Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes

by Henry James

As for “L’Innocente” again, briefly, there is perhaps nothing in it to match the Roman passages of “Il Piacere”; but the harmony of the general, the outer conditions pervades the picture; the sweetness of the villeggiatura life, the happiness of place and air, the lovability of the enclosing scene, all at variance with the sharpness of the inner tragedy. The inner tragedy of “L’Innocente” has a concentration that is like the carrying, through turns and twists, upstairs and down, of some cup filled to the brim, of which no drop is yet spilled; such cumulative truth rules the scene after we have once accepted the postulate. It is true that the situation as exhibited involves for Giuliana, the young wife, the vulgarest of adventures; yet she becomes, as it unfolds, the figure of the whole gallery in whom the pathetic has at once most of immediate truth and of investing poetry. I much prefer her for beauty and interest to Donna Maria in “Il Piacere,” the principal other image of faith and patience sacrificed. We see these virtues as still supreme in her even while she faces, in advance, her ordeal, in respect to which it has been her hope, in fact her calculation, that her husband will have been deceived about the paternity of her child; and she is so truthfully touching when this possibility breaks down that even though we rub our eyes at the kind of dignity claimed for her we participate without reserve in her predicament. The origin of the infant is frankly ignoble, whereas it is on the nobleness of Giuliana that the story essentially hinges; but the contradiction is wonderfully kept from disconcerting us altogether. What the author has needed for his strangest truth is that the mother shall feel exactly as the husband does, and that the husband shall after the first shock of his horror feel intimately and explicitly with the mother. They take in this way the same view of their woeful excrescence; and the drama of the child’s advent and of the first months of his existence, his insistent and hated survival, becomes for them in respect to the rest of the world a drama of silence and dissimulation, in every step of which we feel a terror.

The effect, I may add, gains more than one kind of intensity from that almost complete absence of other contacts to which D’Annunzio systematically condemns his creatures; introducing here, however, just the two or three that more completely mark the isolation. It may doubtless be conceded that our English-speaking failure of insistence, of inquiry and penetration, in certain directions, springs partly from our deep-rooted habit of dealing with man, dramatically, on his social and gregarious side, as a being the variety of whose intercourse with his fellows, whatever forms his fellows may take, is positively half his interesting motion. We fear to isolate him, for we remember that as we see and know him he scarce understands himself save in action, action which inevitably mixes him with his kind. To see and know him, like Signor D’Annunzio, almost only in passion is another matter, for passion spends itself quickly in the open and burns hot mainly in nooks and corners. Nothing, too, in the picture is more striking than the manner in which the merely sentimental abyss—that of the couple brought together by the thing that might utterly have severed them—is consistently and successfully avoided. We should have been certain to feel it in many other hands yawning but a few steps off. We see the dreadful facts in themselves, are brought close to them with no interposing vaguenesses or other beggings of the question, and are forcibly reminded how much more this “crudity” makes for the communication of tenderness—what is aimed at—than an attitude conventionally more reticent. We feel what the tenderness can be when it rests on all the items of a constituted misery, not one of which is illogically blinked.

For the pangs and pities of the flesh in especial D’Annunzio has in all his work the finest hand—those of the spirit exist with him indeed only as proceeding from these; so that Giuliana for instance affects us, beyond any figure in fiction we are likely to remember, as living and breathing under our touch and before our eyes, as a creature of organs, functions and processes, palpable, audible, pitiful physical conditions. These are facts, many of them, of an order in pursuit of which many a spectator of the “picture of life” will instinctively desire to stop short, however great in general his professed desire to enjoy the borrowed consciousness that the picture of life gives us; and nothing, it may well be said, is more certain than that we have a right in such matters to our preference, a right to choose the kind of adventure of the imagination we like best. No obligation whatever rests on us in respect to a given kind—much light as our choice may often throw for the critic on the nature of our own intelligence. There at any rate, we are disposed to say of such a piece of penetration as “L’Innocente,” there is a particular dreadful adventure, as large as life, for those who can bear it. The conditions are all present; it is only the reader himself who may break down. When in general, it may be added, we see readers do so, this is truly more often because they are shocked at really finding the last consistency than because they are shocked at missing it.

“Il Trionfo della Morte” and “Il Fuoco” stand together as the amplest and richest of our author’s histories, and the earlier, and more rounded and faultless thing of the two, is not unlikely to serve, I should judge, as an unsurpassable example of his talent. His accomplishment here reaches its maximum; all his powers fight for him; the wealth of his expression drapes the situation represented in a mantle of voluminous folds, stiff with elaborate embroidery. The “story” may be told in three words: how Giorgio Aurispa meets in Rome the young and extremely pretty wife of a vulgar man of business, her unhappiness with whom is complete, and, falling in love with her on the spot, eventually persuades her—after many troubled passages—to come and pass a series of weeks with him in a “hermitage” by the summer sea, where, in a delirium of free possession, he grows so to hate her, and to hate himself for his subjection to her, and for the prostration of all honour and decency proceeding from it, that his desire to destroy her even at the cost of perishing with her at last takes uncontrollable form and he drags her, under a pretext, to the edge of a sea-cliff and hurls her, interlocked with him in appalled resistance, into space. We get at an early stage the note of that aridity of agitation in which the narrator has expended treasures of art in trying to interest us. “Fits of indescribable fury made them try which could torture each other best, which most lacerate the other’s heart and keep it in martyrdom.” But they understand, at least the hero does; and he formulates for his companion the essence of their impasse. It is not her fault when she tears and rends.

Each human soul carries in it for love but a determinate quantity of sensitive force. It is inevitable that this quantity should use itself up with time, as everything else does; so that when it is used up no effort has power to prevent love from ceasing. Now it’s a long time that you have been loving me; nearly two years!

