Keats had, in effect, come home.
Yet the deflection, if it strained, also braced; and if in the following months his imagination, when he is most inspired, moves once more habitually among mossy woodland ways and by enchanted waters, the immense advance in robustness of artistic and intellectual sinew which distinguishes the poet of the Nightingale and Autumn from the poet of Endymion was gained chiefly in that summer of enlarged ideals and experience, of which the mountain vision was a small but a significant and symbolical part.
IV
GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO
IV
GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO
MAZZINI, the most prophetic figure of the nineteenth century, declared in a famous passage his confidence in the European mission of his country. ‘The Third Italy,’ destined to be born of the long agony of the struggle with Austria without and the papacy within, was not merely to be a nation, restored to unity and independence; it was to intervene as an original voice in the complex harmony of the European nationalities, contributing of its own inborn genius something distinctive and unique. ‘We believe devoutly that Italy has not exhausted her life in the world. She is called to introduce yet new elements in the progressive development of humanity, and to live with a third life. It is for us to begin it.’ Were Mazzini to return to life to-day, how far would he regard his prophecy as fulfilled? Beyond question his lofty idealism would find much to disapprove and to regret. He would find a Third Italy, which has committed grave excesses in the name of her recovered nationhood. But he would also find a nation whose present rulers have shown more capacity for Mazzinean internationalism than any other European government. And he would find, also, in the Third Italy, a real renascence, a genuine rebirth of genius and power, and this in ways so individual as to justify in a rare degree the anticipation that Italy would give something vitally her own to the new Europe. Open any serious Italian book to-day, and you will note a kind of intellectual concentration, a girding up of the loins of speech and thought, in striking contrast with the loose-tongued volubility of most Italian writing, in verse or prose, of the mid-nineteenth century. You note also a new tone of critical mastery and conscious equality. Italy in the last century was still the ‘woman-people,’ the pathetic beauty, languid still after the gentle torpor of two centuries, and whose intellectual life, with some brilliant isolated exceptions, faintly reflected that of the more masculine nations north of the Alps. To-day she has not only critically mastered all that Europe has to give, she sits in judgment upon us, and the judgment she pronounces has again and again been of that fruitful kind which disposes of old difficulties by revealing a larger law. Benedetto Croce, who in his review, the Critica, brings the literature of Europe, weighed and measured, to his reader’s doors, has in his original philosophic work subjected her philosophic systems to a searching revision, and has succeeded in some measure to their authority.[20] A thinker less known, even to cultivated Italians, Aliotta, has surveyed in a book of singular penetration and philosophic power, the ‘idealistic reaction against science’ in the nineteenth century. And when we look to creative literature, we find in this Third Italy, together with a profusion of those fungoid growths of which the modern age has in the West been everywhere prolific, a group of poets, of powerful temperament and dazzling gifts, to whom no predecessor, in Italy or elsewhere, offers more than a distant resemblance. One of these, after pouring forth poems, dramas, novels, in prodigal abundance for thirty years, became the most vociferous, and possibly the most potent, of the forces that drove Italy into the war, and was until lately the idol of the whole Italian race. Even to-day, after the sorry collapse of his adventure, the man in whom Europe, irritated and impatient, sees only a sort of Harlequin-Garibaldi, impudent where his predecessor was sublime, and florid where he was laconic, is still, for multitudes of his countrymen, the hero-poet who took the banner of Italianità from the failing or treacherous hands of diplomats and statesmen, and defended it against the enemy without and the enemy within, with the tenacity of maturity and the ardour of youth. Certainly, one who is beyond all rivalry the most adored poet, in any country, of our time, who has fought for Italy with tongue and pen and risked his life in her service, and whose personality might be called a brilliant impressionist sketch of the talents and failings of the Italian character, reproducing some in heightened but veracious illumination, others in glaring caricature or paradoxical distortion—such a man, as a national no less than as a literary force, claims and deserves close study.
