I
ELEONORA DUSE!
When this extraordinary woman first came to New York in January, 1893, she attracted a small band of admirable lunatics who saw her uncritically as a symbol rather than as an actress. Some of us went to fantastic lengths in our devotion. She was Our Lady of Evil, one of Baudelaire's enigmatic women; Mater Malorium, a figure out of De Quincey's opium-stained dreams; she was not only superior to Sarah of the Sardou régime, but the true successor to Rachel. This semi-absurd jumbling of Poe, Swinburne, Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans—what a tremendous Duchess of Malfi we fancied Duse would make!—was not altogether the fabric of fantasy. Nor was personality the strongest asset in her art. She had suffered academic training; she had practised when young all the scales of thumb-rule theatricalism; she had played Cosette when a child and knew Electra. The apprenticeship then had been exhausting, the thirty-six situations she had by heart, a long race of play actors determined her vocation, and yet she rose superior to all these things, to experiences that would have either crushed or made mechanical the average artist. Life with its disillusionments was the sculptor that finally wrought the something precious and strange we recognize in Eleonora Duse.
Without especial comeliness, without the golden ductile voice of Bernhardt, Duse so drilled her bodily organs that her gestures, angular if executed by another, become potent instruments; her voice, once rather thin, siccant, now gives a soft, surprised speech; and her face is the mirror of her soul. Across it flit the agonies, the joys, of the modern anæmic, overwrought woman. She excels in the delineation of listless, nervous, hysterical, and half-mad souls. She passes easily from the passionate creatures of Dumas and Sardou to the chillier-blooded women of Ibsen and Sudermann, unbalanced and out of tune with their surroundings. Shall we ever forget her reading of Vladimir's letter in Fédora? And yet her assumption of the Russian was a tour-de-force of technic; temperamentally the rôle belongs to the hotter-tongued Bernhardt. With Santuzza, a primitive nature, she accomplished wonders. That miserable, deserted girl, in a lowly Sicilian village, with her qualms of conscience, her nausea, her hunted looks—here was Verga's heroine stripped of all Mascagni's rustling music, the soul showing clear and naked against the sordid background of Cavalleria Rusticana.
The slinking ferocity of Cesarine's entrance into her husband's atelier; the scene with Antonine; the interview of Camille with Armand's father; the gracious gayety of Goldoni's La Locandiera; that hideous battle of an exasperated man and woman before the closed doors in Fernande; Magda's wonderful blush as she meets Kellar, the cold-hearted prig, who ruined her—all these stale situations and well-worn types, Magda being an honourable exception, Duse literally re-created. In them we felt the power of her intellect, the magic of the woman. And she stared tradition in the face by refusing to "make up," unconcealing her own hair and doing nothing to restrict the plasticity of her figure. Now she wears wigs, uses rouge discreetly, for her hair is gray and her face more matured. But her art is broader, though losing none of its former subtlety. There is more weight, more brilliancy, in her action and gesture, and that doubtless prompted some critics to compare her to Sarah Bernhardt. But she is still Eleonora Duse, the woman with the imagination, the glance, and the beautiful hands.
The wisdom of her choice in selecting only D'Annunzio's dramas is not altogether apparent. She will listen to no advice; perhaps she is on a mission; perhaps she wishes to make known everywhere the genius of her young countryman, and to go back with the means to raise upon the border of Lake Albano a great independent theatre, the poet's dream of a dramatic Bayreuth. The D'Annunzio plays are not of the kind that appeal to the larger public. For the student of contemporary drama they are of surpassing interest in their freedom from conventional stage trickery and characterization; La Gioconda, La Citta Morta, are really lyric masterpieces in little, though many will wince at the themes, at their bold development and treatment. When floated on the wings of Richard Wagner's mighty music in Die Walküre, the incestuous loves of Siegmund and Sieglinde are applauded; prose, be it as polished and as sonorous as D'Annunzio's, has not the same privilege as music. So the motto of Catulle Mendès for a playhouse has a point, "Abandon all reality ye who would enter here." And D'Annunzio never falters before harsh reality, as those who have read his romances well know. In each of his plays we assist at the toilette of a woman's soul.
