The clear understanding of a divergence should result in a common
ground of departure, of sympathy, and to make this plainer still it
ought to be added that in the question of taste, of the latitude
of allowable material and treatment, the Italians are far more
comprehensive than ourselves. This, certainly, is particularly true in
their attitude toward the relation of the sexes; and here is, perhaps,
the greatest difference between what might be loosely called a Latin
literature and an Anglo-Saxon. We are almost exclusively interested
in the results, the reactions, of sexual contacts; but the former have
their gaze fixed keenly on the process itself. At the most we indicate
that consummations of passion have occurred, and then turn, with a
feeling of relief, to what we are convinced is the greater importance
of its consequences.
But not only is Gabriele D’Annunzio perfectly within his privilege in
lingering over any important, act of nature, he is equally at liberty
to develop all the smaller expressions of lust practically barred from
English or American pens. These, undeniably, have as large an influence
in one country, one man, as in another; they are—as small things are
apt to be—more powerful in the end than the greatest attributes. Yet
while we have agreed to ignore them, to discard them as ignoble and
obscene, in “Tales of My Native Town” erotic gestures and thoughts,
libidinous whispers, play their inevitable devastating part.
Yet this is not a book devoted to such impulses; one tale only,
although in many ways that is the best, has as its motive lust. It
is rather in the amazingly direct treatment of disease, of physical
abnormality, that it will be disturbing to the unprepared reader
from an entirely different and less admirable, or, at any rate, less
honest, convention. Undoubtedly D’Annunzio’s unsparing revelation of
human deformity and ills will seem morbid to the unaccustomed mind;
but, conversely, it can be urged that the dread of these details is
in itself morbid. Then, too, we have an exaggerated horror of the
unpleasant, a natural, but saccharine, preference for happiness. As
a nation we are not conspicuously happier than Italy, but we clamour
with a deafening insistence for the semblance of a material good
fortune. Meeting pain no better and no worse than other nations, from
our written stories we banish it absolutely; but anyone who cares to
realise the beauty that, beyond question, pervades the following pages
will be obliged to harden himself to meet precisely the deplorable
accidents that he must face wherever life has been contaminated by
centuries of brutal ignorance, oppression and want.
Again, it is not in the larger aspects, the nobler phases, of suffering
with which we are concerned, but in the cold revelation of rasping
details, brutal sores and deformity, the dusty spiders of paralysis. If
this were all it would be hideous beyond support; but, fortunately, the
coldness is only in the method, there is a saving spirit of pity, the
valid humanity born of understanding. Such horror as exists here is the
result of D’Annunzio’s sensitive recognition of the weight of poverty
and superstition crushing men into unspeakable fatalities of the flesh.
A caustic humour, as well, illuminates the darker pits of existence,
ironic rather than satirical, bitter rather than fatalistic; and then
admirably exposing the rough play of countrymen like the rough wine
of their Province. In addition there is always, for reassurance, the
inclusion of the simple bravery that in itself leavens both life and
books with hope.