The last word of the Isaotta idyll--_sovrumano_--rendered above
‘divine,’ was an early symptom of a development of formidable
significance in the prose and poetry of d’Annunzio during the next
twenty years. The ‘Superman’ had not yet been discovered when he was a
boy, but the spirit to which _sovrumanità_ appeals had from the first
run in his blood. His passion for sensation, for strong effects, for
energy, even for ferocity and cruelty, was the concomitant of a genius
that strove to shatter obstacles, to bend others to its will, and
reshape its experience, as the opposite genius of Pascoli submissively
accepted experience, hearing in all its vicissitudes reverberations of
the mournful memories in which his soul was steeped. When d’Annunzio
accordingly, in the early nineties, discovered the work of Nietzsche,
he experienced that liberation which comes to every man who meets with
a coherent exposition of the meaning of his own blind impulses, and a
great new word for his confused and inarticulate aims. In Nietzsche he
found a mind more congenial to him perhaps than any other he had known,
more even than that of his master Carducci, but, unlike his, congenial
mainly to what was most perilous and ill-omened in himself. He loftily
admitted the German his equal, a great concession, and when Nietzsche
died, in 1900, wrote a noble dirge ‘to the memory of a destroyer,’--of
the _Barbaro enorme_ ‘who lifted up again the serene gods of Hellas on
to the vast gates of the Future.’
When d’Annunzio wrote these words the Hellenic enthusiasms, nourished
by his acute sense of beauty in a nature utterly wanting in the
Hellenic poise, had won, partly through Nietzsche’s influence, an
ascendancy over his imagination which made it natural for him to render
the Superman in Hellenic terms. The serene gods of Hellas symbolized
for him the calmness of absolute mastery, of complete conquest, all
enemies trampled under foot or flung to the eternal torments of Erebus.
This mood detached him wholly from Shelley, and Byron, and the young
Goethe. They had gloried in Prometheus, the spirit of man struggling
against supreme deity on its Olympian heights, and finally overthrowing
it; whereas d’Annunzio, like the riper Goethe, adores the secure
serenity of Olympus. ‘O Zeus, Father of Serene Day, how much fairer
than the chained and howling Iapetid seemed in thy eyes the silent
mountain and its vast buttresses fresh with invisible springs.’ And
besides Prometheus, Zeus has another enemy, Christ--the foe of beauty,
and lord of the herd of slaves with their slave-morality of pity and
submission. ‘O Zeus, he cries, I invoke thee, awaken and bring on the
Morrow! Make the fire of heaven thy ploughshare to plough the Night!
Thou only canst purify Earth from its piled-up filth.’
We are not to look in all this for even so much of definite ethical or
philosophic content as we find in Nietzsche. If Nietzsche was a poet
imagining in philosophic terms rather than a philosopher, d’Annunzio
was hardly capable of abstract thought at all. On the other hand,
Nietzsche could still less rival d’Annunzio in creative faculty, and
the series of d’Annunzian characters inspired or touched by the spirit
of Nietzschean _sovrumanità_ may be set against the richer intellectual
and spiritual substance of _Zarathustra_. No doubt this influence was
in the main disastrous for him; Nietzsche’s heady draught intoxicated
his brain with visions of colossal and ruthless power, begetting images
of supermen and superwomen magnificent in stature and equipment, in
the glory of their flame-like hair, and the crystalline beauty of
their speech, but wholly unreal and impossible. Nevertheless, there
were fortunate moments when the vision of power was constrained by a
human and moving story to work within the limits of humanity. And these
moments, though few, atoned for much splendid futility.
Moreover, his vision of power came to include, at moments, the bridling
of his own infirmities. There was always the making of a soldier in
the Abruzzan before he became one. He was capable of an asceticism
amazing to those who know only the hothouse atmosphere of his novels.
Some of his most sumptuous prose and verse was poured forth in the
naked seclusion of monastic cells, or in wild peasant houses far from
civilization; and only the most iron industry could have achieved the
enormous bulk of his work.[24] Hence he can put into the mouth of
Claudio Cantelmo, in the _Vergini_, these evidently autobiographic
words: ‘After subduing the tumults of youth, I examined whether
perchance ... my will could, by choice and exclusion, extract a new
and seemly work of its own from the elements which life had stored up
within me.’ There is a glimpse here of a finer psychological and a
deeper ethical insight than we often find in d’Annunzio, and it might
have led a man of richer spiritual capacity to a loftier poetry than he
was ever to produce.
