities, depicts his frailties, and extols
his ambitions and what he would like to do, experience, or accomplish.
In a general way, it is expected that it shall be tuned to an ethical
pitch that will not give offense to the man of average Christian or
pagan morality, or outrage universally accepted and acceptable
convention. The most successful horticulturist in the world would find
no market for his roses, even though they were more exquisite than those
of all other florists, should he impregnate them with a scent obtained
from the Mustelidæ. This is what D'Annunzio did.
It would be very difficult to find a religion, a form of government, a
code of ethics, a type of beauty, a map of life, a canon of morals, a
custom, habit, or a convention that something could not be said in
praise of it. Bolshevism has its attractive facet, even though the
present-day proponents of it have got it so deeply submerged in the mire
of ambition and power, and so defaced with lust for revenge that it
cannot be recognized. There is scarcely any form of those various
indulgences and commissions which are labelled "vice" that have not some
commendable and praiseworthy feature, but there is one aberration of
human conduct that has never had a champion in the open. It is incest,
and Gabriele D'Annunzio is its champion. Concealed or openly, it goes
through his writings with the same constancy that streams flow through
plains that go out from glacier mountains. In the English translations
of his romances elaborate descriptions of other forms of perversion of
the genesic instinct have been largely expurgated, but it is impossible
to purge them entirely of the incest theme, for in many of his writings
it is beyond the verbal description. It is the atmosphere of the book.
Take, for instance, the novel "L'Innocente." On the face of it, it is
the narration of the conduct of a man who, having wedded a superior
woman of great intellectual charm and bodily attractions, yields to the
temptations of the life of dissipation in which he had distinguished
himself previous to an ideal matrimony and a contented paternity. He
realizes that his digressions are scandalous, and that their frequent
deliberate repetitions justify his wife in living apart from him, though
her love, being beyond control, still continues. They agree to live with
each other as brother and sister. The moment he succeeds in placing her
in his soul as his sister an irresistible impulse seizes him to have
carnal possession of her, and the burden of the book is a description of
his seduction of his own wife, who in the new covenant is his sister.
Meanwhile with consummate art he has described in the first chapter as
the only true love that which exists between brother and sister, his
apostrophe of it having been called forth by recalling the sister whom
death had fortunately removed.
Before he has accomplished the seduction of his wife-sister he has
precipitated her into a vulgar adventure with his own brother, a pattern
of all the virtues. It is a part of his consummate art to create
circumstantial evidence that will tend to put the paternity of her child
upon a fellow author who in other days had been civil and courteous to
his wife, and had sent her a copy of his latest book with an enigmatical
inscription on the fly-leaf, but in reality he succeeds in creating an
atmosphere from which one senses with readiness that the real father is
his brother. The book, in so far as it is concerned with the nobility of
Giuliana, the sweetness of life in the country, the lovability of her
mother and her children, the way in which Giuliana's emotions and
thought after the advent of the child are shaped that she may grow to
hate it as he hates it, as well as the mental elaborations that justify
him in seeking to destroy it, and the accomplishment of it, are done in
a way that shows the author to be not only intimately familiar with the
workings of the normal human mind but with the depraved human mind.
From the beginning of his literary career D'Annunzio was at no pains to
conceal that he was the model from which he painted his heroes. The
reader who identifies him with Tullio Hermil is the perspicacious
reader, in the eyes of the author; the reader who considers the conduct
of Tullio, infracting as it does the canons of law, of morality, and of
decency, as the conduct of a superman, is, in the judgment of the
author, the sapient reader. He who sees in Tullio and his conduct a
beast abnormally freighted with lubricity, lacking in inhibitory
qualities of a man unguided and uninfluenced by any obligation to God or
man, and knowing no other obligation than the pursuit of his own
pleasures and desires, is a fool, a weakling, an inanimate mass of
protoplasm moulded in the form of a human being unworthy of
consideration. D'Annunzio conceived himself a superman long before he
began to write romances, and I am not one of those who believe that he
got his conception from Nietzsche. He got it from the same indescribable
source that that unbalanced monster of materialism got his. Its roots if
they could be traced back to the days of the Hebrew prophets would be
found to have their germinal sprouts in some descendant of Samuel or
David.
