IV
Yet d’Annunzio’s vision of power, his appetency of enormous and abnormal things, was now to assume a new form. The grandiose dream of the Superman expands into the dream of the Super-nation. The discovery of Rome had taught him something of the pride of citizenship, and more than the nascent pride of nationality. But in the last year of the century he underwent an experience which turned this nascent emotion into a passion, and the poet himself into a prophet and preacher in its service, an ‘announcer’ as he was fond of saying, of the cause and creed of Italianità.
He had as yet seen nothing of Europe beyond the Alps. In 1900 he made an extensive tour, but in no tourist spirit. An Italian had no need to go abroad for beauty of nature or of art, and d’Annunzio’s keen eyes were turned in quite other directions—to the great Transalpine nations with their vast resources and their high ambitions; and he measured their several capacities for success in the conflict which he, among the first, saw to be impending. He was impressed by the threatening growth of Germany, and by ‘the extraordinary development of race-energy’ in England. Everywhere the force of nationality was more vehement than ever before. ‘All the world is stretched like a bow, and never was the saying of Heracleitos more significant: “The bow is called Bios (life), and its work is death.”’
But where was Italy in this universal tension of the national spirit? Where was her strung bow? How was she preparing to hold her own with the great progressive nations of the North? D’Annunzio flung down these challenging questions in his eloquent pamphlet, Della coscienza nazionale (1900). To the foreign observer the trouble with Italy did not seem to be defective ambition. She had rather appeared to take her new rôle as a great Power too seriously, blundering into rash adventures abroad when she ought to have been spreading the elements of civilization at home. But d’Annunzio had seen the race for empire in the North, and his call to Italy was the call of an imperialist; a call for unity of purpose, for concentration of national wealth and strength in the interest of a greater Italy, mistress of the Adriatic, if not of the Mediterranean. It was the beginning of a new phase of d’Annunzio’s career. He was henceforth a public man, whose voice, the most resonant and eloquent then to be heard in Italy, counted, as poetic voices so rarely do, in the direction of public affairs. He entered Parliament, a proclaimed disciple in policy of Crispi, the Italian Bismarck.
How did these enlarged ideals affect d’Annunzio’s work in poetry? In part, as has been hinted, disastrously. The enlarged ideals lent themselves with perverse ease, in a mind already obsessed with sovrumanità, to a mere megalomania, a rage for bigness, only more mischievous in practice, and nowise better as literature, because it was conveyed in terms of navies and transmarine dominions. He had already in his fine series of Odi Navali (1893) fanned to some purpose the naval ambitions of his country. He now sounded a loftier note, suited to the vaster horizons of an Italian Mediterranean. These, for instance, are some stanzas from the opening hymn or prayer prefixed to his colossal naval tragedy, La Nave (1908):
O Lord, who bringest forth and dost efface
The ocean-ruling Nations, race by race,
It is this living People by Thy grace
Who on the Sea
Shall magnify Thy name, who on the Sea
Shall glorify Thy name, who on the Sea
With myrrh and blood shall sacrifice to Thee
At the altar-prow.
Of all Earth’s oceans make Our Sea, O Thou!
Amen!
The fourth book of the Laudi is a lyric celebration in this spirit, of the Tripoli adventure ‘beyond the sea.’ But megalomania was happily not the whole result. The older and deeper instincts planted or quickened in d’Annunzio by his earlier experience—the feeling for race and for historic continuity—coalesced with the new and vehement passion of nationality, communicating to it, in moments of vision, something of their human intimacy, and undergoing in their turn an answering enlargement of range and scope. If his Italianità was something more significant than a resonant cry for more ships and territory, it was because it drew warmth and insight from the home sentiment for his Abruzzan province deep-rooted in the poet’s heart; while the Abruzzan province, in its turn, was seen in the larger and grander setting of the Italian people and the Roman race, but without the distorting nimbus of megalomaniac dreams. This fortunate harmony found expression chiefly in certain poems of the years shortly before and after the beginning of the new century, the golden period of d’Annunzio’s production. To these years belong his two most notable attempts to give to Italy a tragic poetry built upon Italian history.
