MAZZINI, the most prophetic figure of the nineteenth century,
declared in a famous passage his confidence in the European mission
of his country. ‘The Third Italy,’ destined to be born of the long
agony of the struggle with Austria without and the papacy within,
was not merely to be a nation, restored to unity and independence;
it was to intervene as an original voice in the complex harmony of
the European nationalities, contributing of its own inborn genius
something distinctive and unique. ‘We believe devoutly that Italy has
not exhausted her life in the world. She is called to introduce yet
new elements in the progressive development of humanity, and to live
with a third life. It is for us to begin it.’ Were Mazzini to return
to life to-day, how far would he regard his prophecy as fulfilled?
Beyond question his lofty idealism would find much to disapprove and
to regret. He would find a Third Italy, which has committed grave
excesses in the name of her recovered nationhood. But he would also
find a nation whose present rulers have shown more capacity for
Mazzinean internationalism than any other European government. And he
would find, also, in the Third Italy, a real renascence, a genuine
rebirth of genius and power, and this in ways so individual as to
justify in a rare degree the anticipation that Italy would give
something vitally her own to the new Europe. Open any serious Italian
book to-day, and you will note a kind of intellectual concentration,
a girding up of the loins of speech and thought, in striking contrast
with the loose-tongued volubility of most Italian writing, in verse
or prose, of the mid-nineteenth century. You note also a new tone of
critical mastery and conscious equality. Italy in the last century was
still the ‘woman-people,’ the pathetic beauty, languid still after
the gentle torpor of two centuries, and whose intellectual life, with
some brilliant isolated exceptions, faintly reflected that of the
more masculine nations north of the Alps. To-day she has not only
critically mastered all that Europe has to give, she sits in judgment
upon us, and the judgment she pronounces has again and again been of
that fruitful kind which disposes of old difficulties by revealing a
larger law. Benedetto Croce, who in his review, the _Critica_, brings
the literature of Europe, weighed and measured, to his reader’s doors,
has in his original philosophic work subjected her philosophic systems
to a searching revision, and has succeeded in some measure to their
authority.[20] A thinker less known, even to cultivated Italians,
Aliotta, has surveyed in a book of singular penetration and philosophic
power, the ‘idealistic reaction against science’ in the nineteenth
century. And when we look to creative literature, we find in this Third
Italy, together with a profusion of those fungoid growths of which the
modern age has in the West been everywhere prolific, a group of poets,
of powerful temperament and dazzling gifts, to whom no predecessor,
in Italy or elsewhere, offers more than a distant resemblance. One
of these, after pouring forth poems, dramas, novels, in prodigal
abundance for thirty years, became the most vociferous, and possibly
the most potent, of the forces that drove Italy into the war, and was
until lately the idol of the whole Italian race. Even to-day, after
the sorry collapse of his adventure, the man in whom Europe, irritated
and impatient, sees only a sort of Harlequin-Garibaldi, impudent
where his predecessor was sublime, and florid where he was laconic,
is still, for multitudes of his countrymen, the hero-poet who took
the banner of _Italianità_ from the failing or treacherous hands of
diplomats and statesmen, and defended it against the enemy without
and the enemy within, with the tenacity of maturity and the ardour of
youth. Certainly, one who is beyond all rivalry the most adored poet,
in any country, of our time, who has fought for Italy with tongue
and pen and risked his life in her service, and whose personality
might be called a brilliant impressionist sketch of the talents and
failings of the Italian character, reproducing some in heightened but
veracious illumination, others in glaring caricature or paradoxical
distortion--such a man, as a national no less than as a literary
force, claims and deserves close study.
Before entering, however, upon the detail of his life and work, let
me assist our imagination of Gabriele d’Annunzio by quoting from the
vivid description given by Mr. James Bone of a meeting with him at
Venice in the summer of 1918. The poet, fifty-six years old, was then
at the height of his renown; Fiume was still unthought of. His great
exploit of flying over Vienna and dropping leaflets inviting her in
aureate imagery to make peace was on every tongue. The gondoliers
took off their hats as they passed his house on the Grand Canal, and
he had to register all his letters to prevent their being abstracted
as souvenirs. Mr. Bone was talking with the airmen at an aerodrome on
one of the islands in the lagoons; when ‘Conversation died instantly
as an airman, very different from the others, came hurrying towards
us a rather small, very quick, clean-cut figure, wearing large smoked
glasses and white gloves with the wrists turned down.... The nose was
rather prominent, complexion not dark but marked a little, the whole
profile very clear, making one think not of a Renaissance Italian but
of a type more antique, an impression accentuated by his rather large,
beautifully shaped ear, very close to the head. The body denied the age
that was told in the face, for all its firmness. One’s first impression
was of a personality of extraordinary swiftness and spirit still at
full pressure, remorselessly pursuing its course “in hours of insight
willed.”... The whole surface of d’Annunzio’s personality suggested
a rich, hard fineness, like those unpolished marbles in old Italian
churches that gleam delicately near the base where the worshippers have
touched them, but above rise cold and white as from the matrix....