Duse's art, however, covers a multitude of D'Annunzio's morbidities—everything that does not derive from bread and butter, children in arms, politics, dog-shows and gowns, is adjudged morbid by a world that feeds on divorce scandals, crimes of the day, and the diversions of multi-millionnaires. D'Annunzio, who does not pretend to be a mere painter of manners, is given over entirely to the portraying of the primary passions. This Swinburne of Italy became famous in his sixteenth year (he was born in 1864, and his real name is said to be Gaetano Rapagnetto). Since then he has succeeded the poet Carducci in the affections of a certain public, though his poetic ancestry may be easily traced to Shelley, Baudelaire, Carducci, and Stecchetti. From verse he passed to prose, writing in a highly coloured, fluid style a group of novels called The Romances of the Rose, Lily, and Pomegranate. The Triumph of Death is the best known to English and American readers, though Fuoco—The Flame of Life—set wagging the tongues of the curious by its carefully exposed portraits of a celebrated Italian actress and D'Annunzio himself. In that astonishing performance, the taste of which can be hardly gauged by any but Latin standards, one of the D'Annunzio plays—The Dead City—is set forth in detail. Whether the betrayal of a woman's soul—for D'Annunzio is a true soul-hunter—was made with the concurrence of the subject, no one seems to know. Of the psychologic value of the study there can be but one opinion. It is unique, it is painful, it is appallingly true. D'Annunzio now enjoys a European reputation. His art, despite its exquisite workmanship, is still a gallery of echoes. He has absorbed all contemporary culture, and so chiselled is his prose that he has been called "the Italian Flaubert." A profound student of the classics, he is rich in his scholarly allusions. The late Pope is said to have delighted in the melodious thunder-pool of his style. From Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Bourget, Daudet, Maeterlinck, Tolstoy, and Dostoïevsky he has absorbed much; while he evidently knows the English classics. Some of his dramatic figures seem to have stepped out of John Webster or John Ford's pages. In his short tales, Novelle della Pescara, he has utilized a number of De Maupassant's themes, in an individual manner; but the assimilation is complete. Compare La Ficelle and Foire de Candea—the transposition of character and place are most deftly accomplished, as a writer in the Mercure de France has shown. That D'Annunzio has chosen to depict decadent men and women, and all bristling with vitality, is his personal idiosyncrasy. His chief defect is an absolute lack of humour, and this, coupled with the tropical quality of his art, causes a certain monotony—we breathe a dense, languorous atmosphere. Human interest in the daily sense of the phrase is often absent. He loves nature. He describes her lovingly. His formal sense is exquisite; yet too much literature often kills the humanity of his characters. And he is always more lyric than dramatic.
"Gabriele d'Annunzio," writes M. Huret, "is of medium height, slender, not to say frail, with short, reddish hair which is growing thin on the top of his finely shaped head, and this he brushes straight back at the temples; his back already somewhat bent, he has the air of one of those aristocratic beings who have begun life too soon. His ruddy mustache is trimmed close to the lip, and the points are turned up sharply at the corners, while the chin ends in a little pointed beard. The nose is regular and shows strength; the division between the nostrils extends below in a prominent lobe. His eyes, of pale blue, like a faded violet, are half veiled by his heavy lids. Beneath these eyes the network of fine lines tells the story of precocious weariness. The finely shaped mouth opens widely in a smile over carefully tended teeth. And one may search in vain in that face for any trace of the overwhelming, almost savage, sensuality which his privileged hero manifests in all his novels. The appearance of his physiognomy as a whole is rather self-contained and cold. He is a thinker, assuredly quite master of himself, much more given to enthusiasm over a beautiful verse than capable of a real emotion over another's grief. Besides, has he not written, 'One must keep one's liberty complete at any cost, even in intoxication'?"
D'Annunzio has ever been a spoiled darling of the Muses. At the age of sixteen, after he had published that turbulently erotic book of verse, Primo Vere, Marc Monnier, the critic, wrote of him in the Revue Suisse, "If I were one of his masters I should give him a medal and the stick."
It is to be hoped that with increasing age and experience he will pierce beneath the vesture of things and seek for the message spiritual. He is now the poet of the fleshly, albeit an interpreter of its beauties. The poet in him celebrates the joy of living, the joys of love, of death,—oh, he can pipe you many sweet lays of Death the Triumpher!—of wine, of art. He has just begun to write for the stage, and is unduly preoccupied with the sumptuousness of externals, with the bravery of words, with the torturing complexities of character.
II
Gabriele d'Annunzio's La Gioconda is a four-act tragedy of power, beauty, and horror. Despite the reputation of the poet-dramatist and his undeniable qualities of copious invention, skilful characterization, and prime literary ability, this piece was not warmly received in Italy. Its unrelieved analysis, its slowly accumulating burden of misery, and the cruelty of the climax do not allure the average listener. And the poet in D'Annunzio shows at every line—there are many gorgeous ones spoken in La Gioconda.