Before entering, however, upon the detail of his life and work, let me assist our imagination of Gabriele d’Annunzio by quoting from the vivid description given by Mr. James Bone of a meeting with him at Venice in the summer of 1918. The poet, fifty-six years old, was then at the height of his renown; Fiume was still unthought of. His great exploit of flying over Vienna and dropping leaflets inviting her in aureate imagery to make peace was on every tongue. The gondoliers took off their hats as they passed his house on the Grand Canal, and he had to register all his letters to prevent their being abstracted as souvenirs. Mr. Bone was talking with the airmen at an aerodrome on one of the islands in the lagoons; when ‘Conversation died instantly as an airman, very different from the others, came hurrying towards us a rather small, very quick, clean-cut figure, wearing large smoked glasses and white gloves with the wrists turned down.... The nose was rather prominent, complexion not dark but marked a little, the whole profile very clear, making one think not of a Renaissance Italian but of a type more antique, an impression accentuated by his rather large, beautifully shaped ear, very close to the head. The body denied the age that was told in the face, for all its firmness. One’s first impression was of a personality of extraordinary swiftness and spirit still at full pressure, remorselessly pursuing its course “in hours of insight willed.”... The whole surface of d’Annunzio’s personality suggested a rich, hard fineness, like those unpolished marbles in old Italian churches that gleam delicately near the base where the worshippers have touched them, but above rise cold and white as from the matrix.... There was something of the man of fashion in the way he wore his gloves, and in his gestures, but nothing one could see of the national idol aware of itself.’[21]
I
The soldier-poet-man-of-fashion, who wore his fifty-six years thus lightly, was born, in 1862, at Pescara, the chief—almost only—town of the Abruzzi, then one of the wildest and rudest provinces of Italy. Its valleys, descending from the eastern heights of the Apennines to the Adriatic, were inhabited by an almost purely peasant population—a hardy, vigorous race, tenacious of their primitive customs, and little accessible to cultural influences. The Church enjoyed their fanatical devotion, but only at the price of tacitly accepting many immemorial pagan usages disguised by an unusually transparent veil of Catholic ritual; while the Law occasionally found it expedient to leave a convicted murderer (as in the Figlia di Iorio) to be executed by an angry multitude according to the savage methods their tradition prescribed. The little haven of Pescara—one of the few on Italy’s featureless Adriatic coast—was the centre of a coasting traffic with the yet wilder Dalmatian seaboard, a traffic which like all ancient sea-faring, pursued its economic aims in an atmosphere of superstitious observance, mystical, picturesque, and sometimes cruel. In the poetic autobiography (‘The Soul’s Journey’) which occupies the first Laude (1903), d’Annunzio sketches vividly his boyhood’s home in this Abruzzan country overlooking the sea. Of the persons who composed this home, of family affections, we have only momentary retrospective glimpses. We hear of the father, long dead when he wrote, from whom he derived his iron-tempered muscles; and of the mother, who gave him his insatiable ardour of will and desire. The three sisters seem to have been like him; the face of the second sister resembled his own ‘mirrored in a clear fountain at dawn.’ All that stood between them, he says, was their innocence and his passion. There was, too, an old nurse, to whom in her serene old age, when she had retired to a mountain hamlet, the poet addressed some tenderly beautiful stanzas, contrasting his own stormy career with her idyllic peace as she ‘spins the wool of her own flocks while the oil holds out.’[22]
But of household drama, such as dominates the experience of most children, little seems to have existed for this child. Certainly it vanishes completely, in the retrospect of the man of forty, beside the drama enacted with prodigious intensity of colour, animation, and passion, by his imperious senses. The contrast is here acute between d’Annunzio and his co-heir of the Carduccian tradition, Pascoli, whose poignant memories of childhood, instead of being effaced by the energy of his sense-life, permeate it through and through, giving a ‘deep autumnal tone’ to almost every line he wrote. He spoke in later life of his ‘profound sensuality’ as a gift which had brought him poetic discoveries denied to colder men, and this is no doubt true if by ‘sensuality’ we understand, as we ought, that d’Annunzio is prodigally endowed with all the senses, that eye and ear feast on the glory and the music of the world and live in its teeming life, that his lithe body thrills with the zest of motion, that imagery is the material of his thinking and the stuff of his speech; and that the passion of sex, so acutely and perilously developed in him, is just one element in this prodigal endowment of his entire sense-organism, itself a main source of the artistic splendour of his work. In the early pages of the Viaggio we see the young boy drinking in with a kind of intoxication the simple sights and sounds of the farm—the rhythmic fall of the flails on the threshing-floor, the pouring of the whey from the churn, the whirr of the spool in the loom, the scampering of wild ponies with streaming manes over the hillside; or again, out at sea, the gorgeous scarlet or gold sails scudding before the wind, each with its symbolic sign. Even the inanimate world became for his transfiguring senses alive; ‘it was a lying voice,’ he cries, ‘that declared that Pan is dead.’ The mere contrasts of things, the individual self-assertion shown by a tree, for instance, in not being a rock, produced in him an excitement analogous to that which made Rupert Brooke, in his own words, ‘a lover’ of all kinds of common things for being just definitely and unmistakably what they were. So that a conception apparently so thin and abstract as ‘difference’ can assume for him the shape and potency of an alluring divinity: ‘Diversity,’ he cries, ‘the siren of the world! I am he who love thee!’