The most conspicuous name in the annals of Italian literature of the generation now passing is that assumed by a child or a youth when the voice first whispered to him that he had been chosen to announce the coming of a new era, to blaze the way for a new social and national life: Gabriele D'Annunzio. He was born at Pescara in the Regno, March 13, 1863, the son of Francescopaolo D'Annunzio and of his wife, Luisa de Benedictis of Ortona. A studied effort has been made to envelop his birth and parentage in a mantle of mystery, but it has been thwarted.
One day of his infancy, in Ferravilla-on-the-Sea, suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind. From that moment the little Annunciator was filled with the gift of verbal expression. He enhanced the endowment by diligent study in the high school at Prato, in Tuscany, where he spent his boyhood. Thus did he acquire an unparalleled mastery of the Italian language. The gods of mythology, the Hellenic heroes and philosophers, the emperors and courtesans of Pagan Rome were the loves of his infancy. After Carducci's "Odi Barbari" exploded his poetic magazine he looked about to find a god and a Greek upon whom to model his conduct. He recalled Dionysus going through the world with Priapus ostentatiously displaying the Phallus, and the die was cast.
But he must have a philosophy as well. He who taught that eternal flux and change is the only actuality; that all phenomena are in a state of continuous transition from non-existence to existence and vice versa; that everything is and is not; all things are and nothing remains; that all things must be reduced by way of quasi-condensation to the primary matter from which they originated, in brief—Heraclitus, whose name signified "he who rails at the people," was the one that he selected. The process of quasi-reduction was to be preceded by purification through pleasure, and pleasure was to be obtained by stimulation of the senses. The more they were stimulated the greater became their potency for purification. When he looked about the world he found others had been seduced by Heraclitus. Nietzsche, whose activity preceded D'Annunzio's by a few years, was the most conspicuous exponent of the Eternal Recurrence. He too taught a master morality, a morality which says yea to life and nay to morals, rules, and conventions. Christianity is the moral code of slaves. Instinct is the true wisdom. The genesic instinct is the basis of all other instincts. Therefore cultivate it, for in that way one becomes a superman and begets a race of supermen. If we must have a statue of Apollo, as Socrates and Christ taught, let us make it a feminine figure and place it beside Dionysus, first erected by animal men, and around them let us dance a frenzied tarantella while we intoxicate ourselves with foaming wine, the product of sensuous fermentation.
No attempt will be made here to put an estimate upon D'Annunzio's conduct or his accomplishments of the past five years, save to say that they have been in keeping with his previous life.
Literary criticism is concerned with the genius of the writer and the way in which he makes that genius manifest. It is not concerned with the morals or immorality of his writing, and yet it has to take some cognizance of them, especially if they are at variance with that which is considered moral or approximately moral. No one who is a public figure or whose activities are concerned with the welfare of the public, whether it be with their diversion, instruction, or protection, can comport himself in a way that is flagrantly offensive to the public without showing the effect of it in his writings. For instance, a writer produces a masterpiece of literature, one that has qualities of conception and construction that evoke universal admiration. It has been written for one of three reasons, or all of them. First, because the artist has it in him and he must externalize it, a creative craving that must be satisfied; second, he has a purpose in doing it—he wants to amuse, amaze, or instruct people; third, he wants to gain fame or money.
If he is utterly oblivious to the two last, his writings may be as immoral or unrighteous as he wishes to make them. If the public does not wish to read them it need not, and if it considers them injurious to others whose mental capacity does not enable them to judge whether they are proper or injurious they can be suppressed. If, however, the writer is animated to production by either of the latter two motives, he must be reconciled to having an estimate made of his work not only from the point of view of literary criticism, but also from the point of view of the fitness of his works for literary consumption. That is, he must be reconciled to attempts at estimating whether or not the world would not have been better off without his writings.
There are few writers to whom these remarks apply with greater force than Gabriele D'Annunzio. It is generally admitted that he is the most consummate master of Italian verse now living. Though his prose writings show that he is not a literary craftsman of the first order, he has understood that art rises out of our primal nature and that it is instinctive. He has sung the praises of sensualism as they never have been sung in modern times, and he has panoplied the preliminaries to love's embrace with garlands made of flowers of forced blooming, artificially perfumed and colored so that the average human being does not recognize them as products of nature. He has preached and practised a moral code the antithesis of Christianity, and yet no one has sought seriously to save his soul.
In truth, D'Annunzio had tired the world of him. The people of it were tired of him as they might have been of a radiantly beautiful woman who had become a gorgeously decorated strumpet constantly walking up and down in the world seeking praise and admiration. When he went to Paris the world seemed to be satisfied that he should disappear in that maelstrom, as it was willing that a contemporary sensuous egocentrist should disappear when he left Reading Gaol, but D'Annunzio must enter upon the final stage of his mission from the gods, and the Great War gave him the opportunity.
Although so long a conspicuous figure in the public eye, he has managed to wrap certain layers of the mantle of mystery about him so closely that little is known of his origin or of the forces that contributed to the making and development of his extraordinary career. It is confidently stated by those who pretend to know him that he is a Jew, but he is not claimed by Hebrew writers, who are proud of enrolling Bergson and Brandes, Spinoza and Strauss in their list. Vainly offering his life for Italy, he is not somatically, mentally, or emotionally an Italian. Knowing her history, her traditions, and her reactions as few of her sons have known them, until the war he had not sung her virtues or mirrored her wondrous accomplishments of nation-building. His face has steadily been turned not toward the east, where the sun of her glory is arising, but toward the west, where he has revelled in the resurrected glows of sunsets of pagan and Renaissance days. He has treated his friends disdainfully when it suited his whim; he has meted out contumely to his adulators when it pleased his fancy; he has disdained those who have accused him; he has passed unnoticed those who have sought to belittle him; and he has gone among his superiors as if he were their king. He has been called everything save Philistine and fool. He has been called the greatest literary figure of modern Italy and it is likely that he merits it.
He is a poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist, politician, critic, propagandist, prophet, aviator, hero, dictator, and self-constituted arbiter of Italy's destinies.