Duse possesses the subtle hands of that painter's Lisa Gioconda, and as the motive of D'Annunzio's play springs from a pair of hands—its original title was The Tragedy of the Beautiful Hands—Signora Duse makes of her fingers ten eloquent signals.
The opportunity for theatric climax is rare in La Gioconda; but when it does come the effect is strong. A wife, whose love and devotion are slighted, dares to face her rival in the studio of the sculptor-husband. He has endeavoured desperately to wean himself from his passion for the model who posed as his masterpiece, a Sphinx. Attempted suicide before the action of the play proved how deeply sunk in his imagination is this crazy infatuation. His wife meets the woman, who is young, beautiful, strange, and absolutely enamoured of the sculptor. Of her sincerity there is no doubt. Then the dramatist throws wire-drawn analysis to the winds and in a scene of peculiar brutality the women duel for the possession of the gifted, worthless man.
Here Duse's imagination and technic are revealed. She must remain the refined woman, though her brain is afire, her soul up in arms. In acrid terms of reproach and irony she defies the temptress of her husband, knowing full well that he is lost to her; in the very flush of defeat she would pluck victory by the sleeve. Startled by the ready assurance, enraged by the seemingly triumphant wife, Gioconda, the model, rushes into the atelier, bent upon destroying her counterfeit in clay,—that figure she so lovingly guarded during the sculptor's illness.
She had watched the work of his soul, while his wife nursed only his sick body. With this she taunts the other. In despair before the looming catastrophe, Duse, the wife, cries that she has lied, that her husband still loves his model. But it is too late. The struggle of the women is heard. A crash and a scream announce that the statue has been overthrown. Then an ugly Sardou motive is obtruded.
With the shadow of eternal regret in her eyes, her hands wrapped in the wet cloths that bound the clay, Duse staggers from behind the draperies of the atelier. She has saved her husband's statue, but her beautiful hands are hopelessly maimed. This scene is hideously cruel. And to top the crescendo of woe, the vacillating man runs in. "You, you, you!" sobs his wife; "it is saved," and the curtain blots the agonizing situation from our eye, not from our memory.
The play might be truthfully called The Triumph of Art, for, if it poses any problem at all, it is this: What will an artist, a sensuous, weak decadent, do when confronted by the choice of relinquishing his wife or his mistress? The latter is surpassingly beautiful, and, as he tells his friend, the painter, in Act I, she is his sole inspiration, the guiding pillar of flame for his art. "She has a thousand statues in her," in that marvellous body that "is like a look." He loves his wife, too, but she does not reveal to him his entire creative self. She is a staff to lean upon, not an electric impulse in his life. To the everyday observer all this seems a variation of an old story. Lucio is tired of Silvia, his wife, and dazzles himself with the sophistries of art—base sensuality being the real reason for his behaviour.
But this supposition is only a half-truth. Lucio has a species of accursed temperament that needs must feed upon the exquisite surfaces of beautiful things. He is a true artist of mediæval times, loving colour and form for their own sake; art for art is his motto, as it was Benvenuto Cellini's, as it was George Eliot's Tito Melemo. Lucio's most eloquent speech describes the appeal Gioconda makes to his artistic nature, the creative ardour she arouses. This speech is of much significance.
Despicable as is the man,—and we never doubt his ultimate desertion of his wife,—there is no denying the grim truth with which he is depicted. That he is not sympathetic is hardly our affair. It is bad art to preach, and that D'Annunzio never does. He simply sets before us, with consummate address, a few episodes in the life of an unhappy family, leaving us to draw our own inferences. His men and women are genuinely alive, and, given their various temperaments, they act as they inevitably would in the world of the living.
The character of the wife, Silvia, is beautiful despite the dissonance of the fatal untruth she utters. Without mawkish sentimentality, she divines the eternal child that is the basis of every artist, and so she forgives her husband. As portrayed by Duse, one feels that lurking in the sanctuary of her innermost being there is the sad, bitter suspicion that her sacrifice will be in vain.
But she stops not to count the cost, and, at the end of Act I, when the emotional, weak-spined fellow, touched by her sacrifice, casts himself sobbing at her knees, her great heart surrenders, and she pets and pities him. The exquisite tenderness, soft credulity, and suppressed sweetness of Duse here sound like a strain of marvellous music. The chords of human sympathy sing melodiously. And her every movement has the actuality of life.
