Critical Studies

aware that, in him, one of the ablest and most delicate of living critics believes that he has seen the personification of a renascence of Latin genius. Imprisoned as his novels were in the limits o

évue des Deux Mondes, and never certainly, since lyre was strung or laurels were woven, was any praise ever heard so dulcet an

ey are apt to lead his readers away from the consideration of the value of his literary judgments. He is a critic of exquisite delicacy and fineness, but also of great enthusiasms, and these enthusias

ch version, and twenty thousand will accept De Vogüé's description of his works without attempting to judge those for themselves. In the French version the romances gain in certain points; their excessive detail is abridged, their crudities are softened down, their wearisome analyses and too frequent obscenities are omitted. The translations of M. Herelle are, as all must know, admirable in grace and elegance, but, though as perfect as translations which are guilty of continual excisions

eproduction of a scene of Italian fanaticism and frenzy, and of similar portions of his works, it is impossible to estimate fully the real D'Annunzio, and judge of his magnificent

t is singularly true to certain phases of Italian life, in which all the Paganism bred in the blood and bone of

the sacred choruses, the howls of the possessed, the shouts of the ambulatory vendors, the clanging of the bells, the squeal of the trumpets, the lowing, the neighing, the bleating; the fires crackling under the cauldrons, the heaps of fruits and sweetmeats, the display of utensils, of stuffs, of arms, of jewels, of rosaries; the obscene capers of the dancers, the convulsions of the epileptic, the blows of the quarrelsome, the rush of flying, frightened thieves through the crowd; the supreme froth of c

of design, as in a Callot or Hogarth! what sense conveyed of press, of haste,

ever vulgar, although it is unbridled. He admits the preference for the unclean, which almost am

they have nothing in common with tradesmen, who painfully produce the filth demanded by a publisher and a certain public. An abyss separates the former from the latter writers. This difference between them which

rain, an effort, a mannerism, an extravagance, sought, and unnecessary. The reader, if he desires to understand what I mean by this, can turn to page 320 in the Trionfo, or to C

n any sensual excess in description, is mere nastiness, mere filth; and

s of praise the creator of the Trionfo, the fact remains that the Satyr shows his cloven hoof as much in one as in the other; and the motives which move ei

human nature, to shrink from no investigation, to deny no evidence, and to protest against the hypocrisy with which literary art has so frequently covered its eyes and turned away from the truth. 'Let us study life alone,' says D'Annunzio, as Zola sai

peaking of him, regret his incessant recurrence to obscenity. Not from prudery, for Italians are never prudes, but from an artistic sens

ng immeasurable suggestion in a mere word, in concentrating all the music of the soul in one brief note. All the arts err at this epoch in the same manner; literature has the common

efore it withers; of lack of skill to master the subtleties of concentration and suggestion. The descriptions of the modern writer are frequently mere inventories; they are painfully minute; they are like a mosaic, in which millions of little cubes are grouped to make a whole. As before a modern painting we are often unimpressed by the whole, but struck by the dexterity of the brush-work, so in modern litera

illiant; and his poetic powers were shown in his sonnets and lyrics before he wrote his romances. Zola is no scholar, and is not, either in temperament or expression, a poet. It would be impossible to conceive him creating such a poem as t

mother, Latin, i.e., to say with grace and impunity what in any other tongue would disgust the hearer, he says what is absolutely untrue; and one can only wonder if he knows anything of the Italian of the streets, of the fields, of the wine-houses, of the popular theatres

day, as spoken by all classes, it certainly possesses nothing of this privilege which he claims for it. It can be, on the contrary, very coarse and crude; it has none of

plicit when treating of those subjects which in modern literature are generally considered forbidden. Indeed, this anxiety to paint the brothel and the madhouse as carefully and minutely as the miniaturist paints on the ivory, leads to his great defect, over

jured his style. I think he would have been a greater Italian writer if

originality; it encumbers the mind under too vast a load of riches, it enlightens, but it also

the least losing his own Italian individuality. D'Annunzio, on the contrary, allows himself to be absorbed and assimilated by foreign influences, to be dominated by them, to so great an extent indeed that his style is frequently bastardised by them, and many of his sentences read as though they were translations from foreign sources. He claims to have greatly embellished and amplified the Italian language; he has certainly rendered it more colloquial and more copious; but he has often grafted foreign

