The Flame

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

"And have you never thought that the essence of music does not lie in the sounds alone?" asked the mystic doctor. "It often dwells in the silence that precedes and follows sound. Rhythm makes itself felt in these intervals of silence. Rhythm is the very heart of music, but its pulsation is inaudible except during the intervals between sounds."

This metaphysical law confirmed Stelio in his belief of the justness of his own intuition.

"Imagine," said he, "an interval between two scenic symphonies wherein all the motifs concur in expressing the inmost essence of the characters that are struggling in the drama as well as in revealing the inmost depths of the action, as, for instance, in Beethoven's great prelude in Leonora, or the prelude to Coriolanus. That musical silence, pulsating with rhythm, is like the mysterious living atmosphere where alone can appear words of pure poetry. Thus the personages seem to emerge from the symphonic sea as if from the hidden truth that works within them; their spoken words will possess an extraordinary resonance in that rhythmic silence, will reach the farthest limit of verbal power, because it will be animated by a continuous aspiration to song that cannot be appeased except by the melody which must rise again from the orchestra, at the close of the tragic episode. Do you understand me?"

"Then you place the episode between two symphonies, which prepare it and also terminate it, because music is the beginning and the end of human utterance."

"Thus I bring nearer to the spectator the personages of the drama. Do you recall the figure employed by Schiller in the ode he wrote in honor of Goethe's translation of Mahomet, to signify that, on the stage, only the ideal world seems real. The chariot of Thespis, like the barque of Acheron, is so slight that it can carry only shadows or the images of human beings. On the stage commonly known, these images are so unreal that any contact with them seems as impossible as would be contact with mental forms. They are distant and strange, but in making them appear in the rhythmic silence, accompanied by music to the threshold of the visible world, I shall be able to bring them marvelously close, because I shall illumine the most secret depths of the will that produces them. I shall reveal, in short, the images painted on the veil and that which happens beyond the veil. Do you understand?"

They were now entering the Campo di San Cassiano lonely and deserted on the banks of the gray stream; their voices and their footsteps echoed there as if in an amphitheater of stone, distinct above the sound of the Grand Canal, which made a rushing noise like that of a river. A purple mist rose from the fever-laden waters, spreading like a poisonous breath. Death seemed to have reigned there a long time. The shutter of a high window beat in the wind against the wall, grinding on its hinges, a sign of abandonment and ruin. But, in the mind of the Inspirer, all these appearances produced extraordinary transfigurations. He saw again the wild and solitary spot near the tomb of Mycenæ. Myrtles flourished between the rugged rocks and the cyclopic ruins. Beside a rock lay the rigid, pure body of the Victim. In the death-like silence he could hear the murmuring water and the intermittent breath of the breeze among the myrtles.

"It was in an august place," said he, "that I had the first vision of my new work—at Mycenæ, under the gateway of the Lions, while I was re-reading Orestes. Land of fire, country of thirst and delirium, birthplace of Clytemnestra and of the Hydra, earth forever sterile by the horror of the most tragic destiny that ever has overtaken a human race. Have you ever thought about that barbarian explorer who, after passing the greater part of his existence among his drugs behind a counter, undertook to find the tombs of the Atridæ among the ruins of Mycenæ, and who one day (the sixth anniversary of the event is of recent date) beheld the greatest and strangest vision ever offered to mortal eyes? Have you ever pictured to yourself that fat Schliemann at the moment when he discovered the most dazzling treasure ever held by Death in the dark obscurity of the earth for centuries—for thousands of years? Have you ever fancied that this superhuman and terrible spectacle might have been revealed to some one else—to a youthful and fervent spirit, to a poet, a life-giver, to you, to me, perhaps? Then the fever, the frenzy, the madness—Imagine!"

He was on fire and vibrating, suddenly swept away by his own fancy as by a whirlwind. His seer's eyes sparkled with the gleam of the buried treasure. Creative force flowed to his brain as blood to his heart. He was an actor in his own drama, with accent and movement expressing transcendent beauty and passion, surpassing the power of the spoken word, the limit of the letter. And his brother spirit hung upon his speech, trembling before the sudden splendor that proved to him the truth of his own divinations.

"Imagine! Imagine that the earth in which you explore is baleful—it must still exhale the miasma of monstrous wickedness. The curse upon the Atridæ was so terrific that some vestige of it must still have remained to be feared in the dust that they once trod upon. You are bewitched: the dead you seek and cannot find are reincarnated in you, and breathe in your body with the terrible breath with which Æschylus infused them, huge and sanguinary as they appear in the Orestes, pierced perpetually with the darts and flames of their destiny. Hereafter, all the ideal life with which you have nourished yourself must assume the form and impress of reality. And still you go on in this land of thirst, at the foot of the bare mountain, enclosed within the fascination of the dead city, always delving in the earth, with those terrifying phantoms ever before your eyes in the burning dust. At each thrust of the spade you tremble to the very marrow, eager to see the face of one of the Atridæ, still perfect, but with the signs still visible of the violence he suffered, the inhuman carnage. And behold it! the gold, the gold, the bodies, piles of gold, bodies covered with gold"—

The Atridæ princes seemed to be lying there on the stones, a miracle evoked in the obscurity of the pathway. And the one who had evoked these images, as well as his listener, shuddered at the same instant.