III
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.