After the third act any dramatist would have cried quits. Not so D'Annunzio. He wishes to tell us that Silvia is deserted forever. Pathos, poetic in its quality, contrasts with the horror of the preceding scene. We are shown Silvia at the seaside, her crushed hands concealed. To her comes La Sirenetta, an elfin creature of the sea, a tiny, fantastic fisher maid, who sings the delightful ballad of the Seven Sisters and consoles the sorrowful wife and mother. Yes, Silvia has a daughter, Beata, who is kept in ignorance of her mother's misfortune.
It is now that the spectator feels the remorseless grip of the poet. La Sirenetta offers a star-fish to Silvia and wonders why she does not accept it. She is the solitary shaft of sunshine in the play. Beata runs in with flowers for her mother. It is a poignant touch. The chilly indifference of the dramatist to the suffering of his characters, his complete detachment, is art of a rarefied sort, though not the art that will endear him to all. "Beata!" exclaims the poor mother, making a futile gesture with her mutilated arms. "You are crying! You are crying!" sobs the child, throwing herself upon her mother's breast. The flowers slip to earth.
A trait of Duse is the stifling of her tears when her sister visits her. She involuntarily lifts her arms, and then, checking herself with an indescribable movement, she rests her face upon her sister's shoulder. There the tears fall. There she dries them. It is characteristic Duse. Her entire assumption is on the plane of exalted realism. We know that Silvia has a beautiful, strong soul, that she succumbs to the awful pressure of temptation; and the lie she tells is henceforth a memory never lifted from her life. In a measure she accepts with resignation physical torture and loss of her husband. D'Annunzio has not before created such a noble woman. Lucio is only a variant of his typical man: George Aurispa, Andrea Sperelli, and the rest of his amateurs in corruption and artistic hunters of morbid sensation. Silvia is unique. Silvia is adorable as Duse presents her. Throughout this most human among actresses is in constant modulation; her very silence is pregnant with suggestion. She is the exponent of an art that is baffling in its coincidence with nature. From nature what secret accents has this Italian woman not overheard?—secrets that she embodies in her art.
There are many beauties in the play, beauties of style, though the dialogue in the early acts is in excess of the movement This is quite in consonance with continental ideas of playwriting. In Europe the art of elocution is not a lost one, as it is on the English stage. The Italians and the French often speak for the sheer beauty of their expressive tongues. So the action halts and there are some amateurish strokes betrayed in the bringing on of his characters by D'Annunzio. But the burning rhetoric of the young poet lends fascination to several scenes—notably the interview of painter and sculptor in Act II. His brother-poet, Arthur Symons, has Englished D'Annunzio's prose and has accomplished his task with rare distinction.
III
D'Annunzio's Francesca da Rimini is glorified melodrama. It is unnecessary to revert to the plays, poems, books, pictures, symphonies, that have been made with the unhappy loves of Francesca and Paolo as a theme. From the day when the great Florentine exile sang in Canto V of his Hell, "In its leaves that day we read no more," Dante inspired painters, poets, sculptors,—Rodin not among the least,—musicians, and playwrights. Leigh Hunt wrote The Story of Rimini; there is George Boker's commonplace play, in which Lawrence Barrett, Louis James, Otis Skinner, and others have appeared; there is an old play by Silvio Pellico, and the two new settings of the story by Stephen Phillips and Marion Crawford—the latter's version prepared for Sarah Bernhardt—are of yesterday's doings. Both Liszt and Tschaïkowsky have composed symphonic poems on the subject.
And now D'Annunzio, as if he wished to demonstrate his fitness in the handling of any dramatic form, conceived and executed a species of poetic melodrama in which the life of a feudal period is unrolled before us in five glowing tableaux. Prodigality of colour, bloody war, horrid lusts, are mingled artistically with the processional attitudes of tirewomen, sweet singing, and interludes of lyric passion. As in a mirrored dream of Burne-Jones, Francesca moves slowly from rapt maidenhood to forced marriage; from unhappy marriage to deception and death. Not content to follow the bare lines of the ancient chronicle, the playwright weaves into his symphony of adulterous passion historic episodes and pictures of manners. It is one epoch of strange, repellent contrasts. Souls are danced to the tune of graceful madrigals, and roses often dyed a deeper hue by blood. In the sphere of action the play mostly lives, though there are some halting moments of poetic delicacy and introspection set over against operatic episodes. We first assist at a scene of jester and damsels which recalls Bandello or Boccaccio. It is gay and humorous, with the coarse, unseemly humour of the time. Alberich, teased by the three mermaids in Rheingold, is recalled. Two brothers of Francesca indulge in fierce recriminations during which a veiled accusation of attempted parricide is made, with the result that murder is barely escaped.