D'Annunzio's romances are a mixture of materialism, sensualism, and
pessimism reduced in a pagan mortar to a homogeneous consistency, and
then skilfully admixed with honey so that it is acceptable to the
Christian palate, but, once it has got beyond the taste-buds of the
tongue, once it is taken into the system, its poisonous, corroding, and
destructive qualities become operative. I doubt if D'Annunzio ever wrote
a word or line in his plays or romances that any one was the better for
having read or heard, and by better I mean that he added to his
spiritual possessions, to his inherent nobility, or to his aspirations
for a moral perfection, one iota. I doubt if any normal human being,
normal physically, mentally, and spiritually, can read "Il Piacere"
without feeling ill and humiliated, not because of the picture that the
author draws of himself in the guise of Andrea Sperelli, this finished
expert in the employments of love, nor of Donna Maria, nor of the woman
more infernally expert in those matters, nor the score of other
characters which he paints with a master-hand, but because of the way in
which he draws his bow across the overtaut strings of sensuousness until
they scream and wail in frenzied fashion and then finally burst asunder.
The way in which he makes an appeal to his perverted sensuality through
vicarious overstimulation of the senses with which he was endowed for
self-conservation and self-preservation, the senses of smell and sight
and touch and hearing, is in itself a perversion. He stimulates them
until they shriek for mercy or for immersion in some benumbing balm. The
true pervert is he who puts out of proportion and out of perspective the
sources of æsthetic emanation, and who concentrates them upon the
percipient apparatus of one or other of the senses so that it may be
excited to a frenzied activity. The description of Andrea's room, in
which he awaits Donna Maria, with its perfumes, lights, and colors, and
the description of his toilet articles and his bedroom is one of the
most nauseating things in all literature. Like Nietzsche, D'Annunzio
looks upon women as creatures of an inferior race, instruments of
pleasure and procreation who were created to serve. When they no longer
are amusing, useful, or serviceable they are to be brushed aside and
with the same _sang froid_ as one would put aside an automobile that had
broken down, worn out, or because it's "corpo non è più giovane," as he
kept saying of Foscarina in "Il Fuoco," who belonged to him, "like the
thing one holds in his fist, like the ring on one's finger, like a
glove, like a garment, like a word that may be spoken or not, like a
draft that may be drunk or poured on the ground."
In "Vergini delle Rocce" he expounds the theory that inequality is the
essence of the state, and in this book as well as in "Il Trionfo della
Morte" we find all the passion of language and of sentiment that one
finds in Nietzsche. It is no longer to be doubted that he had kept his
word "noi tendiamo l'orecchio alla voce del magnanimo Zarathustra e
prepariamo nell' arte con sicura fede l'avvento del Uebermensch del
superuomo"--we listen to the voicing of the magnanimous Zarathustra and
we prepare with unfaltering faith for the coming of the superman to the
arts.
In his life of Cola di Rienzo D'Annunzio again took occasion to lampoon
and traduce the common people, describing them as the great beast which
must be crushed and annihilated. "Il Trionfo della Morte" is the very
essence of Heraclitan philosophy and Dionysan ethics. The hero, who is a
paragon of knowledge which he displays for the reader's edification,
meets the young and pretty wife of a business man who bores her. He is
successful finally in permitting her to pass a few weeks with him in his
villa by the sea. During these weeks they run the gamut of every
conceivable sensation and the reader gets a description of them and of
the gradual hatred that develops in him for his subjection of her.
"Every human soul carries in it for love a definite quality of sensitive
force. This quality is used up with time and when it is used up no
effort can prevent love from ceasing." But, unlike the animal when his
concupiscence is satiated and he is still urged to greater display, the
hero is not content with driving her from him; he must needs mete out
the same fate to her that he did to the infant in "Il Piacere," so he
lures her to the edge of a sea cliff and hurls her into space. "She
would in death become for me matter of thought, pure ideality; from a
precarious and imperfect existence she would enter into an existence
complete and definite, forsaking forever the infirmities of her weak,
luxurious flesh. Destroy to possess. There is no other way for him who
seeks the absolute in love."
The reader yields to the enchantment of his style, to the seductiveness
of his lyrism, to the intoxications of his descriptions of beauty; and
the critic and fellow writer to his mastery of technic and consummate
mastery of behavioristic psychology. From the critics' point of view
"The Triumph of Death" and "The Fire" are the high-water marks of
D'Annunzio as a stylist, and they mark his completest moral dissolution.
In "Il Fuoco" we get the same ethics, philosophy, æsthetics, and
glorification of sensuousness that we get in all his other books. Here
the two leading characters are exact replicas of himself and of the
world's greatest actress of her day portrayed in an environment, Venice,
that is redolent of beauty in decay, like a cracked Grecian vase
overfilled with withered rose leaves which fall from it at every puff of
wind. This environment makes an ideal palette upon which he blends the
colors whose pigments he has been selecting and experimenting with for a
quarter of a century. The publication of it promoted his voluntary exile
from Italy. His fellow countrymen could not condone the monstrous
offense of depicting therein as the pliant mediator of his perverted
sensuousness their beloved actress. And they have not yet forgiven him,
nor are they likely to forgive him.
