The Flame

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

Suddenly, with the intensity of a feverish vision, he saw the scorched and fatal spot of earth whereon he wished to create the souls of his great tragedy; he felt all its parching thirst within himself. He saw the mythical fountain which alone could quench the burning aridity; and in the bubbling of its springs the purity of the maiden that must die there. He saw on Perdita's face the mask of the heroine, quiescent in the beauty of an extraordinarily calm sorrow. Then the ancient dryness of the plain of Argos converted itself into flames; the fountain of Perseia flowed with the swiftness of a stream. The fire and the water, the two primitive elements, rushed over all things, effaced all other traces, spread and wandered, struggled, triumphed, acquired a word, a language wherewith to unveil their inner essence and to reveal the innumerable myths born of their eternity. The symphony expressed the drama of the two elementary Souls on the stage of the Universe, the pathetic struggle of two great living and moving Beings, two cosmic Wills, such as the shepherd Arya fancied it when he contemplated the spectacle from the high plateau with his pure eyes. And, of a sudden, from the very center of the musical mystery, from the depths of the symphonic Ocean, arose the Ode, brought by the human voice, and attaining the loftiest heights.

The miracle of Beethoven renewed itself. The winged Ode, the Hymn, sprang from the midst of the orchestra to proclaim, in phrases absolute and imperious, the joy and the sorrow of Man. It was not the Chorus, as in the Ninth Symphony, but the Voice, alone and dominating, the interpreter, the messenger to the multitude. "Her voice! her voice! She has disappeared. Her song seemed to move the heart of the world, and she was beyond the veil," said the Animator, who in mental vision saw again the crystal statue within which he had watched the mounting wave of melody. "I will seek thee, I shall find thee again; I will possess myself of thy secret. Thou shalt sing my hymns, towering at the summit of my music!" Freed now from all earthly desire, he thought of that maiden form as the receptacle of a divine gift. He heard the disembodied voice surge from the depths of the orchestra to reveal the part of eternal truth that exists in ephemeral fact. The Ode crowned the episode with light. Then, as if to lead back to the play of imagery his ravished spirit from "beyond the veil," a dancing figure stood out against the rhythm of the dying Ode. Between the lines of a parallelogram drawn beneath the arch of the stage, as within the limits of a strophe, the mute dancer, with her body seemingly free for a moment from the sad laws of gravity, imitated the fire, the whirlwind, the revolutions of the stars. "La Tanagra, flower of Syracuse, made of wings, as a flower is made of petals!" Thus he invoked the image of the already famous Sicilian who had re-discovered the ancient orchestic art as it had been in the days when Phrynichus boasted that he had within himself as many figures of the dance as there were waves on the ocean on a stormy winter night. The actress, the singer, the dancer—the three Dionysian women—appeared to him like perfect and almost divine instruments of his creations. With an incredible rapidity, in word, song, gesture and symphony, his work should crystallize itself and live an all-powerful life before the conquered multitude.

He was still silent, lost in an ideal world, waiting to measure the effort necessary to manifest it. The voices surrounding him seemed to come from a long distance.

"Wagner declares that the only creator of a work of art is the people," said Baldassare Stampa, "and that the sole function of the artist is to gather and express the creation of the unconscious multitude."

The extraordinary emotion that had stirred Stelio when, from the throne of the Doges, he had spoken to the throng seized on him once more. In that communion between his soul and the soul of the people an almost divine mystery had existed; something greater and more exalted was added to the habitual feeling he had for his own person; he had felt that an unknown power converged within him, abolishing the limits of his earthly being and conferring upon his solitary voice the full harmony of a chorus.

There was, then, in the multitude a secret beauty, in which only the poet and the hero could kindle a spark. Whenever that beauty revealed itself by the sudden outburst from a theater, a public square, or an entrenchment, a torrent of joy must swell the heart of him who had known how to inspire it by his verse, his harangue, or a signal from his sword. Thus, the word of the poet, when communicated to the people, was an act comparable to the deed of a hero—an act that brought to birth in the great composite soul of the multitude a sudden comprehension of beauty, as a master sculptor, from the mere touch of his plastic thumb upon a mass of clay, creates a divine statue. Then the silence that had spread like a sacred veil over the completed poem would cease. The material part of life would no longer be typified by immaterial symbols: life itself would be manifested in its perfection by the poet; the word would become flesh, rhythm would quicken in breathing, palpitating form, the idea would be embodied with all the fulness of its force and freedom.

"But," said Fabio Molza, "Richard Wagner believes that the real heart of the people is composed only of those that experience grief in common—you understand, grief in common."

"Toward Joy—still toward eternal Joy," Stelio reflected. "The real heart of the people is composed of those that feel vaguely the necessity of raising themselves, by means of Fiction, Poetry, the Ideal, out of the daily prison in which they serve and suffer."

In his waking dream he beheld the disappearance of the small theaters of the city, where, amid suffocating air heavy with impurities, before a crowd of rakes and courtesans, the actors make public prostitution of their talents. And then, on the steps of the new theater, his mental vision beheld the true people, the great, unanimous multitude, whose human odor he had inhaled, whose clamor he had listened to in the great marble shell, under the stars. By the mysterious power of rhythm, his art, imperfectly understood though it was, had stirred the rude and ignorant ones with a profound emotion, penetrating as that felt by a prisoner about to be released from his chains. Little by little, the sensation of joy at their deliverance had crept over the most abject; the deep-lined brows cleared; lips accustomed to brutal vociferation had parted in amazement; and, above all, the hands—the rough hands enslaved by instruments of toil—had stretched out in one unanimous gesture of adoration toward the heroine who in their presence had wafted toward the stars the spirit of immortal sorrow.

"In the life of a people like ours," said Daniele Glauro, "a great manifestation of art has much more weight than a treaty of alliance or a tributary law. That which never dies is more prized than that which is ephemeral. The astuteness and audacity of a Malatesta are crystallized for all time in a medal of Pisanello's. Of Machiavelli's politics nothing survives but the power of his prose."