Salvatore di Giacomo must be put at the head of all dialectical poets of Italy. He is very little known to English readers, because he has been so little translated, save into German. He is the librarian of the National Library of the Naples Museum. The subjects of his poems are drawn from Naples and its people, its beauty and their ardency; the realism of his verse is sober, its sentiments are healthy and true to human nature but to the human nature of a voluptuous, pa.s.sionate people. He writes of love in all its aspects, and of death, physical, emotional, and mental. He knows the hopes, aspirations, sympathies, longings, customs of his fellow Neapolitans; he knows them when they are ill, when they are happy, and when they are depressed, when they are fortunate and when they are seeped in misfortune, and he puts them into lyrics that they understand and that poetasters praise.
His lyrics have been collected into one volume called "Poesie." He has been called the Robert Burns of Italy, and it is likely that he deserves it. It is to be regretted that no one has attempted to render him in English.
An Italian poet neglected and almost unknown during his lifetime (1872-1919), whose literary output was very small, is slowly coming to his estate and it is not unlikely that the coming generation will hail Ceccardo Roccatagliata-Ceccardi as one of Italy"s greatest modern poets. "Sonetti e Poemi" contains practically all of his verse save a small collection published when he was twenty.
CHAPTER III GABRIELE D"ANNUNZIO-POET, PILOT, AND PIRATE
The most conspicuous name in the annals of Italian literature of the generation now pa.s.sing is that a.s.sumed 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 G.o.ds of mythology, the h.e.l.lenic 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 G.o.d 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-Herac.l.i.tus, 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 Herac.l.i.tus. 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 ant.i.thesis 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 G.o.ds, 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 pa.s.sed 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-const.i.tuted 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 a.n.a.lyze him-to set him up as a G.o.d 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 const.i.tuted that they cannot pa.s.s judgment unless they are in possession of all the facts concerning him and his career: what he did and the circ.u.mstances 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 ac.u.men 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 Giosue 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 surpa.s.s 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.lities of Wilde and Verlaine; they are the glorification of pagan ethics; they are the apotheosis of l.u.s.t. 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 circ.u.mstances 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-mache 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 n.o.bilities, 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 Mustelidae. 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 l.u.s.t 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 repet.i.tions 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 circ.u.mstantial 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 n.o.bility 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 G.o.d or man, and knowing no other obligation than the pursuit of his own pleasures and desires, is a fool, a weakling, an inanimate ma.s.s 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 h.o.m.ogeneous 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 n.o.bility, 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 aesthetic 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 e piu 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 pa.s.sion 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 Herac.l.i.tan 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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce. "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, aesthetics, 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 cla.s.sical 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 Citta 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 cla.s.sics and archaeology. The philosophy and mysticism of the play he got from Maeterlinck. Its theme is l.u.s.t and crime. l.u.s.t is portrayed in almost every conceivable form of perversion, in poetic thoughts and graceful diction, especially in the delineation of Leonardo, the explorer, who l.u.s.ts for his sister. The dreamy, meditative languor of the dramatis personae, their insensitiveness to every form of ethical conformation, their perversion of every form of moral relationship, const.i.tute 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 appet.i.tes 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 superst.i.tions and emotions, as he knows art, archaeology, 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 l.u.s.tful 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 c.o.c.k, 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 archaeological 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 ent.i.tled "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 ent.i.tled "Laus Vitae," 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 n.o.blest 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 sh.o.r.e 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 paean 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 surpa.s.sed, 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, ill.u.s.trating his new att.i.tude toward life, are "La Leda senza-cigno" ("Leda without the Swan"), "Per la piu 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 t.i.tle 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 h.e.l.lenic 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, archaeology 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 enn.o.bling 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 G.o.d 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 Destinee," and he absorbed some of its aesthetic 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 const.i.tuents 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 pa.s.sages taken bodily from Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, de Maupa.s.sant, Peladan, 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 fict.i.tious world no longer sufficed to divert him; having drunk from the poisoned springs of l.u.s.t not only to satiety but to disgust, he, like his prototype of Huysmans"s creation, "Des Esseintes," the Thebaide raffinee 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 a.s.surance that he can shape the fate of Italy more acceptably than its statesmen.