After D'Annunzio had established a reputation as a neoromanticist with a
classical tendency he turned to drama, and the year 1897 marked his
advent into that field. His first efforts, three one-act parables--"The
Foolish Virgins and the Wise Virgins," "The Rich Man and Poor Lazarus,"
and "The Prodigal Son"--were published in the _Mattino_ of Naples, a
newspaper controlled by the husband of his friend and fellow writer,
Matilde Serao. They are noteworthy merely to show the way in which a
sensuous pagan can transform simple characters into decadent, perverted
proselyters of pleasure. It was not until he wrote "The Dream of a
Spring Morning" and "The Dream of an Autumn Sunset" that he displayed
the same measure of lascivious imagery and capacity for description of
the perverse manifestations of eroticism that he revealed in his
romances. These were revealed in lines that truly may be said to be
masterpieces of lyric beauty, and when the Mad Woman of the first and
the Messalina of the second were interpreted by Eleanora Duse the
musical sound of the words and the emotional force of the sentiment
gained a quality of importance and grandeur which enhanced their
inherent qualities.
In "La Città Morta," his most successful drama, he returned to his
favorite topic, incest. Though his purpose in writing it, the most
successful of all his dramas, was to revive in form, structure, and
unity the Greek drama, it gave him an opportunity to display his
knowledge of the classics and archæology. The philosophy and mysticism
of the play he got from Maeterlinck. Its theme is lust and crime. Lust
is portrayed in almost every conceivable form of perversion, in poetic
thoughts and graceful diction, especially in the delineation of
Leonardo, the explorer, who lusts for his sister. The dreamy, meditative
languor of the dramatis personæ, their insensitiveness to every form of
ethical conformation, their perversion of every form of moral
relationship, constitute an atmosphere that the northerner does not
breath pleasurably. It was thoroughly purged before it was put on the
boards in this country.
His next play, "La Gioconda," is an exposition of the exemption which
D'Annunzio thinks the artist of his own superman caliber should have
from conforming to the laws of estate or custom. The contention is a
simple one. He should do anything that he pleases--which means give
himself over to the pleasure of the senses and the appetites until the
indulgence is followed by satiety and thus his progress toward
perfection through gratification of desires will be accomplished. After
satiety comes disgust, and then a period of dementia, but this is merely
the prelude to another fling of erotic fury in his conformation to the
doctrine of purification through pleasure.
The hero is a psychopathic individual, sensitive, aboulic, distractible,
impressionable, impulsive, vacillating, and suicidal. He is married to a
woman who apparently has every beauty of soul and body that a woman can
have. But, alas, she is virtuous! She has not the key to the
jewel-casket of his genius. That is possessed by his model Gioconda
Dianti, the source of all his inspirations. One quiver of her eyelid
causes his soul to dissolve like sugar in water, while two make him feel
that he is lord of the universe.
The tragedy of the play is the permanent mutilation of the wife's hands,
the only somatic feature that has "appealed" to the artist. She attempts
to save his masterpiece which the model pushes over in temper on being
told falsely that she is to be banished. Her mutilated hands serve to
remind her the rest of her life that virtue is its own reward.
The two dramas of D'Annunzio which are best known to the
English-speaking public are "La Figlia d'Jorio" and "Francesca di
Rimini." "The Daughter of Jorio" is a tragedy laid in the mountains of
Abruzzi. D'Annunzio knows the customs, habits, and traditions of the
shepherds and mountaineers, their superstitions and emotions, as he
knows art, archæology, and eroticism. The first act is a description of
the betrothal of the son of a brutal shepherd to a simple girl with whom
he is not particularly in love. At the ceremony of betrothal the
daughter of Jorio, who is suspected to have evil powers, claims
protection from certain shepherds who had designs upon her. The first
impulse of the joyous party was to cast her out, but when the betrothed
young man was about to do so he saw behind her his lustful desire
presented to his eyes in the guise of an angel, which made him hesitate,
and the daughter of Jorio was allowed to remain. In the next act he is
seen as her lover. He quarrels about her with his father and kills him.
The parricide's punishment is to be sewed into a sack with a dog, a
cock, a viper, and a monkey and cast into the sea. The daughter of Jorio
comes to the rescue and convinces the people that she is the real
criminal. Eros is unconquerable.
