The first act is the best, because the simplest and most sincere. It shows us a living room in a rustic house. The background and "properties" are said to be wonderfully realistic. Aligi, the shepherd, is to marry. His bride's name is Vienda. He does not love her, for she was chosen by his parents—and in this old Italian land the father's command is law. The betrothal ceremonies are beginning. The groom's sisters are near by. He is ill at ease, for he has been dreaming strange dreams. Vienda spills the broken bread of betrothal from her lap upon the floor. It is a maleficent sign. Suddenly there comes a noise of shouting and music. The harvesters, crazy with drink and the torrid heat of the sun, rush in. They have come to celebrate. They are also chasing a human being, a miserable hunted girl of bad repute, the daughter of Jorio, the magician. Hunted down, she claims sanctuary in the household. Although she is of ill-fame, although Aligi's father, Lazaro, has been wounded in a squabble about this girl, Mila di Codra, she is sheltered by the woman. Aligi is for turning her away; her coming spells more bad luck; the infuriated mob without demand admittance. Enraged, the shepherd raises his staff to strike the unhappy fugitive. As he does this he is overtaken by fresh visions; he thinks he sees Mila guarded by a weeping angel. He falls at her feet begging her pardon. A cross is laid over the threshold, a litany sung by his sisters, and the angry reapers are hypnotized. They enter singly, kiss the cross, and dissolve homeward. Lazaro enters with his head in a bandage and Mila escapes. Another ill omen—the father and son both love the same woman.
The second act discovers Aligi and Mila in a mountainous cave where they have lived for six months—in a state of innocence. Here the credulity of the spectator is taxed, and the lyric ecstasy of the poet waxes. It is nevertheless an idyllic episode. One kiss is exchanged, the first and the last, for Lazaro eventually finds his now disgraced son, and with a pair of sturdy rustics comes to carry away the witch. In the conflict that ensues the son murders the father. Act III brings us back to the old home of Aligi. His father's corpse lies in the garden, according to custom. The son is condemned to the awful death of the parricide—after his offending hand is cut off he is to be tied in a sack with a fierce dog and then thrown into the river. The end may be surmised. One consolation is not denied him—a cup of drink to induce forgetfulness. As the preparations are about completed Mila bursts upon the crowded scene—an impressive one, according to printed reports—and takes upon herself the blame of the affair. She it was, she declares, who murdered Lazaro. Aligi curses her in his delirium, as she is dragged away to be burnt alive, she the witch, the daughter of Jorio. Her triumphant voice is heard to the last, while for a background there is the chanting of the requiem and the triumphant yelling and imprecations of the shepherds, the Abruzzi lusting for a human sacrifice. Then the curtain falls. Several critics discern in all this the triumph of religion over the senses—a solution that does their ingenuity credit, though far from convincing.
It may be seen that there is real dramatic worth in the play, love and sacrifice being its very pith. Better still, the poet has become less self-absorbed and consequently more objective. The human note predominates in this wild and highly coloured music. In his plays and novels and verse he has himself been the artistic and sterile hero—as Eleonora Duse, in the plays and one novel, their heroine. A German critic declares that Mila is only a sister of the crazy woman in A Spring Morning's Dream—as she, Duse, also is related to Silvia in Gioconda, to the blind wife in The Dead City, and Francesca, as well as La Foscarina in Fuoco, Duse, Eleonora Duse, always Duse. Lucky, thrice happy poet, to have been inspired by such a model! To have had the opportunity of studying such a sublime, unhappy soul as is Duse's!
A German critic speaks slightingly of Das Geklingel der schönen Phrasen—the jingling of dulcet phrases—as a drawback to the action. Doubtless this is true. Often we cannot hear the play because of the words. The chief thing to be remarked, however, is the improvement in dramatic spirit and rhythm and the gratifying supremacy of the dramatic over the lyric and literary qualities—the latter hitherto anti-dramatic elements in the plays of D'Annunzio.
The poet is now working on a new three-act tragedy, The Ship,—in which Duse is to appear at La Scala this spring. The theme is Venetian—that Venice which both Duse and D'Annunzio love so well; and also on a modern drama entitled, The Light Under the Bushel.
[XI]
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM
"In life," said Barbey d'Aurevilly, "we are strangled between two doors, of which the one is labelled Too Soon and the other Too Late." The brilliant Beau Brummel of French literature who uttered this fatidical speech was a contemporary of the unhappy, impulsive man of genius, poet, mystic, and dramatist, who set Paris agog with his novels, short stories, plays, his half-crazy conduct, his epigrams, his fantastic litigations, and his cruel death—Villiers de l'Isle Adam. The bosom friend of Charles Baudelaire and Richard Wagner, petted at Bayreuth, feted in Paris, nevertheless he died in want, was buried by his friends, and was proud, lonely, aristocratic to the very end—a death from cancer.
His life furnishes material for one of his ironic, bitter, disturbing tales. Born in Brittany, November 28, 1838, he died at Paris in a religious hospital, August 19, 1889. A fierce, even militant, Roman Catholic—he dedicated a book to the Pope—he shocked his co-religionists by the confusing mixture of fanatical piety and fantastic blasphemy which winds through his bizarre works. He is best known to Americans by the story in his Contes Cruels, entitled, The Torture by Hope, which recalls Poe at his best, the Poe of The Pit and the Pendulum. His little play, The Revolt, was translated and first appeared in the Fortnightly Review, December, 1897. Arthur Symons has translated a poem, Aveu, and Vance Thompson, in the defunct pages of Mlle. New York, wrote often of the celebrated Frenchman.