The fourth book of the Laudi is a lyric celebration in this spirit, of the Tripoli adventure ‘beyond the sea.’ But megalomania was happily not the whole result. The older and deeper instincts planted or quickened in d’Annunzio by his earlier experience—the feeling for race and for historic continuity—coalesced with the new and vehement passion of nationality, communicating to it, in moments of vision, something of their human intimacy, and undergoing in their turn an answering enlargement of range and scope. If his Italianità was something more significant than a resonant cry for more ships and territory, it was because it drew warmth and insight from the home sentiment for his Abruzzan province deep-rooted in the poet’s heart; while the Abruzzan province, in its turn, was seen in the larger and grander setting of the Italian people and the Roman race, but without the distorting nimbus of megalomaniac dreams. This fortunate harmony found expression chiefly in certain poems of the years shortly before and after the beginning of the new century, the golden period of d’Annunzio’s production. To these years belong his two most notable attempts to give to Italy a tragic poetry built upon Italian history.
In the material for tragic poetry no country was richer, but it had been left to the genius of foreign dramatists to give world-wide fame to the stories of Romeo and Juliet, Beatrice Cenci, and Torquato Tasso. Alfieri, the greatest of Italian tragic poets, had devoted his austere art almost solely to classical subjects; and his Don Garzia and Congiura de’ Pazzi, with Niccolini’s Arnaldo da Brescia, Monti’s Galeotto Manfredi, and Manzoni’s Conte di Carmagnola and Adelchi stood almost alone, as remarkable Italian tragedies on Italian themes. In the story of Francesca of Rimini, d’Annunzio found to his hand a native tragic subject of the first order, not yet touched by a tragic poet of genius, Italian or other. That it had been made his own by the supreme poet of Italy hardly disturbed d’Annunzio, deeply as he revered the poet whose words, in the fine phrase of his Dante Ode, clothed Italy like the splendour of day. He was not going to challenge comparison with Dante’s marmoreal brevity. And the poet of Pescara had some title to regard this story of the adjacent Adriatic sea-board of Rimini and Ravenna, as his by right. But the story itself has also exerted its moderating control upon the natural prodigiosity of his invention, so that in his Francescan tragedy it is possible to recognize a general conformity to traditional technique.
It is even possible that Shakespeare’s handling of his Italian tragedy may have afforded a hint. The ruin of Romeo and Juliet results from the feud of the rival houses. The ruin of d’Annunzio’s Francesca and Paolo is similarly rooted ultimately in the feud of Guelf and Ghibelline. Her father, a great Guelf captain, has sold her to the lord of Ravenna, as the price of support against the Ghibellines. But when her hand is thus plighted, she has already seen his brother Paolo, with his feminine beauty and luxuriant locks, pass under her window, and the seed of their passion is sown. Francesca has grown up ‘a flower in an iron soil,’ and love throughout is set in a frame of war. But she would be no d’Annunzian heroine if she did not respond to the call of life and light. When about to leave Rimini on her marriage she replies to the pleading of her devoted young sister who cannot live without her, ‘I am going, sweet life, where thou canst not come, to a deep and solitary place, where a great fire burns without fuel.’ Fire is d’Annunzio’s haunting symbol for terrible and splendid things, a symbol, too, for the strange union of cruelty and beauty in his own mind and art, and it does not here forecast only the Inferno flames in which she will move with Paolo so lightly before the wind. In the palace at Ravenna we see her among her ladies, chafing at her dull seclusion, while the Ghibelline siege rages without. A Florentine merchant displays his gorgeous wares before them, a feast of scarlet and gold. Presently Francesca has climbed to the tower where her husband’s brothers are on guard. Bolts and arrows crash against the walls or through the loophole. A cauldron of Greek fire stands ready for use. Francesca, to the horror of the soldiers, fires it, and breaks into wild ecstasy at the ‘deadly beauty’ of this ‘swift and terrible life.’ A moment later a bolt pierces the curls of Paolo. She thinks he is wounded, and clasps his head. In that embrace he stammers the first word of love. ‘They have not hit me, but your hands have touched me, and have undone the soul within my heart!...’ Francesca: ‘Lost! Thou art lost!’ Thus, again, Francesca’s fate, like Juliet’s, is provoked by the irrelevant feud of parties without. But presently the same irrelevant feud thrusts the lovers apart. Paolo is sent as General of the Guelf forces to Florence. Francesca in his absence reads the Lancelot romance with her ladies. But Paolo, unable to endure his exile, posts back to Ravenna, and rushes to her chamber. The romance of Lancelot lies open on the lectern. The place where the reading stopped is marked; it is where Galeotto is urging Lancelot’s suit upon Ginevra. They bend over the book together. The following dialogue replaces Dante’s single pregnant line:
Pa. Let us read a page, Francesca!