In "Francesca di Rimini," a historical play filled with erudite
archæological details, he displays a knowledge of the thirteenth century
and of the customs of the time which has never been excelled save by
historical writers. It is a picture of war and bloodshed, of treachery
and accusation. The central theme is the love of Francesca and Paolo.
They may be taken as the typical human beings of the thirteenth-century
Italy, fond of luxury and beautiful things but savage in their
reactions. Perhaps Francesca is one of the best feminine figures that
D'Annunzio has ever drawn.
In 1904 there appeared two volumes entitled "Praises of the Sky, the
Sea, the Earth and of Heroes." After that period his tragedies, "The
Light under the Bushel," "The Ship," "Fedra," and "The Mystery of San
Sebastian" appeared in French, and soon he adopted France as his home,
having previously published a spiritual autobiography of eight thousand
four hundred lines entitled "Laus Vitæ," in which he summarizes the
motives of his past and lays the basis of his new inspiration.
D'Annunzio's war poems have all been inspired with the belief that
Italy's future lies on the sea. It is much to be regretted that they
have not yet been collected into a single volume. When it is done he
will not unlikely be recognized as the most legitimate of Pindar's
descendants. Undoubtedly he will want them to be the conspicuous,
permanent wreath on his tomb. The Libyan War inspired him to the
production of his noblest war poetry, "Canzoni della Gesta d'Oltremare"
("Songs of Achievements across the Sea").
In the "Canzoni di Mario Bianco" he foresaw the beginning of a new era
for Italy, and he forecast the aspirations and promises of the third
Italy. His "Canzone del Quarnaro" describes the raid of the three
Italian torpedo-boats on the Buccari, a few miles to the southeast of
Fiume. It is short and forceful. The introductory "beffa" describes the
raid in detail. D'Annunzio is inordinately fond of using Christian
imagery, and he reverts to it here in the distribution of his little
tricolor flags, which has a mystic import. "It is a true eucharistic
sacrament, the closest and most complete communion of the spirit with
beautiful Italy. There is no need of consecrating words; the tricolor
wafer was converted through our faith into the living beauty of our
country. We are purified, we are sundered from the shore and from our
daily habits, separated from the land and all vulgar cares, from our
homes and from all useless idleness, from profane love and all base
desires; we are immune from the thought of return."
The "Cantico per l'ottava della Vittoria" is a wish fulfilment for him.
As the boat enters the Quarnaro and runs up the coast of Istria it is,
for D'Annunzio, the guarantor of the treaty of London, and he sees all
the cities and islands of this coast restored to Italy, and these cities
and all the places hallowed by the war join in the pæan of triumph.
In "Songs of Achievements across the Sea" D'Annunzio established an
incontestable claim to be the great inspiring poet, even the prophet, of
his generation in Italy, and he produced work which has not been
surpassed, but he was still the poet only, singer of the deeds of
others, in which he had no share himself. The contrast between his
pretensions and his achievements made the affectations of his early
years appear ridiculous to many people, and tended to obscure the true
value of his work. He was still seeking and the years that followed in
Paris showed that he had discovered no new world to explore, but when
Italy joined the Allies he suddenly found himself. All the brooding
sense of incomplete achievement of other days vanished in a moment. The
speeches and addresses that he delivered between May 4 and 25, 1915,
showed that he had been preparing for what he knew would be "The Day"
for him.
It was widely believed in Italy in 1917 and 1918 that on the evening of
May 4, 1915, when D'Annunzio addressed a meeting at Quarto to
commemorate an anniversary of Garibaldi's departure with his faithful
thousand to deliver Sicily and Naples from the Bourbon yoke, and a few
days later when he addressed them in the Costanzi Theatre in Rome and
then went with the enormous crowd to ring the bell of the Campidoglio,
the signal was given for the declaration of war against Austria and
Germany.
The last books of D'Annunzio, illustrating his new attitude toward life,
are "La Leda senza-cigno" ("Leda without the Swan"), "Per la più grande
Italia" ("For Greater Italy"), "La Beffa di Buccari" ("Buccari's Joke"),
"La Riscossa" ("The Rescue"), "Bestetti e Tuminelli" ("Italy and
Death"), "Contro Uno e contro Tutti" ("Against One and against All"),
and a series of volumes under the title of "The Archives of Icarius,"
which are all concerned with incidents in the Great War.
It is too soon to attempt to guess the pedestal that posterity will
allot Gabriele D'Annunzio in the gallery of fame. The committee that
will do it will estimate his qualifications of lyric poet and Hellenic
dramatist--perhaps as warrior.