it is to the foreign complexion and contour which he so frequently gives to his own language; a fault never before him known in an Italian writer. Many of his phrases are of foreign construction. But he is not on that account a plagiarist, as has been said of him; he is never a plagiarist, but is a too highly educated, and a too sensitively susceptible, mental organisation. The mean charge of plagiarism is one so easy to bring

read from the laboratories of science over all the worlds of literature. Not only is no joyous laugh ever heard, there is not even the indulgent smile which relieves melancholy and bitterness in many writers whose views of life are gloomy. Nowhere is this more seen than in the almost savage cruelty with which the poor old dévote, Gioconda Aurispa, is drawn; the merciless des

nd sharers in his sorrows; but D'Annunzio would concentrate our thoughts only on his ridiculous thin hair blown by the winter winds, the tremor of his toothless jaws, and palsy of his bent, unsteady limbs. In the highest art there is always pity because there is always comprehension. D'Annunzio has as yet no more pity than the demonstrator in a physiol

finds him callous and negligent of it. De Vogüé sees in him the leader of a new school, but there is as yet little that is new in his manner of judging life. It is th

t does this now exist anywhere? If it do, it is in remote mountain sides and by lonely lake waters, not in clubhouses and on racecourses. Such a writer will more probably come, if he come at all, from the extreme south than from the north, perha

ileni rispetti, and the rest, there is more of the genuine spirit of the Italian soil than in any of the works hitherto written by D'Annunzio, becau

gent and constitutionally feeble; who gradually passes from frantic adoration of a woman possessed, to the nausea which so frequently follows on such possession. The proof of this lies in the cruel cynical criticism with which he discovers and enumerates her physical and mental defects, with which he views the deformity of her feet as they push the warm sand of the beach to and fro, and with which he realises the growing disgust whi

e, which develops the physical strength and social liberties of the female to so vast an extent. This is a painful fact, but it is one which cannot be disputed. Go wherever a crowd of both sexes congregate, and there you will se

ful day on which he sees Ippolita in the dusk of the chapel in Rome. He views all things animate and inanimate, human and animal, real and ideal, through that distorted medium which the mentally deformed habitually see through as through a convex and smoked glass. He is more than feeble, he is not s

extreme weakness, physical and moral, which ul

he murmured, with

me," she answered,

s harmoniously in all its currents, in which there is a perfect balance in all the vital forces in accord with the favour and fairness of all surrounding circumstances. As in other similar moments, her whole being

ole passage which I have quoted. But it clearly proves, especially if compared with its context, that the passion which Aurispa onc

at he could neither live with her nor without her. In this, D'Annunzio has linked cause and effect with excellent precision. Every minutia of feeling described is correctly described, and such feelin

nsane. He leaves too much unexplained; too many actions motiveless; too many portraits floating indistinct like the night and river studies of Whistler. It is curious that this vagueness, this uncertainty and obscurity, should exist in one who is on the other hand so frequently and wearisomely minute in microscopic details. He constantly calls on us to believe what he gives us no data for believing. Even in the Trionfo he constantly introduces persons and incidents having no connection with the narrative. The whole family of Giorgio, the whole action pa

hing in her character or in her circumstances which can render it the least probable to us that such a woman as she is described to be, would have been led into the half-unconscious sensual impulse which makes her unfaithful to her conjugal vows without the smallest excuse of passion or temptation. Nor is it conceivable for an instant that Tullio Hermil, on

