Moreover, his vision of power came to include, at moments, the bridling of his own infirmities. There was always the making of a soldier in the Abruzzan before he became one. He was capable of an asceticism amazing to those who know only the hothouse atmosphere of his novels. Some of his most sumptuous prose and verse was poured forth in the naked seclusion of monastic cells, or in wild peasant houses far from civilization; and only the most iron industry could have achieved the enormous bulk of his work.[24] Hence he can put into the mouth of Claudio Cantelmo, in the Vergini, these evidently autobiographic words: ‘After subduing the tumults of youth, I examined whether perchance ... my will could, by choice and exclusion, extract a new and seemly work of its own from the elements which life had stored up within me.’ There is a glimpse here of a finer psychological and a deeper ethical insight than we often find in d’Annunzio, and it might have led a man of richer spiritual capacity to a loftier poetry than he was ever to produce.
But on the whole the clue thus hinted was not followed up, and the tough nerve which might have nourished the powerful controlling will of a supreme artist, often served only to sustain those enormities of the ferocious and the grandiose which make dramas like Gloria and La Nave mere examples of the pathology of genius.
We touch here the crucial point. For these extravagances were not mere momentary aberrations. They were but the more pronounced manifestations of fundamental deficiencies in the man, which in their turn impoverish and dwarf the poet. D’Annunzio, in one word, is wanting in humanity; and because of his shallow and fragmentary apprehension of the human soul, his vision of power and beauty discharges itself in barren spectacles of brute energy and material splendour, for which he cannot find psychological equivalents in grandeur or loveliness of character. Shakespeare’s huge personalities—Othello, Lear, Antony—are human in every trait, however much they transcend our actual experience of men. D’Annunzio tries to make violent actions and abnormal passions produce the illusion of greatness of soul, and disguises his psychological poverty by the sustained coruscations of his lyric speech.
In the meantime novels and poems and dramas poured forth. The prolific later nineties saw the famous novel Fuoco (1900), a picture of Venetian splendour as gorgeous as that of Rome in Piacère, but touched with the new joy in power; and the dramas Sogno d’un Mattino di Primavera (1897), Gioconda, and Città Morta (1898). In the last named d’Annunzio’s vision of power assumes an audacious and original form. It is here the power of the vanished past to stretch an invisible hand across the centuries and strike down youth and life. The result is a tragedy that reproduces as nearly as a modern dramatist may the horror excited in ancient spectators by the doom of the House of Atreus. Nothing indeed could be less Greek than the structure and persons of the play. Leonardo, a young archæologist, is excavating in the ruins of Mycenæ. With him are his sister, Beata Maria, and their friends Alessandro and Anna his wife, a cluster of human flowers, full of living charm and sap, transplanted into the ‘dead city.’ But the dead city is not merely dead; it is mysteriously fraught with the power of the vanished past to control the present and the future. Its mouldering ruins are the arena of a struggle between Death and Life, in which death triumphs and life receives the mortal blow. Leonardo, obsessed with the Oresteia, is haunted at night by visions of terrific blood-stained figures, and has no thoughts by day but of penetrating the secrets of their tombs. Alessandro, full of the joy of life, seeks to detach him from these preoccupations. ‘I hoped he would have come with me and gathered flowers with those fingers of his which know nothing but stones and dust,’ and he is drawn to Beata Maria, herself the very genius of glowing youth, ‘the one live thing, says her friend Anna, in this place, where all is dead and burnt ... it is incredible what force of life is in her ... if she were not, none of us could live here, we should all die of thirst.’ ‘When Beata Maria speaks, he who hears forgets his pain, and believes that life can still be sweet.’ She herself is devoted to the brother whose passion seems to estrange him so far from what she loves. She shares his Hellenic ardour, and innocently recites Cassandra’s prophecy in the Agamemnon, with Cassandra’s wreath on her golden locks, of ‘an evil, intolerable to the nearest kin, and irreparable, preparing in this house.’ Anna, struck with mysterious fear, stops her; but the ominous words have been spoken, and foreshadow a real doom. Beata Maria, the unconscious Cassandra, will suffer Cassandra’s fate. The indestructible virus of the dead city will poison the glory of youth. The incestuous passion which desolated the House of Atreus is not extinguished in the crumbling dust of their tombs. A horrible infection seizes Leonardo. He struggles vainly with an impure passion for his sister. In only one way can his love be purified, a way grievous for him, and yet more grievous for her. She must die; and he slays her among the tombs of the ‘dead city’ which has thus again laid upon the living its mortal hand.
The conclusion outrages our feelings, and betrays d’Annunzio’s glaring deficiency in sympathetic power. Whatever pity we feel for Leonardo in his miserable plight is dispelled by his cynical purchase of the purity of his own emotions at the price of his innocent sister’s death. Here, as in other cases, d’Annunzio’s fundamental want of passion, and the strain of hard egoism which pervaded the movements of his brilliant mind, gravely injured his attempts in tragic poetry. Death was doubtless the only solution; but it must be another death—one that would have saved the ‘purity’ of Leonardo’s emotions by ending them altogether. Leonardo, however, has the ruthless energy of the Superman, and the innocent life must be crushed that he may rise.
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):