There was something of the man of fashion in the way he wore his
gloves, and in his gestures, but nothing one could see of the national
idol aware of itself.’[21]
I
The soldier-poet-man-of-fashion, who wore his fifty-six years thus
lightly, was born, in 1862, at Pescara, the chief--almost only--town
of the Abruzzi, then one of the wildest and rudest provinces of Italy.
Its valleys, descending from the eastern heights of the Apennines to
the Adriatic, were inhabited by an almost purely peasant population--a
hardy, vigorous race, tenacious of their primitive customs, and
little accessible to cultural influences. The Church enjoyed their
fanatical devotion, but only at the price of tacitly accepting many
immemorial pagan usages disguised by an unusually transparent veil
of Catholic ritual; while the Law occasionally found it expedient
to leave a convicted murderer (as in the _Figlia di Iorio_) to be
executed by an angry multitude according to the savage methods their
tradition prescribed. The little haven of Pescara--one of the few
on Italy’s featureless Adriatic coast--was the centre of a coasting
traffic with the yet wilder Dalmatian seaboard, a traffic which like
all ancient sea-faring, pursued its economic aims in an atmosphere of
superstitious observance, mystical, picturesque, and sometimes cruel.
In the poetic autobiography (‘The Soul’s Journey’) which occupies the
first _Laude_ (1903), d’Annunzio sketches vividly his boyhood’s home in
this Abruzzan country overlooking the sea. Of the persons who composed
this home, of family affections, we have only momentary retrospective
glimpses. We hear of the father, long dead when he wrote, from whom
he derived his iron-tempered muscles; and of the mother, who gave him
his insatiable ardour of will and desire. The three sisters seem to
have been like him; the face of the second sister resembled his own
‘mirrored in a clear fountain at dawn.’ All that stood between them,
he says, was their innocence and his passion. There was, too, an
old nurse, to whom in her serene old age, when she had retired to a
mountain hamlet, the poet addressed some tenderly beautiful stanzas,
contrasting his own stormy career with her idyllic peace as she ‘spins
the wool of her own flocks while the oil holds out.’[22]
But of household drama, such as dominates the experience of most
children, little seems to have existed for this child. Certainly it
vanishes completely, in the retrospect of the man of forty, beside
the drama enacted with prodigious intensity of colour, animation, and
passion, by his imperious senses. The contrast is here acute between
d’Annunzio and his co-heir of the Carduccian tradition, Pascoli, whose
poignant memories of childhood, instead of being effaced by the energy
of his sense-life, permeate it through and through, giving a ‘deep
autumnal tone’ to almost every line he wrote. He spoke in later life
of his ‘profound sensuality’ as a gift which had brought him poetic
discoveries denied to colder men, and this is no doubt true if by
‘sensuality’ we understand, as we ought, that d’Annunzio is prodigally
endowed with all the senses, that eye and ear feast on the glory and
the music of the world and live in its teeming life, that his lithe
body thrills with the zest of motion, that imagery is the material
of his thinking and the stuff of his speech; and that the passion of
sex, so acutely and perilously developed in him, is just one element
in this prodigal endowment of his entire sense-organism, itself a main
source of the artistic splendour of his work. In the early pages of the
_Viaggio_ we see the young boy drinking in with a kind of intoxication
the simple sights and sounds of the farm--the rhythmic fall of the
flails on the threshing-floor, the pouring of the whey from the churn,
the whirr of the spool in the loom, the scampering of wild ponies with
streaming manes over the hillside; or again, out at sea, the gorgeous
scarlet or gold sails scudding before the wind, each with its symbolic
sign. Even the inanimate world became for his transfiguring senses
alive; ‘it was a lying voice,’ he cries, ‘that declared that Pan is
dead.’ The mere contrasts of things, the individual self-assertion
shown by a tree, for instance, in not being a rock, produced in him
an excitement analogous to that which made Rupert Brooke, in his
own words, ‘a lover’ of all kinds of common things for being just
definitely and unmistakably what they were. So that a conception
apparently so thin and abstract as ‘difference’ can assume for him the
shape and potency of an alluring divinity: ‘Diversity,’ he cries, ‘the
siren of the world! I am he who love thee!’