Francesca is deliberately betrayed by her brother, Ostasio Polenta, into the arms of the "Lamester" Giovanni Malatesta. She believes that she is wedding his brother Paolo, called the handsome one, skilled in the fine arts, of goodly presence, a warrior and a lover of sport. By a device near the close of Act I he is made to pass and be seen by Francesca. She goes to her doom willingly. She loves, but does not know that Paolo is a married man.
In the second act, a year later, Francesca, in a Saracenic headdress, seems to have aged ten years. On the battlement of her husband's fortress, amid the enginery of war, Greek fire boiling in the caldron, darts flaming, missiles, catapults, ballista, and outlandish weapons that crowd the summit of the tower, she stands. There is a terrific din; crossbows twang, shoutings and tocsins are heard. Francesca, displaying true mediæval immobility at all these sights and sounds, hovers about the platform, questioning, curious.
She insists on tampering with a torch of the deadly Greek fire, and it evokes from the poet a flock of his flaming images that Swinburne alone might parallel. As Paolo enters, eager for the fight, Francesca's attitude shifts. At once we see her aroused interest. She loved him, loves him. Their interview contains some striking speeches. "And then I saw your face, silent between the spears of the horsemen," she tells him, and adds that then she longed for death. He replies in a like exalted strain. He exposes himself at the open portcullis, and she trembles but is brave.
Her Pater Noster is an outlet for her overcharged feelings. It was delivered by Duse with shivering eloquence. The intensity of the scene is heightened by the entrance of her husband, surnamed Gianciotto. He limps, but is a mighty warrior in the land. The characters of the two brothers are exposed in a few lines. Still another brother appears, Malatestino. He is the youngest. His eye has just been destroyed during this battle. Malevolent, cruel, he too loves Francesca. In a later act he plays the part of Iago to his elder brother.
Act III is in the earlier half both a picture and a promise. Little happens. We see Francesca in a rare room, with the Adriatic Sea glimpsed through the open windows. This scene is beautifully presented. Upon a unique lectern is placed a tome, The History of Launcelot of the Lake, the very book mentioned by Dante as the fatal one. There are girlish jesting and chattering. Francesca reads aloud. It may be noticed that at the beginning of Act I the old romance of Tristan and Isolde is alluded to, thus suggesting the ultimate ending of Francesca and Paolo.
Throughout there are these delicate loops of leading motives binding firmly the somewhat loosely built dramatic tale. Francesca relates her dream to her slave, Smaragdi. It is of a pursuit through dim woods of a naked woman by a savage knight and his mastiffs. The vision always ends in the same manner. The knight cuts out her heart and throws it to the hungry dogs; they devour it.
The entrance of a voluble merchant and later an astrologer and the jester relaxes the tense melancholy of the love-lorn lady. A scene of bright foolery follows. It is touched by no little fancy. And then the slave whispers that Paolo is without. Sending away her people, she receives him. There is the inevitable duo of amorous despair and the fateful reading. Here D'Annunzio handles a foreseen situation with poetic skill. He manages to create an atmosphere of suspense from the beginning. The final cry of Francesca, "No, Paolo!" is worth a page of overwrought adjectives and writhing embraces.
Act IV, the cruellest of the five, is devoted to the arousing of Giovanni's suspicions. This is easily accomplished by Malatestino, the wicked younger brother. Jealous of Paolo, he shocks Francesca with his hints, his hot advances, and the hideous cruelty he exhibits in cutting off the head of a prisoner. He drags on the stage the head, enveloped in a bag. It is heavy, he remarks. Oddly enough, D'Annunzio manages matters so that we sympathize with the deceived husband—rather an un-Latin proceeding.
In the final act D'Annunzio, we feel, has Shakespeare before him. The scene of Othello is evoked at once, not in incident, but because of the spiritual, tragic atmosphere. Francesca is asleep; she moans, for she dreams. Her maidens are sent away. Her slave is called, but comes not. Tricked by this plotted absence, Paolo enters. The lovers are soon caught and slain by Giovanni, who breaks his sword across his knee. Every detail is admirably managed.