In the material for tragic poetry no country was richer, but it had been left to the genius of foreign dramatists to give world-wide fame to the stories of Romeo and Juliet, Beatrice Cenci, and Torquato Tasso. Alfieri, the greatest of Italian tragic poets, had devoted his austere art almost solely to classical subjects; and his Don Garzia and Congiura de’ Pazzi, with Niccolini’s Arnaldo da Brescia, Monti’s Galeotto Manfredi, and Manzoni’s Conte di Carmagnola and Adelchi stood almost alone, as remarkable Italian tragedies on Italian themes. In the story of Francesca of Rimini, d’Annunzio found to his hand a native tragic subject of the first order, not yet touched by a tragic poet of genius, Italian or other. That it had been made his own by the supreme poet of Italy hardly disturbed d’Annunzio, deeply as he revered the poet whose words, in the fine phrase of his Dante Ode, clothed Italy like the splendour of day. He was not going to challenge comparison with Dante’s marmoreal brevity. And the poet of Pescara had some title to regard this story of the adjacent Adriatic sea-board of Rimini and Ravenna, as his by right. But the story itself has also exerted its moderating control upon the natural prodigiosity of his invention, so that in his Francescan tragedy it is possible to recognize a general conformity to traditional technique.
It is even possible that Shakespeare’s handling of his Italian tragedy may have afforded a hint. The ruin of Romeo and Juliet results from the feud of the rival houses. The ruin of d’Annunzio’s Francesca and Paolo is similarly rooted ultimately in the feud of Guelf and Ghibelline. Her father, a great Guelf captain, has sold her to the lord of Ravenna, as the price of support against the Ghibellines. But when her hand is thus plighted, she has already seen his brother Paolo, with his feminine beauty and luxuriant locks, pass under her window, and the seed of their passion is sown. Francesca has grown up ‘a flower in an iron soil,’ and love throughout is set in a frame of war. But she would be no d’Annunzian heroine if she did not respond to the call of life and light. When about to leave Rimini on her marriage she replies to the pleading of her devoted young sister who cannot live without her, ‘I am going, sweet life, where thou canst not come, to a deep and solitary place, where a great fire burns without fuel.’ Fire is d’Annunzio’s haunting symbol for terrible and splendid things, a symbol, too, for the strange union of cruelty and beauty in his own mind and art, and it does not here forecast only the Inferno flames in which she will move with Paolo so lightly before the wind. In the palace at Ravenna we see her among her ladies, chafing at her dull seclusion, while the Ghibelline siege rages without. A Florentine merchant displays his gorgeous wares before them, a feast of scarlet and gold. Presently Francesca has climbed to the tower where her husband’s brothers are on guard. Bolts and arrows crash against the walls or through the loophole. A cauldron of Greek fire stands ready for use. Francesca, to the horror of the soldiers, fires it, and breaks into wild ecstasy at the ‘deadly beauty’ of this ‘swift and terrible life.’ A moment later a bolt pierces the curls of Paolo. She thinks he is wounded, and clasps his head. In that embrace he stammers the first word of love. ‘They have not hit me, but your hands have touched me, and have undone the soul within my heart!...’ Francesca: ‘Lost! Thou art lost!’ Thus, again, Francesca’s fate, like Juliet’s, is provoked by the irrelevant feud of parties without. But presently the same irrelevant feud thrusts the lovers apart. Paolo is sent as General of the Guelf forces to Florence. Francesca in his absence reads the Lancelot romance with her ladies. But Paolo, unable to endure his exile, posts back to Ravenna, and rushes to her chamber. The romance of Lancelot lies open on the lectern. The place where the reading stopped is marked; it is where Galeotto is urging Lancelot’s suit upon Ginevra. They bend over the book together. The following dialogue replaces Dante’s single pregnant line:
Pa. Let us read a page, Francesca!
Fr. Look at that swarm of swallows, making a shadow
On the bright water!
Pa. Let us read, Francesca.
Fr. And that sail that is glowing like fire!
Pa. (reading). ‘Assuredly,
Lady,’ says Galeotto, ‘he does not dare,
Nor will he ask ye anything of love,
Being afraid, but I ask in his name, and if
I did not ask, you ought to seek it, seeing
You could in no wise win a richer treasure.’