, and, despite the infidelity in which we are asked to believe, the purest of her sex, submissive to desertion as Griselda, and incapable of an impure thought. It is contrary to all truth to human nature

details with which the subject is elaborated, destroy in the mind of the reader all sense of pity for the victim, and all blame for the act which sends it to its grave. One feels that the little squalling, dribbling, shapeless creature, with its scabby head and cat-like miawling, is much better destroyed, and this is not the sensation which the author desires to arouse; he would wish us to feel at once horror at, and compassion for, Tullio Hermil, but we can feel nothing except a vague contempt for this helpless young man. Had the semi-murder of it followed immediately on its birth, or had it been found by him after absence a fair two-year-old child, with all the rosebud loveliness of that age, this bathos would have been avoided; and the stealthy si

est, abounding in opportunity for the analysis of temptations and emotions; and of such analysis he is a master, if too prolix in his expositions of it. But a want of the perception which warns us off the line of demarcation dividing the dramatic from the grotesque, has allowed him to pass this line, and merge the dramati

ni de Scordio dwelt, my brother saw in

s sowing. We bring our in

fanation. I did indeed profane a thing in itself sacred and beautiful. I went t

, pointing to the sower. "He is no taller

ched the labourer from a distanc

, the sack being full of grain. With his left hand he held the sack open, with the right he took the grain and scattered it. His gesture was large, easy, sweeping, moderated to a serene rhythm. The corn, flying from his hand, sho

ered th

going up to the old man. "Be your seed ble

th to you,"

t off work; he u

we also must stand with bare he

his cap, confused,

bly, "Why so

ve to be steady, "I am come to beg you

ded, then at my brother. His emb

me so muc

you reply?

ost me to-day, and God be praised for the joy that He gives to

man would never have gone on such an errand, never have consecrated by such expressions the spawn of his wife's incomprehensible and unexplained amour. It is impossible to bring one's self to believe in any part of the story of the Innocente, strong as the treatment is in re

ppolita, of which we watch the gradual growth as we watch Vesuvius on a summer night pass from slumber into fury. With what inimitable dexterity he makes us conscious of the plebeian grossness underlying her physical sorcery, the commonness of her base birth seen here and there through the dazzling sorcery of her attractions; and how natural she is in her buoyant spirits, in her gay sportiveness, in her rapid changes of mood and humour, in her mingling of cruelty and compassion! Equally does he convey to the reader the consciousness of the perfect high breeding in the Virgine delle Rocce, of the three sisters of sorrow, so alike yet so dissimilar; three figures stepped down from the canvas of the Veronese, but dimmed by solitude and long negl

e simplest, and the most romantic of his works, but it will probably be caviare to the crowd, and it wholly lacks the great qualities of its predecessors. It is not well-constructed like the Innocente, it is not daring and intense like the Trionfo; it is not brilliant like Il Piacere; it is rambling, and vague, and shadowy, and it is difficult to collect the threads of the narrative. It is published in a fragment, which is always an unwise method of publica

ed country, just such young daughters growing up in stately poverty and perpetual joylessness; just such paternal obsession in clinging to ruined thrones and perished faiths; just such

oft grey dust, the abandonment, the poverty, the stateliness, the infinite pathos and charm of this splendour, 'which dies so slowly because born of true art and of what was once an heroic nobility.' All these are portrayed with perfect fidelity in this strange and too slight story of the three daughters of the fallen House of Montega, and no less true to the facts of Italian life is the destiny which weighs upon them, the insanity which dwells amongst them in the person of their mother, whom we see living before us as she passes, carried in her perfumed and painted sedan chair, with her strange fixed regard, her tiara of ebon

life therein depicted; and the absence of all objective interest, of all care for nature and for art, of all p

by classic memories, and knowledge of the arts, and touched to impassioned appreciation of all natural beauty, have suffered acutely from the apathy, ignorance, and unconscious self-absorption of such

rising tier on tier towards the massive summit of Mount Caran. On the left of the road, the soil was smooth and undulating

nother silver cloud of blossom.

e, wondering probably at the childlike joy awakened in me at the sight of the first

ed Oddo, to whom my pleasure communi

was full

ht where flowers bloom,

uller ease, now that I saw some reflection of it at least awakened

," sighed Antonello, like one

yes refreshed themselves with t

n me their malady, had revealed to me their suffering, had spoken to me of that melancholy prison whence they had come and whither they would return; and I, on the common highway open to all, had invited them to

ression as the sprays of th

h of the virtuoso; he reminds me of a friend of mine, a London celebrity, who once invited a party of artists to see a fine work of art in his London house. When the curtain was drawn aside, the work of art was found to be a young nude woman, of singularly beautiful proportions, extended on a rug of black bear-skins to set off the ambers and ivories and blue-vein traceries of her skin. D'Annunzio stretches his subject thus bare before him in a well-adjusted light, and calls the world to see: for the subject he has no compassion. This preciosità (Anglicè, affectation) is still more apparent in his prefaces than in his works which they precede. These prefaces are long, elaborate, ornate disquisitions, with much of the euphuism of pedantic scholarship; and when in the preface to the Trionfo the author claims that this licentious romance is intended