Not the least potent factor is the absence of all remorse shown by Francesca. The victim of deceit, she does not hesitate to deceive in return. In her love passages, Duse was truthful to a degree. She invested Francesca with just the proper poise, dignity, and suppressed melancholy.
Francesca da Rimini is the first of D'Annunzio's dramatic efforts that attracted popular favour. It is an interesting rather than a great play, though full of inspiring poetry. It was first given, December 9, 1901, at Teatro Costanzi, Rome, by the Duse Company, with the exception that Gustavo Salvini was the Paolo on that occasion.
IV
Compared to La Gioconda, The Dead City is a highly polished specimen of the static drama; there is little that is dynamic until the scene before the last. And the theme, thunder-charged as it is with symbolism, is fitter for reading than for publication before the footlights. The play is literature first, drama afterward. Sarah Bernhardt produced it in Paris.
Incest as a subject for dramatic treatment is no new thing. The Greeks employed it as a leit-motive of horror, and in the Œdipus of Sophocles, the Hippolytus of Euripides—we recall with grateful memories Bernhardt's puissant Phèdre in Racine's paraphrase of the Greek dramatist—and in the Bible itself this dire theme may be encountered, though no modern has had the courage to set the episode of Tamar and Amnon in the Book of Samuel. Later, in the flush of the seventeenth-century dramatic renascence, John Ford wrote his masterpiece, The Brother and Sister.
In that play, admired of Charles Lamb, is set forth with a wealth of realism undreamed of by D'Annunzio and the Greeks the details of a lamentable passion, and so cunning is the art of Ford that we find ourselves pitying the unhappy pair, Giovanni and Annabella, poor play-things of the gods. Of Wagner's Die Walküre it is unnecessary to speak. Music, as Henry James remarks, is a great solvent.
But mark the handling of the young Italian poet. Obsessed by the Greeks, he has constructed his tragedy on antique lines. Crime is hinted at; we even see an adulterous love—for evil passions hunt in couples throughout this dream-like story—in development; almost is a catastrophe precipitated. The incest, however, is potential. It is only an idea. It scourges the two men like whips in the hands of the avenging Furies. And it finally dooms an innocent creature, hopelessly involving at the same time the happiness of three survivors.
It is then a crime contemplated, not accomplished, this love of a brother for a sister. A critic might show that the Italian poet's form is a replica of the Greek with several variations; there is a breach of unity of place in the last act, and no "false catastrophe" is hinted at in the fourth act. This W. F. Apthorp has pointed out. It is not the sole departure. Instead of presenting us with a frozen imitation of Grecian tragedy, like most writers who have attempted to cope with the classics, D'Annunzio frankly filled the antique mould with modern feeling.
His men and women are modern; they are of to-day, neurotic, morbid, febrile souls. And this modern atmosphere is a jangling dissonance to them that prefer their tragedy unadulterated. Without an ounce of John Ford's lusty Elizabethan animalism, D'Annunzio so contrives his play of character and shock of incident that we are disquieted, dismayed, not so much by the theme as by its insidious music.
With his customary audacity he places his action in Greece, on the plain of Argolis; archæology is the background. Four friends are engaged in excavating the dead city of Mycenæ, where Schliemann discovered, or thought he discovered, the tombs and dusty bones of the Homeric heroes. From these tainted remains is exhaled the moral malaria that sets in action D'Annunzio's piece. It is a genuinely original and morbid idea.
The house of the men of Atreus is dug up, and from it comes spiritual pollution. Like a master of string-quartet writing the author has manipulated his four characters so skilfully that the melody worked is ever mysterious, ever melancholy. Anna is blind; she is the wife of Alessandro, a poet and scholar. Alessandro is morally blind, for he loves the younger Bianca, the sister of his friend Leonardo. Leonardo, the successful explorer and rifler of Homeric tombs, loves his own sister,—that ancient poison working in his veins,—and with this uncanny combination D'Annunzio plays his sinister tunes, evokes his strange harmonies.
There is no necessity of disputing the daring of this scheme, and just as inutile would be a discussion of its ethics. It seems that in his three plays, La Gioconda, La Citta Morta, and Francesca da Rimini, D'Annunzio has tried his 'prentice hand at modern realism, ancient tragedy, and historical melodrama. They are all three largely experimental, and, it must not be forgotten, the works of a beginner.