And she says—
(drawing Francesca gently by the hand)
Now do you read what she says,
Be you Ginevra.
Fr. (reading). And she says: ‘Well I know it, and I will do
What you command. And Galeotto said:
Grammercy, lady; I beg that you will give him
Your love....’
(she stops.)
Pa. Read further!
Fr. No, I cannot see
The words.
Pa. Read: ‘Certainly ...
Fr. Certainly,’ she says,
‘I give it him, but so that he be mine
And I utterly his, and all ill things
Made good’ ... Paolo, enough.
Pa. (reading with a hoarse and tremulous voice).
‘Lady, he says, much thanks; now in my presence
Kiss him, for earnest of true love’—You, you!
What says she now? What now?
(Their pale faces bend over the book, so that their cheeks almost touch.)
Fr. (reading). She says: ‘Why should
He beg it of me? I desire it more
Than you....’
Pa. (continuing with stifled voice). ‘They draw apart.
And the Queen sees
The Knight dare go no further. Then she clasps him
About the chin, and with a long kiss kisses
His mouth....’
(He kisses her in the same way. When their mouths separate Francesca reels, and falls back on the cushions.)
Francesca!
Fr. (with hardly audible voice).
No, Paolo!
The sequel is too long drawn out, and is marred by the duplicity of all the persons concerned. Malatestino’s sleuth-hound cunning brings about the husband’s vengeance, but his strategy is animated only by ferocious hatred of the lovers, not by any care for justice. By his contrivance the rough soldier, who has never suspected his own wrongs, returns prematurely from the march, and thunders at the lovers’ chamber door: ‘Open, Francesca!’ The wretched Paolo tries to escape through a trapdoor, but is dragged up by the hair to be slain. But Francesca rushes to clasp him, and the husband’s sword pierces her. Francesca da Rimini, though a brilliant drama, with innumerable beauties of detail, misses, like the Dead City, the quality of great tragedy. Of the principal characters Francesca alone excites a fitful sympathy, while Paolo’s effeminacy provokes a contempt which diminishes our compassion for the woman whose love he has won. These coward ‘heroes’ who leave their mistresses in mortal peril, or slay their sisters, or see their brides borne to execution in their place, seem to haunt the egoist imagination of the poet, to the grievous hurt of his work. Yet when all is said, Francesca is one of the most arresting, though dramatically by no means one of the best, plays produced in Europe during the first decade of the century.
If the Francesca owed much to the stimulus and the control of a great historic and literary tradition, the rarer beauty of La Figlia di Iorio (1904) was nourished on the old intimate passion for his Abruzzan race and home. In language the more moving, because in d’Annunzio so seldom heard, he dedicated ‘To the land of Abruzzi, to my Mother, to my Sisters, to my Brother in exile, to my Father in his grave, to all my Dead, to all my People between the Mountains and the Sea, this song of the ancient blood.’ It betokened, indeed, no mere recurrence to the scenes and memories of his childhood, but a recovery, through them, of the more primitive sensibilities and sympathies which the complexities of an ultra modern culture had obscured or submerged. The shepherds and peasants of this ‘pastoral tragedy’ live and move in an atmosphere fanatically tense with the customs and beliefs of their catholicized paganism; but no believing poet ever drew the ritual of rustic unreason with more delicate sympathy, or rendered its wild prayers and incantations in more expressive and beautiful song. For the poetry is not exotic or imposed; like the songs of peasants in opera, it is found and elicited. The young shepherd, Aligi, is drawn into a kind of mystic relationship to Mila di Codra, a witch-maiden dreaded and abhorred over the whole countryside. But a bride has been chosen for him by his family, and the scene opens on the morning after their nominal bridal. Aligi’s three sisters are seen kneeling before the old carved oak chest, choosing her bridal robes, and vying with each other in joyous morning carols. A band of scarlet wool is drawn across the open door, a crook and a distaff lean against it, and by the doorpost hangs a waxen cross as a charm against evil spells. Aligi looks on in dreamy distraction, his thoughts far away. The women of the neighbouring farms come in procession bearing gifts of corn in baskets on their heads. An unknown girl follows in their train. Presently angry cries are heard in the distance. The reapers are in pursuit of Mila, whose spells have spoilt their harvest; they have seen her enter the house, and now they clamour at the door for her surrender. The frightened women tremble, but Mila has crouched down on the sacred hearth, whence it would be sacrilege to remove her, and Ornella, the youngest of the sisters, who alone secretly pities Mila, draws the bolts. The storm of menace grows louder, till Aligi, roused from his dreamy absorption by the taunts of the women, raises his hand to strike the suppliant on the hearth. Immediately the horror of his sacrilege seizes him, he implores her pardon on his knees, and thrusts his guilty hand into the flame. Then he hangs the cross above the door and releases the bolts. The reapers rush in, but seeing the cross, draw back in dismay, baring their heads. Aligi has saved his ‘sister in Christ;’ but his guilt is not effaced.