The young man’s intelligence is of the clearest; the woman’s here is inferior, though in “Il Fuoco” the two opposed faculties are almost equal; but the pair are alike far from living in their intelligence, which only serves to bestrew with lurid gleams the black darkness of their sensual life. So far as the intelligence is one with the will our author fundamentally treats it as cut off from all communication with any other quarter—that is with the senses arrayed and encamped. The most his unfortunates arrive at is to carry their extremely embellished minds with them through these dusky passages as a kind of gilded glimmering lantern, the effect of which is merely fantastic and ironic—a thing to make the play of their shadows over the walls of their catacomb more monstrous and sinister. Again in the first pages of “Il Trionfo” the glimmer is given.

He recognised the injustice of any resentment against her, because he recognised the fatal necessities that controlled them alike. No, his misery came from no other human creature; it came from the very essence of life. The lover had not the lover to complain of, but simply love itself. Love, toward which his whole being reached out, from within, with a rush not to be checked, love was of all the sad things of this earth the most lamentably sad. And to this supreme sadness he was perhaps condemned till death.

That, in a nutshell, is D’Annunzio’s subject-matter; not simply that his characters see in advance what love is worth for them, but that they nevertheless need to make it the totality of their consciousness. In “Il Trionfo” and “Il Fuoco” the law just expressed is put into play at the expense of the woman, with the difference, however, that in the latter tale the woman perceives and judges, suffers in mind, so to speak, as well as in nerves and in temper. But it would be hard to say in which of these two productions the inexhaustible magic of Italy most helps the effect, most hangs over the story in such a way as to be one with it and to make the ugliness and the beauty melt together. The ugliness, it is to be noted, is continually presumed absent; the pursuit and cultivation of beauty—that fruitful preoccupation which above all, I have said, gives the author his value as our “case”—being the very ground on which the whole thing rests. The ugliness is an accident, a treachery of fate, the intrusion of a foreign substance—having for the most part in the scheme itself no admitted inevitability. Against it every provision is made that the most developed taste in the world can suggest; for, ostensibly, transcendently, Signor D’Annunzio’s is the most developed taste in the world—his and that of the ferocious yet so contracted conoscenti his heroes, whose virtual identity with himself, affirmed with a strangely misplaced complacency by some of his critics, one would surely hesitate to take for granted. It is the wondrous physical and other endowments of the two heroines of “Il Piacere,” it is the joy and splendour of the hero’s intercourse with them, to say nothing of the lustre of his own person, descent, talents, possessions, and of the great general setting in which everything is offered us—it is all this that makes up the picture, with the constant suggestion that nothing of a baser quality for the esthetic sense, or at the worst for a pampered curiosity, might hope so much as to live in it. The case is the same in “L’Innocente,” a scene all primarily smothered in flowers and fruits and fragrances and soft Italian airs, in every implication of flattered embowered constantly-renewed desire, which happens to be a blighted felicity only for the very reason that the cultivation of delight—in the form of the wife’s luckless experiment—has so awkwardly overleaped itself. Whatever furthermore we may reflectively think either of the Ippolita of “Il Trionfo” or of her companion’s scheme of existence with her, it is enchanting grace, strange, original, irresistible in kind and degree, that she is given us as representing; just as her material situation with her young man during the greater part of the tale is a constant communion, for both of them, with the poetry and the nobleness of classic landscape, of nature consecrated by association.

The mixture reaches its maximum, however, in “Il Fuoco,” if not perhaps in “The Virgins of the Rocks”; the mixture I mean of every exhibited element of personal charm, distinction and interest, with every insidious local influence, every glamour of place, season and surrounding object. The heroine of the first-named is a great tragic actress, exquisite for everything but for being unfortunately middle-aged, battered, marked, as we are constantly reminded, by all the after-sense of a career of promiscuous carnal connections. The hero is a man of letters, a poet, a dramatist of infinite reputation and resource, and their union is steeped to the eyes in the gorgeous medium of Venice, the moods of whose melancholy and the voices of whose past are an active part of the perpetual concert. But we see all the persons introduced to us yearn and strain to exercise their perceptions and taste their impressions as deeply as possible, conspiring together to interweave them with the pleasures of passion. They “go in” as the phrase is, for beauty at any cost—for each other’s own to begin with; their creator, in the inspiring quest, presses them hard, and the whole effect becomes for us that of an organised general sacrifice to it and an organised general repudiation of everything else. It is not idle to repeat that the value of the Italian background has to this end been inestimable, and that every spark of poetry it had to contribute has been struck from it—with what supreme felicity we perhaps most admiringly learn in “The Virgins of the Rocks.” To measure the assistance thus rendered, and especially the immense literary lift given, we have only to ask ourselves what appearance any one of the situations presented would have made in almost any Cisalpine or “northern” frame of circumstance whatever. Supported but by such associations of local or of literary elegance as our comparatively thin resources are able to furnish, the latent weakness in them all, the rock, as to final effect, on which they split and of which I shall presently speak, would be immeasurably less dissimulated. All this is the lesson of style, by which we here catch a writer in the very act of profiting after a curious double fashion. D’Annunzio arrives at it both by expression and by material—that is, by a whole side of the latter; so that with such energy at once and such good fortune it would be odd indeed if he had not come far. It is verily in the very name and interest of beauty, of the lovely impression, that Giorgio Aurispa becomes homicidal in thought and finally in act.

She would in death become for me matter of thought, pure ideality. From a precarious and imperfect existence she would enter into an existence complete and definitive, forsaking forever the infirmity of her weak luxurious flesh. Destroy to possess—there is no other way for him who seeks the absolute in love.