D'Annunzio is very fine; finest of all when it is spent on the portraiture of natural scenes, and of characters unhampered by conventionality. Read this bri

And the question suggested by the little homely sound, pu

them looked at the table ready spread under the oak

what there is," said Giorgi

d be satisfie

th, the silver, the glass, the plates, finding everything charming, delighte

ng delight

loaf, which was still warm und

impelled by her childlike joy in the fresh

good

lip expressed the pleasure which she felt; and from her whole person there seemed to emana

d! Taste, how

simple, more radiant, than this

, so true to the sc

by a homely aqueduct made of hollowed trees, crossed the low-lying land between the two slopes. Other little rivulets were caught and guided by concave tiles to water the tilled earth grown with rich vegetation, and above these streams, ever bright and rippling, there leaned some beautiful purple flowers;[2] all these humble things seemed to him pregnant with profound life. All the merry waters ran down along the incline tow

in clay. An outside staircase led up to a covered terrace. Two women sat spinning at the head of the stair, and the flax shone in the sun like gold. You could hear the wheels turn. By a window sat another, weaving; you could see her rhythmical gestures in moving the shuttle. In the

. Underneath, the earth was dewy and fragrant. In an angle a black cross leaned over the hedge, the silence had the resigned sadness of a graveyard. At the end of a line there arose a flight of steps, half in shade, half in sunshine; they led to a door standing half open, protected by two branches of olive hun

leeping on the stone steps, with the young mother, unseen within, singing sotto voce

s grass grows; a capuchin crosses a square; a bishop descends from a closed carriage before the gate of a hospital; a tower rises

ity of style; there is the poet's, the painter's, power to embrace a world at a glance, and with a touch set before duller eye

is very diffe

und th

baskets, singing as they worked. They sang a song of thirds and fives in perfect harmony. When one of them reached a special phrase she lifted her whole bust out of the yellow maze of bloss

ent again over the gorse. Stifled saucy laught

f you is

sed her head in reply, amazed,

he finest singe

. That is

is true!" cried

make he

is not true. I

of short stature but well-formed; her bosom was high and large, swollen with songs. She had curly hair, dar

ir circle. They were up to their waists in the flowe

spring. She sang a couplet and the others sang in chorus a ritornello. They prolonged the harmonies, putting their mou

tta s

e spring

love

s of t

water thou

ght thee an

t is a chai

thers

live

m young breasts, which perchance as yet knew not its

te observation as it is beautiful in its expression. Tullio Hermil and G

ugh the air like pearls falling on the glass of a harmonium. Then came a pause. A shake arose, agile, marve

h scarcely seems to come from the same throat so humble is it, so timid, so slight; it resembles the twitter of scarce-fledged birds, the chirrup of sparrows; then, with a miraculous volubility, this noisy note changes into a breathless song, more and more rapid in its trills, vibrating in sustained shakes, turning in daring flights of sound, leaping, growing, bounding, attaining the highest heights of the soprano. The songster is drunk with his own song. With pause so brief that one note scarce ceases ere another succeeds it, he spends his delirium in ever-varied m

his passage, and is more completely echoed in it than in the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven. This sympathy with the melody of birds is the more singular in D'Annunzio, because Italians are almost invariably indifferent to such melody, and snare the divine songster in the net, or shoot him whilst he shouts his nuptial Io Triumphe! with the most stolid indifference. And it may, perhaps, be that D'Annunzio does not care for the bird himself more than the rest of his countrymen, but

sea. Magnificent they are, true also, entirely true; but some mannerism there is in them, some over-intricate embroidery of phrase. The sea he knows best, and remembers always, is the Adriatic, of

