Palestrina? Alone the voice mourns, to the world
Uttering a sorrow divine. Does the buried singer not hear it?
Does not his soul leap up, bright on the heights of heaven?
Even as a dove makes wing aloft unto golden turrets?
The voice mourns, alone; mourns, in the silence, alone.
The sonnets of the Isottèo and Chimera (1885-8) show a concentration rare in the later history of the Italian sonnet. And any reader who thinks d’Annunzio incapable of writing of love without offence may be invited to try the charming idyll of Isaotta Guttadàuro. Scenery and circumstances, to be sure, are sumptuous and opulent as usual. The simple life and homely persons traditional in idyll are remote; but poetry did not absolutely fly from Tennyson’s touch when he turned from his Miller’s and Gardener’s daughters to put Maud in a Hall; and neither does she retire from d’Annunzio’s Isaotta, in her noble mansion. The lover stands at sunrise in the ‘high hall garden’ under her window and summons her in a joyous morning song to come forth. It is late autumn, the house is silent, but the peacocks perched on the orange trees hail the morning in their raucous tones. The situation is that of Herrick’s May morning song to Corinna; but though Herrick loved jewels and fine dresses not a little, the contrast is piquant between the country simplicity of his Devonshire maids and men, and the aristocratic luxury of Isaotta. ‘Come, my Corinna, come! Wash, dress, be brief in praying’—bids Herrick; but no such summary toilette will serve the Italian. Isaotta will rise from her brocaded bed, and her white limbs will gleam in a marble bath, as her maid pours amber-scented water on them, while the woven figures of the story of Omphale look on from the walls. At length Isaotta comes out on to her vine-wreathed balcony and playfully greets messèr cantore below. She is secretly ready, we see, to surrender, but makes a show of standing out for terms. They will wander through the autumnal vineyards, and if they find a single cluster still hanging on the poles, ‘I will yield to your desire, and you shall be my lord.’ So they set out in the November morning. The vineyards, lately so loud with vintage merriment and song, are now deserted and still. Not a cluster is to be seen. She archly mocks him: ‘What, has subtle Love no power to give you eyes?’ They meet peasant women going to their work, and one of them asks him, ‘What seekest thou, fair sir?’ And he replies: ‘I seek a treasure.’ A flight of birds rises suddenly across their path with joyous cries; they take it as a sign, and gaze at each other, pale and silent. Then unexpectedly he sees before him a vineyard flaming in full array of purple and gold, and a flock of birds making a chorus in its midst. “‘O lady Isaotta, here is life!’ I cried to her with rapt soul; and the chorus of songsters cried over our heads. I drew her to the spot, and she came as swift as I, for I held her firmly by the hand. Rosy was the face she turned away from me, but fair as Blanchemain’s when she took the kiss of Lancelot, her sovran lover, in the forest. ‘O Lady, I keep my pact; for you I pluck the fatal untouched cluster.’ Then she gave me the kiss divine”.
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.