Fr. Look at that swarm of swallows, making a shadow
On the bright water!
Pa. Let us read, Francesca.
Fr. And that sail that is glowing like fire!
Pa. (reading). ‘Assuredly,
Lady,’ says Galeotto, ‘he does not dare,
Nor will he ask ye anything of love,
Being afraid, but I ask in his name, and if
I did not ask, you ought to seek it, seeing
You could in no wise win a richer treasure.’
And she says—
(drawing Francesca gently by the hand)
Now do you read what she says,
Be you Ginevra.
Fr. (reading). And she says: ‘Well I know it, and I will do
What you command. And Galeotto said:
Grammercy, lady; I beg that you will give him
Your love....’
(she stops.)
Pa. Read further!
Fr. No, I cannot see
The words.
Pa. Read: ‘Certainly ...
Fr. Certainly,’ she says,
‘I give it him, but so that he be mine
And I utterly his, and all ill things
Made good’ ... Paolo, enough.
Pa. (reading with a hoarse and tremulous voice).
‘Lady, he says, much thanks; now in my presence
Kiss him, for earnest of true love’—You, you!
What says she now? What now?
(Their pale faces bend over the book, so that their cheeks almost touch.)
Fr. (reading). She says: ‘Why should
He beg it of me? I desire it more
Than you....’
Pa. (continuing with stifled voice). ‘They draw apart.
And the Queen sees
The Knight dare go no further. Then she clasps him
About the chin, and with a long kiss kisses
His mouth....’
(He kisses her in the same way. When their mouths separate Francesca reels, and falls back on the cushions.)
Francesca!
Fr. (with hardly audible voice).
No, Paolo!
The sequel is too long drawn out, and is marred by the duplicity of all the persons concerned. Malatestino’s sleuth-hound cunning brings about the husband’s vengeance, but his strategy is animated only by ferocious hatred of the lovers, not by any care for justice. By his contrivance the rough soldier, who has never suspected his own wrongs, returns prematurely from the march, and thunders at the lovers’ chamber door: ‘Open, Francesca!’ The wretched Paolo tries to escape through a trapdoor, but is dragged up by the hair to be slain. But Francesca rushes to clasp him, and the husband’s sword pierces her. Francesca da Rimini, though a brilliant drama, with innumerable beauties of detail, misses, like the Dead City, the quality of great tragedy. Of the principal characters Francesca alone excites a fitful sympathy, while Paolo’s effeminacy provokes a contempt which diminishes our compassion for the woman whose love he has won. These coward ‘heroes’ who leave their mistresses in mortal peril, or slay their sisters, or see their brides borne to execution in their place, seem to haunt the egoist imagination of the poet, to the grievous hurt of his work. Yet when all is said, Francesca is one of the most arresting, though dramatically by no means one of the best, plays produced in Europe during the first decade of the century.