. Sometimes it is all azure, of an intense blue, like the ultramarine which heralds use for blazonries, veined with gold like lapis-lazuli, and on it the painted sails seem like a procession of standards, of banners, of spears borne on a Catholic holy day. And yet again at other moments it

ecovered health and his mind nobility. The sea had for him the mysterious attraction of a native country, and he abandoned himself to it with filial confidence, as a weak chi

ne returns from his contemplations of it to his life of voluptuous pleasure, and the other drowns both himself and the woman, whom he has adored to frenzy,

nd unstudied eloquence. It is when, in the person of Claudio Cantelmo, he speaks in furious invective of the modern desecration of Rome; in these passages he is strong without effort,

been witness to its most ignominious evolutions, to the most obscene unions that have ever desecrated a sacred place. And I have understood the symbolism hidden in that act of an Asiatic conqueror, who cast myr

nly set sail that the art of exchange and bart

gain, a malignant delirium, seizing not only on the tradesman and money-lenders, and the workers in brick and mortar, but also on the elect heirs of the papal majo

escended and abased themselves one by one, slid down into the new mud, sank, and vanished. The illustrious riches, amassed

ed to Beauty and to Dreams. There passed over Rome a blighting blizzard of barbarism, menacing all that greatness and loveliness which were without equals in the memory of the world. Even the laurels and the rose trees of the Villa Schiarra, for so many nights of so many summers hymned by their nightingales, fell destroyed, or remained in their desecration behind the gates of little gardens parcelled out to the little

of commercial activity, every sense of common decency was forgotten, all respect for the past was trampled under foot. The struggle for gain was carried on with blind fury, with neither check nor curb. The pickaxe, the shovel, and the cunning of fraud were the weapons employed. And week after week, with incredib

not barber, nor tailor, nor boot-maker, had power to take away the ignoble stamp. We could see them pass and repass with the sonorous trot of their shining bay and bro

rulers of Rome.

sent masters of that Rome which prophets an

they have been considered exaggerations. They cannot b

from their hearts for such passages, and must mourn with him th

o see and despise the falseness of those scientific pretensions which enslave the multitude in modern life. His intellect, richly stored by learning, is, in a large measure, free of prejudic

, which, in this day, it is easy to be; but also free from the superstitions o

e says what it needs much co

es and solve all problems. But to this proud exaltation has now succeeded a discouragement mingled with suspicion. They say to themselves, and not without reason: "Where is this certainty that science promised us?" If ever certainty were incomplete, deprived of solid criterio

ecognised by all, and which is still violently denied by those fan

ion of him held by others, is to him of the most absolute unimportance. His teaching is always to preserve the independence of the Eg

ons there is an echo of Carlyle which sounds oddly and jarringly amongst the amorous liberties and artistic debaucheries of the rest; and is not worthy of a writer who has so much courage in opposing scientific pharisaism and the thraldom of the schools. He is disposed to admire what is strong simply because it is strong, forgetful that such strength is sustained and nourished by the suffering of the weak. It is true that he has lived in an atmosphere in which the verities embodied in the aspirations, abortive but always noble, of the higher efforts of revolution have been received with fear and misunderstan

t scorn, even when misdirected, is fresh and bracing as the dash of his own Adriatic waves, when the east wind drives them hurrying on to the shingle beach

bear such corrosive acid in them that they shall pierce to the very pith of the spine and destroy it. Brand to the very bone the stupid forehead of those fools who would mark every soul with the same label, and make every brain like another, as the heads of nails are beaten into a common likeness by the blows of the nailmaker. Let your mordant laughter reach to heaven when you hear

scourge, a sword, a sheaf of arrows fro

word, such flame-tipped arrows, needed to slay the courtiers, the usurers, the sycopha

his works in the original text all ye who can, men and w

when the joys of the senses will fade for him as th

ic influences, and untrammelled by the search for idioms and pruriencies. Genius, like the river at its source, takes the colour of the ea

and that more and more fully will he realis

ooped to drink at other cups when he had once tasted of this?[3] How could he have bent to taste of other joys, once having known this ecstasy? How could his senses have let themselves be weakened and d

eaning that he has hitherto written, I will,