Gabriele D'Annunzio

The Most Extravagant Figure Against the Confusing Background of the War

ARTHUR SYMONS

I HAVE been turning over some old letters, and this one, from a woman of rare qualities, has set me musing. It is dated, 31 Via San Spirito, Florence, May, 1898:

"Eleanora Duse has been in Florence—only for two nights. I, mad with enthusiasm, went to see her, but it was in a very trivial play that she was acting—The Prince of Bagdad; and though Duse is Duse, and whatever she touches must be transmuted into something beautiful, enchanting by the alchemy of her passionate genius, it made me sad and pained that she should waste her power and her wonderful fire on things so small—so small! Your friend D'Annunzio was there with his curious fox-like face at once fascinating and repellent to me. I have never read anything of his, for the very good reason that you said you would not allow me to read his Triumph of Death. Has he a superb style? A marvellous lyric gift? I see no genius in his face."

No, in his face, no genius.

I met him first at Count Giuseppe Primoli's house on the Tiber, via Tordinona, Rome.

WHEN D'Annunzio entered Primoli's study I was rather startled: I had never imagined that he was so small in stature: with the eyes of a certainly not charming bird of prey; with his sensual mouth, his uplifted moustache, his small, pointed beard. He had an air about him of the poet and the man of the world, eager, plausible, implacable. I saw in him then, as always, a creature of flesh and blood, normal, if you like, or abnormal: a sensualist at once cold and calculating; a man for whom physical beauty alone of all things in the world existed.

Yet he lived for his art; sex and art are inseparable in writers whose imagination is Dionysian. Then he is Latin, after the Latin tradition; and to me much of his frenzied and exasperating style is founded on that of Pietro Aretino. Take, for instance, this sentence in Il Fuoco: "She knew how much was pungent and impure in that sudden excitement, how deeply rooted was his opinion of her that considered her a poisoned and corrupt thing laden with many loves, an expert in all that was pleasure, a wandering, implacable temptress." This might simply have been lifted from a page of La Cortigiana, by Aretino (Venice 1534).

ONE afternoon I went to Primoli's to hear D'Annunzio read his "Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins." He spoke with a pure sense of the rhythm of every word, with that caressing Italian voice of his that thrills one. After the reading was over he and I went slowly along the streets together. He confessed himself with a simplicity that surprised me. He spoke of his way of writing, his painstaking care of producing his best work, in solitude. We talked of foreign writers—Flaubert, Maupassant and Pater; yet he never admitted to me his curious instinct in borrowing phrases, and pages, from other writers' works. He spoke fervently on many subjects: asked me about my own way of writing; was an attentive listener.

As we came to the Borghese Palace he led the way up a long staircase. Finally we entered a vast circular room that had been the bathroom of the Princess Borghese. As we entered, a man's voice cried, "Gabriele!"

I spent an hour there, talking with him and his friend, the painter Michetti, both bom in the Abruzzi, in whose house he had written Il Piacere, "a study, written with sadness, of corruption and deprivation, of severity and cruelty."

LA FIGLIA DI JORIO, when I saw it performed by the Sicilian actors—in which Aguglia showed her sinister genius and her tigerish animality—seemed to be acted with speed and fury, in spite of the play being a melodrama. Suddenly the words had become unnecessary; the bare outlines stand out, perfectly implied in gesture and motion; the scene passes before you as if you were watching it in real life; and this primitively passionate acting, working on an action so cunningly contrived for its co-operation, gave me at last what the play, as I read it, had suggested, but without complete conviction. The beauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if one did not understand it, the desire to know what was being said: the playwright and his players had eclipsed the poet, the acting had put out the calculated cadences of the verse.

I GIVE here two of D'Annunzio's letters. In June, 1900, he wrote:

"Your translation of La Citta Morla is a marvel of style. I find over again in your subtle phrases the most secret essences of my poetry. It is the first time that a literary translation has given me this unimaginable and unexpected joy."

In 1902 he writes in regard to my essay on him and on some of my translations:

"My Dear Poet,

"I have read with joy your essay in The Fortnightly Review. What you say of the prosody of my Drama is given with an admirable and perspicuous science. We have examples not only in Leopardi's verses, but in pastoral tragedies of the Renaissance, in Tasso's Aminta, in Guerin's Pastor fido. I have added to the verse of eleven and of seven syllables the verse of five, which is also iambic in structure. Thus the metre is formed of the hendecasyllable and of its two hemistichs (11. 7. 5.) and, as you see, it is an instrument of an extreme variety and vigour.

"Your translations are excellent. You have reproduced with an art at once subtle and infallible, the rhythmical movement of the text, the musical respiration of my poetry. There are here and there inaccuracies of interpretation, but the accent is always just, and I am astonished at this perfect mastery, because the speeches in this tragedy are difficult even for an Italian man of letters.

"J'espère done que nous n'aurons pas de tracasseries, au cas d'une representation k Londres."

POETRY, as Rossetti has wisely said, must indeed be as "amusing" as prose; but it is amusing first, and poetry afterwards. But fiction, dealing with circumstance, which is the accident of time, and character, which is .the accident of temperament; with society, which is the convention of external intercourse; with life seen from its own level, and judged by its temporary laws; has been a sort of composite art, working at once for two masters. It has never freed itself from the bondage of mere "truth" (likeness, that is, to appearances), it is only now, faintly and hesitatingly, beginning to consider beauty as its highest aim.

No art can be supreme art if it does not consider beauty as its highest aim. It may be asked, it may even be doubted, whether such an aim will ever be practically possible for the novel. But to answer in the negative is to take away the novel's one chance of becoming a great imaginative art.