It is the externals of the drama with which we are more concerned. Of five acts three were placed in the loggia of Leonardo's house; Act II is the interior of the same house; Act V a fountain not far away. It is then a soul tragedy that is enacted, and one cannot quite escape the feeling that much study of Maeterlinck has been responsible for the sullen, depressing atmosphere. There is in the dialogue, with its haunting repetitions, the same electric apprehension sensed in the Belgian's poems. Gestures, movements, the music of sonorous speech, slow glances, and pauses—the pause is a big factor in Maeterlinck—are woven into a sort of incomprehensible symphony.
Seemingly subordinate, Eleonora Duse is the real protagonist. Blind, though not from birth, because of her exquisite tactile sensibility she understands the love of her husband for her friend. An exalted sentiment of renunciation prompts her to probe this secret passion, and when she discovers that Bianca is languishing, too, her mind is made up. She will efface herself. She will slay her useless life, So that two souls may thrive in happiness. More than this, she tempts her husband with the ripe beauty of Bianca. Here is an un-Greek idea at once. It is altruism gone mad. From Anna is mercifully kept the unholy love of the brother; nor is it revealed to Bianca. Therein lies another deviation from antique models. A story in classical literature is never told obliquely.
Duse, who has extraordinary powers of intuition, the logic of her temperament, impersonated Anna with unvarying truth and veiled sweetness, indicating by shades almost too fine for the frame of the theatre her mental attitudes toward her companions. There are few climaxes for her, the part being a passive one, the action being buried in the text. But she has opportunities. Her cry for "Light!" is one; and almost at the drop of the last curtain she finds her way to the fountain where, lured by the brother Alessandro, Bianca, his hapless victim, is murdered by being drowned in the murmuring waters which the pair have so often watched.
Anna utters the names in the terrified accents of the lost blind. She seeks, too, her husband. All the day she anticipated tragedy. It hung over her soul like a smoky pall. She feels her way to the fountain and there touching with her feet the body of the dead girl she distractedly searches for signs of life. It is a dramatic moment. Then arising with a shudder she shouts, joyfully:—
"Vedo! Vedo!" ("I see! I see!"). Her physical sight is restored and her own hold on life becomes at once intensified; her unselfishness is shed. And it is at this hopeless moment that the dramatist unseals her vision and closes his play, leaving the wretched woman to face the loss of Bianca and possibly the lunacy of her husband and his friend. If they do not go mad it is because their nerves have become dulled to the hideousness of life. They are abnormal; every one in the play, excepting the girl Bianca, is abnormal. Even the nurse does not escape the taint. She is a figure out of Maeterlinck, and doubtless knows the madness that lurks in moon-haunted corridors!
That Duse triumphed was to be expected. She awed rather than astonished us, her skill taking on new meanings, new colours. All together, her art was a unique something that closely bordered on the clairvoyant. Her helpless silences were actually terrifying; her poses most pathetic. Bianca Maria was admirably played by Signorina Civani, the Sirenetta of La Gioconda. She noted most fluently the loving, healthy nature of the girl who falls a victim to the shafts of Eros. It is with Sophocles's Antigone that the action begins; it is with a motto from Antigone, Eros, unconquered in strife, that the play is overshadowed.
V
D'Annunzio's new play, The Daughter of Jorio, has achieved some success in Italy, despite the absence of Eleonora Duse from the cast, and despite the reaction against the enthusiasm of its première. When the drama was produced at Milan it was put on for a "run," or the European equivalent of one. There was severe criticism, but the consensus seems to be that in his latest work that extraordinary creature, D'Annunzio, has outshone his earlier dramatic efforts.
The chief quality that impresses itself upon the reader of La Figlia di Jorio is its superior dramatic movement as compared, for example, with The Dead City or Francesca da Rimini by the same writer. The first act is full of vitality, its characterization excellent; the cuts in Acts II and III made by D'Annunzio for the first performance greatly benefit the somewhat sluggish tempi of these scenes. The old rhetorician and lover of beautiful phrases has not been killed in the Italian poet, merely "scotched." For one thing, he has struck that theatrical vein of gold, a new background, new methods of speech, new costumes, new ideas—or, rather, most ancient ones, though novel to the stage. Travelling with his friend, the painter Michetti, one summer in the savage mountainous country of the Abruzzi, D'Annunzio saturated himself with his accustomed receptivity to a strange people and environment, which has resulted in a powerful tragedy. Like Verga's discovery of the Sicilian peasant in Cavalleria Rusticana—a veritable treasure-trove for that poet and also for Mascagni—D'Annunzio in his encounter with the curious customs and pagan personalities of the hardy, superstitious Abruzzi, was enabled to lay up a stock of images for his new work. I doubt, however, if he has succeeded as well as Verga in getting close to the skin and soil of this peasantry. There is more than one awkward hiatus in The Daughter of Jorio, and an almost epileptic intensity in the development of the witch girl's character.