In the second Act, Aligi and Mila are living together, as brother and sister, in a mountain cavern. He would fain go with his flocks to Rome to seek dissolution of his marriage; but she knows that happiness is not for her, and she will not hurt him with her passionate love. But in his home they know only that the witch-maiden has decoyed the son away from his mother and his virgin bride; Ornella, the compassionate sister, is thrust out of doors, and now the father, who had returned home only after the reapers had gone, arrives at the mountain cavern in Aligi’s absence, and peremptorily summons Mila. She holds him defiantly at bay. He is about to seize her, when Aligi appears on the threshold. In the great scene which follows the Roman authority of the Abruzzan father over the son overpowers for the moment even the lover’s devotion. Not softened by Aligi’s humble submission, Làzaro binds him, flogs him savagely, and turns upon Mila, now wholly in his power. At the moment when he has seized her Aligi breaks free, rushes upon his father, and kills him. The third act opens with the mourning for Làzaro, in long-drawn lyric dirges. Then harsher and fiercer notes are heard, and Aligi, deeply penitent, appears black-robed and bound, borne by the angry mob to bid farewell to his mother before being led to the parricide’s death. ‘To call you mother is no more permitted me, for my mouth is of hell, the mouth that sucked your milk, and learnt from you holy prayers in the fear of God. Why have I harmed you so sorely? I would fain say, but I will be silent. O most helpless of all women who have suckled a son, who have sung him to sleep in the cradle and at the breast, O do not lift this black veil to see the face of the trembling sinner....’ The crowd tries to comfort her in its rough way, and the mother gives her son the bowl of drugged wine. Suddenly, confused cries are heard in the rear, and Mila breaks her way impetuously through the throng. ‘Mother, sisters, bride of Aligi, just people, justice of God, I am Mila di Codra. I am guilty. Give me hearing!’ They call for silence, and Mila declares that Aligi is innocent, and she the murderer. Aligi protests: ‘Before God thou liest.’ But the crowd eagerly turns its fury upon the dreaded sorceress who owns her guilt, and the cry goes up: ‘To the flames! To the flames!’ Aligi protests again, but with growing faintness, as the deadening potion masters and confuses his brain; till at length, when the bonds have been transferred from his limbs to Mila’s, he lifts up his hands to curse her. At this felon stroke her spirit breaks down. With a piercing shriek she cries: ‘Aligi, Aligi, not thou, thou canst not, thou must not!’ She is hurried away to the stake, only Ornella crying aloud: ‘Mila, Mila, Sister in Jesus, Paradise is for thee,’ while Mila herself, now full of the d’Annunzian exultation in glorious ruin, goes to her death crying: ‘Beautiful Flame, Beautiful Flame!’
A brief résumé such as this inevitably brings into undue emphasis the melodramatic elements of the plot. Yet it is the most human and natural, as it is the most beautiful, of d’Annunzio’s dramas. For the strangest things that happen in it are no mere projections of the poet’s inspired ferocity or eroticism, as so often elsewhere, but are grounded in the real psychology of a primitive countryside. We see its fear, love, hatred, now mysteriously mastered by superstitious awe, now breaking rebelliously from its control, now wrought by its mystic power to else inexplicable excesses.