If the Francesca owed much to the stimulus and the control of a great historic and literary tradition, the rarer beauty of La Figlia di Iorio (1904) was nourished on the old intimate passion for his Abruzzan race and home. In language the more moving, because in d’Annunzio so seldom heard, he dedicated ‘To the land of Abruzzi, to my Mother, to my Sisters, to my Brother in exile, to my Father in his grave, to all my Dead, to all my People between the Mountains and the Sea, this song of the ancient blood.’ It betokened, indeed, no mere recurrence to the scenes and memories of his childhood, but a recovery, through them, of the more primitive sensibilities and sympathies which the complexities of an ultra modern culture had obscured or submerged. The shepherds and peasants of this ‘pastoral tragedy’ live and move in an atmosphere fanatically tense with the customs and beliefs of their catholicized paganism; but no believing poet ever drew the ritual of rustic unreason with more delicate sympathy, or rendered its wild prayers and incantations in more expressive and beautiful song. For the poetry is not exotic or imposed; like the songs of peasants in opera, it is found and elicited. The young shepherd, Aligi, is drawn into a kind of mystic relationship to Mila di Codra, a witch-maiden dreaded and abhorred over the whole countryside. But a bride has been chosen for him by his family, and the scene opens on the morning after their nominal bridal. Aligi’s three sisters are seen kneeling before the old carved oak chest, choosing her bridal robes, and vying with each other in joyous morning carols. A band of scarlet wool is drawn across the open door, a crook and a distaff lean against it, and by the doorpost hangs a waxen cross as a charm against evil spells. Aligi looks on in dreamy distraction, his thoughts far away. The women of the neighbouring farms come in procession bearing gifts of corn in baskets on their heads. An unknown girl follows in their train. Presently angry cries are heard in the distance. The reapers are in pursuit of Mila, whose spells have spoilt their harvest; they have seen her enter the house, and now they clamour at the door for her surrender. The frightened women tremble, but Mila has crouched down on the sacred hearth, whence it would be sacrilege to remove her, and Ornella, the youngest of the sisters, who alone secretly pities Mila, draws the bolts. The storm of menace grows louder, till Aligi, roused from his dreamy absorption by the taunts of the women, raises his hand to strike the suppliant on the hearth. Immediately the horror of his sacrilege seizes him, he implores her pardon on his knees, and thrusts his guilty hand into the flame. Then he hangs the cross above the door and releases the bolts. The reapers rush in, but seeing the cross, draw back in dismay, baring their heads. Aligi has saved his ‘sister in Christ;’ but his guilt is not effaced.
In the second Act, Aligi and Mila are living together, as brother and sister, in a mountain cavern. He would fain go with his flocks to Rome to seek dissolution of his marriage; but she knows that happiness is not for her, and she will not hurt him with her passionate love. But in his home they know only that the witch-maiden has decoyed the son away from his mother and his virgin bride; Ornella, the compassionate sister, is thrust out of doors, and now the father, who had returned home only after the reapers had gone, arrives at the mountain cavern in Aligi’s absence, and peremptorily summons Mila. She holds him defiantly at bay. He is about to seize her, when Aligi appears on the threshold. In the great scene which follows the Roman authority of the Abruzzan father over the son overpowers for the moment even the lover’s devotion. Not softened by Aligi’s humble submission, Làzaro binds him, flogs him savagely, and turns upon Mila, now wholly in his power. At the moment when he has seized her Aligi breaks free, rushes upon his father, and kills him. The third act opens with the mourning for Làzaro, in long-drawn lyric dirges. Then harsher and fiercer notes are heard, and Aligi, deeply penitent, appears black-robed and bound, borne by the angry mob to bid farewell to his mother before being led to the parricide’s death. ‘To call you mother is no more permitted me, for my mouth is of hell, the mouth that sucked your milk, and learnt from you holy prayers in the fear of God. Why have I harmed you so sorely? I would fain say, but I will be silent. O most helpless of all women who have suckled a son, who have sung him to sleep in the cradle and at the breast, O do not lift this black veil to see the face of the trembling sinner....’ The crowd tries to comfort her in its rough way, and the mother gives her son the bowl of drugged wine. Suddenly, confused cries are heard in the rear, and Mila breaks her way impetuously through the throng. ‘Mother, sisters, bride of Aligi, just people, justice of God, I am Mila di Codra. I am guilty. Give me hearing!’ They call for silence, and Mila declares that Aligi is innocent, and she the murderer. Aligi protests: ‘Before God thou liest.’ But the crowd eagerly turns its fury upon the dreaded sorceress who owns her guilt, and the cry goes up: ‘To the flames! To the flames!’ Aligi protests again, but with growing faintness, as the deadening potion masters and confuses his brain; till at length, when the bonds have been transferred from his limbs to Mila’s, he lifts up his hands to curse her. At this felon stroke her spirit breaks down. With a piercing shriek she cries: ‘Aligi, Aligi, not thou, thou canst not, thou must not!’ She is hurried away to the stake, only Ornella crying aloud: ‘Mila, Mila, Sister in Jesus, Paradise is for thee,’ while Mila herself, now full of the d’Annunzian exultation in glorious ruin, goes to her death crying: ‘Beautiful Flame, Beautiful Flame!’