This aim, at all events, has always been clearly the aim of D'Annunzio; and with D'Annunzio it is important to remember that he was a poet long before he ever wrote novels, and that his novels, as he gets more and more mastery over his own form, become more and more of the nature of poetry. His early stories were crude, violent, done after the French models of that day; the man himself coming out in them only in the direct touch. The stories seemed somehow to be built more upon physical pain than upon physical pleasure.

But with II Piacere he began, a little uncertainly, to mould a form of his own, taking the hint, not only from some better French models, but also from an Englishman, Pater. L'Innocente, which shows a new influence, the Russian intimacy of Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, deviates in form, but narrows the interest of the action still tighter about two lonely figures, seeming to be cut off from the world by some invisible, impassable line.

In the Trionfo della Morte, form, subject, are both found. This study in the psychology of passion is a book scarcely to be read without terror, so insinuatingly does it show the growth, change, and slowly absorbing dominion of the flesh over the flesh, of the flesh over the soul. "Nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum," the epigraph upon the French translation, expresses, if we add to it the "Odi et amo" of Catullus, that tragedy of . desire unsatisfied in satisfaction, yet eternal in desire, which is perhaps the most profound tragedy in which the human soul can become entangled.

Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde: it might have seemed as if nothing new could be said on a subject which is the subject of those two supreme masterpieces.

BUT D'Annunzio has said something new, for he has found a form of his own, in which it is not Antony who is "so ravished and enchanted of the sweet poison" of the love of Cleopatra, nor Tristan who "chooses to die that he may live in love," for the sake of Isolde, but two shadows, who are the shadows of what ever in humanity flies to the lure of earthly love.

Here are a man and a woman: I can scarcely remember their Christian names, I am not even sure if we are ever told their surnames, and in this man and woman I see myself, you, every one who has ever desired the infinity of emotion, the infinity of surrender, the finality of possession. Just because they are so shadowy, because they may seem to be so unreal, they have another, nearer, more insidious kind of reality than that reality by which Antony is so absolutely' Antony, Tristan so absolutely heroic love. These live in themselves with so intense a personal or tragic life that they are forever outside us; but the lovers of the Trionfo della Morte might well be ourselves, evoked in some clouded crystal, because they have only so much of humanity as to have the desires, and dangers, and possible ecstasies, and possible disasters, which are common to all lovers who have loved without limitation and without wisdom.

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Le Virgini della Rocce begins with a discourse, and ends as a poem. Here there is not even so much of plot as the mere progression of states of mind to an arresting conclusion. The action, when it can once be said to begin, remains at the same point to the end. A marvellous sensation is given, but it is as if a picture found words; as if the "Concert" of the Pitti were to break its suspensive and melancholy silence.

IN Laudi del Cielo, del Mare, della Terra, e degli Eroi, the substance is infinitely interesting; the form shows a wide range of accomplishment. Never, indeed, has D'Annunzio shown himself a more complete musician of the art of verse, and there is here and there a poem perhaps more genuinely poetic than anything he has yet written.

The first section of the book is largely a song of heroes; there are poems on Garibaldi, the young King, Nietzsche, Victor Hugo, Verdi, with a vast series of sonnets on "Le Citta di Silenzio," in which the glories of Italian cities are celebrated, and a Canto augurale per la nazione eletta. In all this there is a great deal of fervid and eloquent writing, but, except in some of the descriptions, little that seems sincere with more than the orator's sincerity of the moment, little that does not become tedious with the tedium of unfelt emotion. Page follows page and soon we are wearied of this orator in verse, who seems to talk for the sake of talking, and who expects to be listened to because he has a beautiful voice. Much in the latter part of the book has something of the same quality of tedium, especially the four Ditirambi, which are all gesture, and some of the classical studies, which are no more than elegant scholastic exercises, done with great purity of style.

But, among these classical studies, there are some which have a genuine personal quality, and a feeling for what was at the root of classical mythology. The dialogue in sonnets, La Corona di Glauco, has fine outlines and moves to the sound of steady music; Versilia, the nymph of the woods, and Udulna, the nymph of the water, speak as if with the actual life of sap and of springs.

With these may be classed a series of poems which render with extraordinary subtlety certain natural sensations: the joy of sunlight in Meriggio, the singing of water in L'Onda and Intra du' Amo, the delight of rain among the trees in La Pioggia nel Pineto, with all that is expressed in the title Lungo I'Affrico nella sera di guigno dopo la pioggia. They might be called "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth," though with a significance by no means the same as Meredith's. Their joy is a joy from which not only the intellect but the reason itself is excluded; they render the sensations of animal pleasure in merely living, and being conscious of life. Within these limits of sensation they have infinite delicacies, and this verse which is so often eloquent without saying anything becomes suddenly precise, with a new beauty of exactitude. A whole new order of rhythms comes into D'Annunzio's work in the search for some means of expressing almost inarticulate meanings. The poem called L'Onda goes leaping down the page in a veritable cascade of thin and curving lines. And there are, for other effects, lines of immense length, longer perhaps, than any Italian poet has used before; all are handled with the same fiery assurance.

THE latest news concerning the only man of genius Italy now possesses is that he has flown over the Alps, to France, twice, from Rome to Vienna, starting at dawn and returning at night. Certainly D'Annunzio is the most extravagant figure who stands out against the confusing background of the war; and his career has been a bewildering one. He has shown—unlike Coventry Patmore, who, on his sixty-seventh birthday dinner at which I was a guest, wore a wreach of laurel on his head— his sense of. pride in refusing these things: a Roman sword, an aeroplane and a crown of laurel.