And then, with adolescence, came the passion of sex; for d’Annunzio no shy and gradual discovery, but a veritable explosion, before which all obstacles, moral and material, vanished into air. He tells it with the frankness of a child of the South, and the self-conscious importance of an egoist for whom the events of his own physical history could only be fitly described in terms of epic poetry, with its contending nationalities and ruined or triumphant kings. ‘O flesh!’ he cries, ‘I gave myself up to thee, as a young beardless king gives himself up to the warrior maid who advances in arms, terrible and beautiful. She advances victorious, and the people receive her with rejoicing. Astonishment strikes the gentle king, and his hope laughs at his fear.’[23] And from the first this new passion allies itself with the rest of his sense-organism, irradiating eye and ear and imagination, ‘giving to every power a double power,’ as Biron says in Love’s Labour’s Lost. ‘Thou wast sometimes as the grape pressed by fiery feet, O flesh, sometimes as snow printed with bleeding traces; I seemed to feel in thee the twisting of trodden roots, and to hear the far-off grinding of the axe upon the whetstone.’ The young erotic was already growing towards that observant psychologist of eroticism who pervades so many gorgeous but repulsive pages of his novels.
He was also growing, more slowly and as yet invisibly, to other and more notable things. In the first published poems of the boy of eighteen, and the second, Canto Novo, two years later, there is not much more than the reflexion of this intense and pervading ‘sensuality’ (in the large meaning above indicated), in a speech moulded upon the diction and rhythms of Carducci. The great master, then at the height of his fame, had still to do much of his most splendid work. D’Annunzio, who never ceased to revere him, was to become his principal inheritor; but the heir added so much of his own to the bequest that he can only at the outset be regarded as his disciple. The elder poet’s influence was in any case entirely salutary. The classical severity and nobility of style which distinguish the Rime Nove and the Odi Barbare from the florid and facile romantic verse of the day, contributed to temper the dangerous luxuriance of d’Annunzio, and to evoke the powers of self-discipline and tenacious will which lay within; while Carducci’s exultation in radiance and clarity, his noonday view of life, his symbolic sun-worship and his hatred of all twilight obscurantism and moonlight nebulosity, equally enforced the more virile strain in d’Annunzio, the ‘stalk of carle’s hemp’ which, far more truly than in Burns, underlay the voluptuous senses.
This background of harder and tougher nature was already manifested when d’Annunzio, a few years later, turned to tell in prose some stories of his native province. There is little in the Novelle della Pescara of love, less of luxury or refinement; we see the Abruzzan village folk at feud, fanatical and ferocious, the women inciting the men, the Church in its most ceremonial robes blandly but helplessly looking on. The Idolators tells how the men of a certain village plan to set the bronze statue of their saint upon the church altar of another neighbouring village. They assemble at night and march through the darkness with the image on a cart. In the other village the men await them in force, and a savage battle takes place in the church, ending in the rout of the assailants with much slaughter, and the ignominious mutilation of the image of their patron saint. And all this grim matter is told in a style admirably strong and terse, bold and sharp in outline, direct and impersonal in statement, untouched by either delicate feeling or weak sentimentality. D’Annunzio’s sensuality asserts itself still, as always; but it appears here as a Rubens-like joy in intense impressions; now a copper-coloured storm sky, now a splash of blood, betrays his passion for the crude effects of flame and scarlet, most often where they signify death or ruin. He imagines voluptuously as always, but his voluptuousness here feeds not in the lust of the flesh, but in the lust of wounds and death. When he describes the fighting in the church, he spares you as little as Homer; you are not told merely that a man was stabbed, you are made to see the blade shear away the flesh from the bone. His men are drawn with the same hard, pungent stroke, and a visible relish for scars, gnarled features, frayed dress, and all the maimings and deformities, which tell not of weakness or decay, but of battles recent or long ago, the blows and buffets received in the tug with fortune. There is little trace of sybarite effeminacy in the painting of old Giacobbe, for instance, the leader of the insurgents, a tall, bony man, with bald crown and long red hairs on nape and temples, two front teeth wanting, which gave him a look of senile ferocity, a pointed chin covered with bristles, and so forth.
D’Annunzio was intrinsically of the Abruzzan race; the tough hardy fibre of the peasant folk was his; and it was the deep inborn attachment to his blood and kin which produced, twenty years later, his greatest work, as a like attachment lifted Mr. Shaw, almost at the same moment, to the rare heights of John Bull’s Other Island. But much had to happen to the young provincial before he could thus discover to the full the poetry of his province.
II
In the early eighties d’Annunzio had come to Rome. The little circle of young Carduccians in the capital welcomed the poet’s brilliant disciple, who was soon to outdistance them all in sheer splendour of literary gift. More important, however, than any literary or personal influence—for his hard encasing shell of egoism made him extraordinarily immune to the intrusion either of alien genius or of friendship or love—was the deep impression made upon the young Abruzzan by the splendour, the art glories, and above all the historic import of Rome. ‘The Abruzzi gave d’Annunzio the sense of race‘, says an excellent critic, ‘Rome gave him the sense of history.’ The magical effect of Rome had hitherto been rendered most vividly in the poetry of other peoples, to whom it was a revelation, or a fulfilment of long aspiration, of the ‘city of their soul,’ in Goethe’s Roman Elegies, Childe Harold, or Adonais. How overwhelming to an imaginative Italian the sight and living presence of Rome could be may be judged from the magnificent Ode of Carducci. The Englishman who is thrilled as he stands in the Forum, or by the mossy bastions of our own Roman wall, may faintly apprehend the temper of a citizen of the ‘Third Italy’ who felt his capital, newly won from the Popes, to be once more in living continuity with the city of Cæsar. Both the nobility and the extravagance of Italian national feeling have their root in this sense of continuity with antique Rome, and this is to be remembered in estimating the perfervid Italianità of d’Annunzio, the most striking example both of the sublime idealism and of the childish extravagance which it is able to inspire.
The work of the next years abounded in evidence of the spell which Rome had laid upon his sensuous imagination. He poured forth novels and poems, both charged with an oppressive opulence of epicurean and erotic detail, but saved for art by the clear-cut beauty of the prose, and by frequent strokes of bold and splendid imagination.
Andrea Sperelli in Il Piacere (1889) and Tullio Hermil in L’Innocente (1892), are virtuosos in æsthetic as well as in erotic luxury, and the two allied varieties of hedonism reflect and enforce one another. Sperelli is artist and connoisseur, of unlimited resources and opportunities, and neither he nor his mistress could think love tolerable in chambers not hung with precious tapestry and adorned with sculptured gold and silver vessels, the gift of queens or cardinals of the splendour-loving Renascence. No doubt there is irony in the picture too; the native stamina in d’Annunzio resists complete assimilation to the corrupt aspects of the luxury he describes, and he feels keenly the contrast between the riotous profusion of the ‘new rich’ of the new Rome and the heroism and hardships of the men of the Risorgimento who had won it.
The poetry of this period is less repellent because its substance, though not definitely larger or deeper, is sustained and penetrated by the magic of a wonderfully winged and musical speech. His Elegie Romane (1892)—a rare case of his emulating another poet—are inferior in intellectual force to Goethe’s, which yet have as lyrics an almost pedestrian air in comparison with the exquisite dance of the Italian rhythms. Here is one of d’Annunzio’s, in some approach to the original elegiacs. He has listened to a service in St. Peter’s:
Thro’ the vaulted nave, that for ages has gathered so vast a