A brief résumé such as this inevitably brings into undue emphasis the melodramatic elements of the plot. Yet it is the most human and natural, as it is the most beautiful, of d’Annunzio’s dramas. For the strangest things that happen in it are no mere projections of the poet’s inspired ferocity or eroticism, as so often elsewhere, but are grounded in the real psychology of a primitive countryside. We see its fear, love, hatred, now mysteriously mastered by superstitious awe, now breaking rebelliously from its control, now wrought by its mystic power to else inexplicable excesses.
V
But even the finest dramatic work of d’Annunzio makes clear that his genius is fundamentally lyrical. The greatest moments of La Figlia di Iorio and Francesca are uttered in a vein which thrills and sings; while, on the other hand, these moments are often reached by summary short cuts, not by the logical evolution of great drama. And it is fortunate that while he continued to be allured by drama—giving in particular a very individual rendering of the tragedy of Phædra (1909)—d’Annunzio’s most serious and ambitious poetry took the form of a festival of sustained song, the Laudi (1903 onwards). We have already quoted from the picture of his childhood drawn retrospectively, in the opening book, by the poet of forty. But these passages, though not at all merely episodic, hardly disclose the deeper sources of inspiration in this series of lyric cycles. ‘Praises,’ he calls them, ‘Praises of the Sky, of the Sea, of the Earth, of its Heroes.’ The glory of earth, and sea, and sky had drawn more majestic praise from the poet of the 123rd Psalm, though in his naïve Hebrew way he ‘praised’ only their Maker, not these ‘wonderful works’ themselves. D’Annunzio’s ‘praise’ expresses simply the ravishment of acute sensibilities in the presence of the loveliness and sublimity of Nature and the heroism of man, an emotion Greek rather than Hebraic. Our poet is perhaps the least Hebraic of all modern poets of genius; and if his barbaric violence alienates him almost as completely from the Hellenic temper, he is yet akin to it by his inexhaustible joy in beauty. And in these years of the Laudi Hellas had become more than ever the determining focus about which his artistic dreams revolved, the magnet to whose lure even the barbarian in him succumbs. The first book, called Maia, after the mother of Hermes, describes the poet’s spiritual journey to the shrine of that god of energy and enterprise, whose Praxitelean image, the most magnificent expression of radiant virility ever fashioned by the chisel, had not long before been unearthed at Olympia. It is a journey of discovery, and d’Annunzio invokes for it the symbolism of the last voyage of the Dantesque Ulysses to seek the experience that lay ‘beyond the sunset.’ D’Annunzio turns his prow east, not west, but he, too, is daring peril in the quest of the unknown. A splendid Proem in terza rima, ‘To the Pleiads and the Fates,’ takes us to a rocky promontory by the Atlantic shore, where, on a flaming pyre, the helm of the wrecked ship of Ulysses is being consumed—the fiery consummation which crowns most of d’Annunzio’s heroic careers. The modern venturer, too, must disdain safety, not like Galileo turning back into the secure haven, but fronting the pathless sea of fate with no anchor but his own valour. The sequel does not, it is true, accord completely with this Ulyssean vision. Symbolic imagery is interwoven, in this ‘spiritual journey,’ to the ruin of poetic coherence, with scenes from an actual voyage to Greece, leaves from a tourist’s notebook, incidents of steamer-life, games and talk on board, sketches of fellow-passengers, the squalor and vice of Patras. Presently the ship reaches Elis, and then, as we enter the ruins of Olympia, the great past, human and divine, rises up before us. Pericles, Alcibiades, Themistocles obliterate the tourist memories, and the poet holds high colloquy with Zeus, and offers up a prayer, nine hundred lines long, to Hermes—a lurid picture of the future of humanity, as d’Annunzio imagined it, wrought by the genius of Energy and Enterprise, Invention and Will; a future dominated by men of rocky jaw, who chew care like a laurel leaf, precipitate themselves on life, and impregnate it relentlessly with their purposes,—a significant image, for the d’Annunzian Hermes is fused with Eros (v. 2904). Eros was, indeed, indispensable, it might well be thought, to a quite satisfying d’Annunzian divinity. Yet in the fine colloquy with Zeus, which precedes, he touches a deeper note, rare with him, of desperate and baffled struggle with his own ‘vast sensuality.’ He begs Zeus for a sign. ‘I am at war with many monsters, but the direst are those, ah me! which rise within me from the depths of my lusts.’ ‘Thou wilt conquer them,’ replies Zeus, ‘only if thou canst transform them into divine children.’