But on the whole the clue thus hinted was not followed up, and the
tough nerve which might have nourished the powerful controlling will
of a supreme artist, often served only to sustain those enormities of
the ferocious and the grandiose which make dramas like _Gloria_ and _La
Nave_ mere examples of the pathology of genius.
We touch here the crucial point. For these extravagances were not mere
momentary aberrations. They were but the more pronounced manifestations
of fundamental deficiencies in the man, which in their turn impoverish
and dwarf the poet. D’Annunzio, in one word, is wanting in humanity;
and because of his shallow and fragmentary apprehension of the human
soul, his vision of power and beauty discharges itself in barren
spectacles of brute energy and material splendour, for which he cannot
find psychological equivalents in grandeur or loveliness of character.
Shakespeare’s huge personalities--Othello, Lear, Antony--are human in
every trait, however much they transcend our actual experience of men.
D’Annunzio tries to make violent actions and abnormal passions produce
the illusion of greatness of soul, and disguises his psychological
poverty by the sustained coruscations of his lyric speech.
In the meantime novels and poems and dramas poured forth. The prolific
later nineties saw the famous novel _Fuoco_ (1900), a picture of
Venetian splendour as gorgeous as that of Rome in _Piacère_, but
touched with the new joy in power; and the dramas _Sogno d’un Mattino
di Primavera_ (1897), _Gioconda_, and _Città Morta_ (1898). In the
last named d’Annunzio’s vision of power assumes an audacious and
original form. It is here the power of the vanished past to stretch
an invisible hand across the centuries and strike down youth and
life. The result is a tragedy that reproduces as nearly as a modern
dramatist may the horror excited in ancient spectators by the doom
of the House of Atreus. Nothing indeed could be less Greek than the
structure and persons of the play. Leonardo, a young archæologist,
is excavating in the ruins of Mycenæ. With him are his sister, Beata
Maria, and their friends Alessandro and Anna his wife, a cluster of
human flowers, full of living charm and sap, transplanted into the
‘dead city.’ But the dead city is not merely dead; it is mysteriously
fraught with the power of the vanished past to control the present and
the future. Its mouldering ruins are the arena of a struggle between
Death and Life, in which death triumphs and life receives the mortal
blow. Leonardo, obsessed with the _Oresteia_, is haunted at night by
visions of terrific blood-stained figures, and has no thoughts by day
but of penetrating the secrets of their tombs. Alessandro, full of the
joy of life, seeks to detach him from these preoccupations. ‘I hoped
he would have come with me and gathered flowers with those fingers
of his which know nothing but stones and dust,’ and he is drawn to
Beata Maria, herself the very genius of glowing youth, ‘the one live
thing, says her friend Anna, in this place, where all is dead and burnt
... it is incredible what force of life is in her ... if she were
not, none of us could live here, we should all die of thirst.’ ‘When
Beata Maria speaks, he who hears forgets his pain, and believes that
life can still be sweet.’ She herself is devoted to the brother whose
passion seems to estrange him so far from what she loves. She shares
his Hellenic ardour, and innocently recites Cassandra’s prophecy in the
_Agamemnon_, with Cassandra’s wreath on her golden locks, of ‘an evil,
intolerable to the nearest kin, and irreparable, preparing in this
house.’ Anna, struck with mysterious fear, stops her; but the ominous
words have been spoken, and foreshadow a real doom. Beata Maria, the
unconscious Cassandra, will suffer Cassandra’s fate. The indestructible
virus of the dead city will poison the glory of youth. The incestuous
passion which desolated the House of Atreus is not extinguished in the
crumbling dust of their tombs. A horrible infection seizes Leonardo. He
struggles vainly with an impure passion for his sister. In only one way
can his love be purified, a way grievous for him, and yet more grievous
for her. She must die; and he slays her among the tombs of the ‘dead
city’ which has thus again laid upon the living its mortal hand.
The conclusion outrages our feelings, and betrays d’Annunzio’s glaring
deficiency in sympathetic power. Whatever pity we feel for Leonardo
in his miserable plight is dispelled by his cynical purchase of the
purity of his own emotions at the price of his innocent sister’s death.
Here, as in other cases, d’Annunzio’s fundamental want of passion,
and the strain of hard egoism which pervaded the movements of his
brilliant mind, gravely injured his attempts in tragic poetry. Death
was doubtless the only solution; but it must be another death--one that
would have saved the ‘purity’ of Leonardo’s emotions by ending them
altogether. Leonardo, however, has the ruthless energy of the Superman,
and the innocent life must be crushed that he may rise.