The first act is the best, because the simplest and most sincere. It shows us a living room in a rustic house. The background and "properties" are said to be wonderfully realistic. Aligi, the shepherd, is to marry. His bride's name is Vienda. He does not love her, for she was chosen by his parents—and in this old Italian land the father's command is law. The betrothal ceremonies are beginning. The groom's sisters are near by. He is ill at ease, for he has been dreaming strange dreams. Vienda spills the broken bread of betrothal from her lap upon the floor. It is a maleficent sign. Suddenly there comes a noise of shouting and music. The harvesters, crazy with drink and the torrid heat of the sun, rush in. They have come to celebrate. They are also chasing a human being, a miserable hunted girl of bad repute, the daughter of Jorio, the magician. Hunted down, she claims sanctuary in the household. Although she is of ill-fame, although Aligi's father, Lazaro, has been wounded in a squabble about this girl, Mila di Codra, she is sheltered by the woman. Aligi is for turning her away; her coming spells more bad luck; the infuriated mob without demand admittance. Enraged, the shepherd raises his staff to strike the unhappy fugitive. As he does this he is overtaken by fresh visions; he thinks he sees Mila guarded by a weeping angel. He falls at her feet begging her pardon. A cross is laid over the threshold, a litany sung by his sisters, and the angry reapers are hypnotized. They enter singly, kiss the cross, and dissolve homeward. Lazaro enters with his head in a bandage and Mila escapes. Another ill omen—the father and son both love the same woman.
The second act discovers Aligi and Mila in a mountainous cave where they have lived for six months—in a state of innocence. Here the credulity of the spectator is taxed, and the lyric ecstasy of the poet waxes. It is nevertheless an idyllic episode. One kiss is exchanged, the first and the last, for Lazaro eventually finds his now disgraced son, and with a pair of sturdy rustics comes to carry away the witch. In the conflict that ensues the son murders the father. Act III brings us back to the old home of Aligi. His father's corpse lies in the garden, according to custom. The son is condemned to the awful death of the parricide—after his offending hand is cut off he is to be tied in a sack with a fierce dog and then thrown into the river. The end may be surmised. One consolation is not denied him—a cup of drink to induce forgetfulness. As the preparations are about completed Mila bursts upon the crowded scene—an impressive one, according to printed reports—and takes upon herself the blame of the affair. She it was, she declares, who murdered Lazaro. Aligi curses her in his delirium, as she is dragged away to be burnt alive, she the witch, the daughter of Jorio. Her triumphant voice is heard to the last, while for a background there is the chanting of the requiem and the triumphant yelling and imprecations of the shepherds, the Abruzzi lusting for a human sacrifice. Then the curtain falls. Several critics discern in all this the triumph of religion over the senses—a solution that does their ingenuity credit, though far from convincing.
It may be seen that there is real dramatic worth in the play, love and sacrifice being its very pith. Better still, the poet has become less self-absorbed and consequently more objective. The human note predominates in this wild and highly coloured music. In his plays and novels and verse he has himself been the artistic and sterile hero—as Eleonora Duse, in the plays and one novel, their heroine. A German critic declares that Mila is only a sister of the crazy woman in A Spring Morning's Dream—as she, Duse, also is related to Silvia in Gioconda, to the blind wife in The Dead City, and Francesca, as well as La Foscarina in Fuoco, Duse, Eleonora Duse, always Duse. Lucky, thrice happy poet, to have been inspired by such a model! To have had the opportunity of studying such a sublime, unhappy soul as is Duse's!
A German critic speaks slightingly of Das Geklingel der schönen Phrasen—the jingling of dulcet phrases—as a drawback to the action. Doubtless this is true. Often we cannot hear the play because of the words. The chief thing to be remarked, however, is the improvement in dramatic spirit and rhythm and the gratifying supremacy of the dramatic over the lyric and literary qualities—the latter hitherto anti-dramatic elements in the plays of D'Annunzio.
The poet is now working on a new three-act tragedy, The Ship,—in which Duse is to appear at La Scala this spring. The theme is Venetian—that Venice which both Duse and D'Annunzio love so well; and also on a modern drama entitled, The Light Under the Bushel.