And then, with adolescence, came the passion of sex; for d’Annunzio no
shy and gradual discovery, but a veritable explosion, before which all
obstacles, moral and material, vanished into air. He tells it with the
frankness of a child of the South, and the self-conscious importance
of an egoist for whom the events of his own physical history could
only be fitly described in terms of epic poetry, with its contending
nationalities and ruined or triumphant kings. ‘O flesh!’ he cries,
‘I gave myself up to thee, as a young beardless king gives himself
up to the warrior maid who advances in arms, terrible and beautiful.
She advances victorious, and the people receive her with rejoicing.
Astonishment strikes the gentle king, and his hope laughs at his
fear.’[23] And from the first this new passion allies itself with the
rest of his sense-organism, irradiating eye and ear and imagination,
‘giving to every power a double power,’ as Biron says in _Love’s
Labour’s Lost_. ‘Thou wast sometimes as the grape pressed by fiery
feet, O flesh, sometimes as snow printed with bleeding traces; I seemed
to feel in thee the twisting of trodden roots, and to hear the far-off
grinding of the axe upon the whetstone.’ The young erotic was already
growing towards that observant psychologist of eroticism who pervades
so many gorgeous but repulsive pages of his novels.
He was also growing, more slowly and as yet invisibly, to other and
more notable things. In the first published poems of the boy of
eighteen, and the second, _Canto Novo_, two years later, there is not
much more than the reflexion of this intense and pervading ‘sensuality’
(in the large meaning above indicated), in a speech moulded upon
the diction and rhythms of Carducci. The great master, then at the
height of his fame, had still to do much of his most splendid work.
D’Annunzio, who never ceased to revere him, was to become his principal
inheritor; but the heir added so much of his own to the bequest that
he can only at the outset be regarded as his disciple. The elder
poet’s influence was in any case entirely salutary. The classical
severity and nobility of style which distinguish the _Rime Nove_ and
the _Odi Barbare_ from the florid and facile romantic verse of the
day, contributed to temper the dangerous luxuriance of d’Annunzio,
and to evoke the powers of self-discipline and tenacious will which
lay within; while Carducci’s exultation in radiance and clarity, his
noonday view of life, his symbolic sun-worship and his hatred of all
twilight obscurantism and moonlight nebulosity, equally enforced the
more virile strain in d’Annunzio, the ‘stalk of carle’s hemp’ which,
far more truly than in Burns, underlay the voluptuous senses.
This background of harder and tougher nature was already manifested
when d’Annunzio, a few years later, turned to tell in prose some
stories of his native province. There is little in the _Novelle della
Pescara_ of love, less of luxury or refinement; we see the Abruzzan
village folk at feud, fanatical and ferocious, the women inciting the
men, the Church in its most ceremonial robes blandly but helplessly
looking on. _The Idolators_ tells how the men of a certain village
plan to set the bronze statue of their saint upon the church altar of
another neighbouring village. They assemble at night and march through
the darkness with the image on a cart. In the other village the men
await them in force, and a savage battle takes place in the church,
ending in the rout of the assailants with much slaughter, and the
ignominious mutilation of the image of their patron saint. And all
this grim matter is told in a style admirably strong and terse, bold
and sharp in outline, direct and impersonal in statement, untouched
by either delicate feeling or weak sentimentality. D’Annunzio’s
sensuality asserts itself still, as always; but it appears here as a
Rubens-like joy in intense impressions; now a copper-coloured storm
sky, now a splash of blood, betrays his passion for the crude effects
of flame and scarlet, most often where they signify death or ruin. He
imagines voluptuously as always, but his voluptuousness here feeds not
in the lust of the flesh, but in the lust of wounds and death. When
he describes the fighting in the church, he spares you as little as
Homer; you are not told merely that a man was stabbed, you are made to
see the blade shear away the flesh from the bone. His men are drawn
with the same hard, pungent stroke, and a visible relish for scars,
gnarled features, frayed dress, and all the maimings and deformities,
which tell not of weakness or decay, but of battles recent or long
ago, the blows and buffets received in the tug with fortune. There is
little trace of sybarite effeminacy in the painting of old Giacobbe,
for instance, the leader of the insurgents, a tall, bony man, with bald
crown and long red hairs on nape and temples, two front teeth wanting,
which gave him a look of senile ferocity, a pointed chin covered with
bristles, and so forth.
D’Annunzio was intrinsically of the Abruzzan race; the tough hardy
fibre of the peasant folk was his; and it was the deep inborn
attachment to his blood and kin which produced, twenty years later, his
greatest work, as a like attachment lifted Mr. Shaw, almost at the same
moment, to the rare heights of _John Bull’s Other Island_. But much had
to happen to the young provincial before he could thus discover to the
full the poetry of his province.