* * * * *
Shall come from far-off seas,
Shall come from the deep, the Power
Wherein alone thou hast hope.
So, O Rome, our Rome, in its hour,
A heroic Maid of thy race
Shall draw Her within thy walls.
Not a vessel immovably stuck
In the slimy bed, not an image
Once worshipped in foreign fanes,
Shall her pure hand draw to the shore;
But the Power of Man, but the holy
Spirit born in the heart
Of the Peoples in peace and in war,
But the glory of Earth in the glow
Divine of the human Will
That manifests her, and transfigures,
By works and deeds beyond number,
Of light, and darkness, of love
And hatred, of life and death;
But the beauty of human fate,
The fate of Man who seeks
His divinity in his Creature.
Since in thee, as in an imperishable
Imprint shall the Power of Man
Take form and image ordained
In the market-place and the Senate
To curb the dishonour of Men.
* * * * *
O Rome, O Rome, in thee only,
In the circle of thy seven hills,
The myriad human discords
Shall find their vast and sublime
Unity. Thou the new Bread
Shalt give, and speak the new Word.
All that men have thought,
Dreamed and endured, achieved
And enjoyed, in the Earth’s vast bound,
So many thoughts, and dreams,
So many labours and pangs,
And raptures, and every right won
And every secret laid bare,
And every book set open
In the boundless circuit of Earth....
Shall become the vesture of thee,
Thee only, O Rome, O Rome!
Thou, goddess, Thou only shalt break
The new Bread, and speak the new Word!
On this note, the climax of his boundless national faith, we will leave
d’Annunzio. We are apt to think that the tide of humanity has ebbed
decisively away from the city of the seven hills, and that wherever its
sundered streams may be destined finally to flow together in unison,
the Roman Forum, where the roads of all the world once met, will not
be that spot. Yet a city which can generate magnificent, even if
illusory, dreams is assured of a real potency in human affairs not to
be challenged in its kind by far greater and wealthier cities which the
Londoner, or the New Yorker, or even the Parisian, would never think of
addressing in these lyrical terms.
Few men so splendidly endowed as d’Annunzio have given the world so
much occasion for resentment and for ridicule. His greatest gifts lend
themselves with fatal ease to abuse; his ‘vast sensuality’ and his iron
nerve sometimes co-operate and enforce one another in abortions of
erotics and ferocity. But the same gifts, in other phases, become the
creative and controlling elements of his sumptuous style. His boundless
wealth of sensuous images provides the gorgeous texture of its ever
changing woof. But its luxury is controlled by tenacious purpose; the
sentences, however richly arrayed, move with complete lucidity of aim
to their goal; the surface is pictorial, but the structure is marble.
Thus this Faun of genius, as he seems under one aspect, compounded
with the Quixotic adventurer, as he seems under another, meet in one
of the supreme literary artists of the Latin race; a creator of beauty
which, however Latin in origin and cast, has the quality that strikes
home across the boundaries of race, and has already gone far to make
its author not merely the protagonist of the Latin renascence, but a
European classic.
V