D'Annunzio is a poet who abounds in lyrical ecstacies. His style is the
most remarkable thing about him. He describes armor, architecture,
archæology like an expert. He knows the dynamic point of view. He knows
how to depict dramatic situations. His personages are all living
personages. He is concerned with the neurotic, decadent, hectic,
temperamental type of human beings. All his characters have a love of
beauty. He is the true decadent of the nineteenth-century literature, to
whom the decadent French symbolists cannot hold a candle.
After he had sucked the luscious orange of Italy dry and eaten of its
pomegranates to satiety; after he had exhausted sensation in the search
for sensation and he could no longer hope for stimulation from vision,
from image, from sound, from color; when the nets of Eros were so
lacerated and worn from having been dragged upon the rocks and crags of
life; when Italian food, though appetizingly spiced and washed down with
rare vintage of the Castelli Romani, would no longer nourish him, he
abandoned his native land and went to France. His writings while in
France were like those of a man who is dominated by a dementia following
a protracted delirium, and as he emerged from this dementia he published
a pietistic piece called "The Contemplation of Death." It seems to have
been suggested to him by the death of the poet Pascoli, for whom he
professed an admiration, but more particularly by Adolfo Bermond, whom
he had met after he went to France and who apparently had been able to
depict the beauties of humility so that they were recognizable to
D'Annunzio. In his fatigued, emotional, and enfeebled mental state he
asked himself whether humility was not more desirable than pride, love
not stronger than hate, spiritual aristocracy more ennobling than
aristocracy of blood, of money, of brain, of privilege. In this state of
mock humility he wrote: "I always feel above me the presence of the
sacrifice of Christ. I see now that the glory of my life is not in the
beauty of my possessions. I have never felt so miserable and at the same
time so powerful. Never since I lived have I had within me an instinct,
a need so deep and so storming. I am aware that a part of my being,
maybe the best part, is deeply asleep within me." But soon this
spiritual awakening was throttled by the influence of Nietzsche. "What
will become of me if I surrender wholly to the Saviour? Surely I want
the world to know if in my life, filled with base instincts, there comes
the moment of changing. Even if my glory be destroyed I will not be a
prisoner to the worse that speaks within me." It was from that hour that
he decided to be the Garibaldi of the third Italy. He would then be
another Gabriel standing in the presence of God and sent to speak to
them and show them glad tidings.
It was a strange awakement that D'Annunzio had when he went to Rome in
the early '90's. Perhaps it was before that time that he encountered
"L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable," and later
"La Sagesse et la Destinée," and he absorbed some of its æsthetic
mysticism. He realized that it was another variety of search for wisdom
because it is happiness, and he began to portray it in his poetry and
tragedies. From the day he began to write he accustomed himself to take
as it pleased him from others' writings, and not only lines and
paragraphs but subjects, movements, cadences, thoughts, and images which
determined the character and decided the nature of the production.
Italian critics have taken the trouble to return to the original
creators the borrowed constituents of some of his productions,
"L'Asiatico," for instance; and that which then remained was the
caressing modulation of the verses. When his romances appeared in French
many of the passages taken bodily from Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, de
Maupassant, Pêladan, de Goncourt, Huysmans, and many others were
prudently suppressed. But no one can fail to recognize that he read
these authors with a keen eye, a note-book by his side. But he has known
how to use what he borrowed. The day came when the conduct of a corrupt
people in a decadent fictitious world no longer sufficed to divert him;
having drunk from the poisoned springs of lust not only to satiety but
to disgust, he, like his prototype of Huysmans's creation, "Des
Esseintes," the Thebaide raffinée of "A Rebours," must hide himself away
far from the world, in some retreat where he might deaden the discordant
sounds of the rumblings of inflexible life, as one deadens the street
with straw where an important or beloved one is sick. This retreat was
Paris and there we must leave him making scenic plays and erudite verse
for a Russian ballerina, and working out his destiny in contemplation of
death and in planning the selection of warriors for Valhalla.
We are not concerned with his conduct or with his morals. We are
concerned with his activities to divert and instruct us, and the
influence that his efforts had upon the people of his time. He wrote
artistically perfect novels; his poetry is the highest form of lyric
expression; he made his dramas the revivification of the elements of
Greek tragedy; and he strove to prove that Eros was unconquerable by
priest, sage, or warrior. Now, with the world in ferment, they are the
only earnest for our acceptation of his assurance that he can shape the
fate of Italy more acceptably than its statesmen.
Before the Great War he had practically passed from the stage of
letters. That epochal occurrence resurrected him. We can wait to hear
what posterity will say of him.