Neither his peer nor his superior has ever denied him a rare imagination, an artistic intelligence of extraordinary range, depth and exquisiteness, a stupendous versatility and productiveness, a tireless energy, a fearless daring and a supreme contempt for the feelings, beliefs, and accomplishments of others.
There are two ways of approaching an estimate of D'Annunzio. One is to analyze him—to set him up as a god or a monster and to dissect him and study the elements of his complex mechanism, then put them together patiently and laboriously as one puts together a jigsaw picture-puzzle. It is the tempting way, but it risks injuring the sensibilities of his admirers and the judicially minded who are so constituted that they cannot pass judgment unless they are in possession of all the facts concerning him and his career: what he did and the circumstances attending the doing of them, that is, the environment in which they were done—both that which he created and that which was thrust upon him. Finally they want to view him in rest and in action. Then they are ready to render a verdict in much the same way as a jury renders a verdict with or without the analysis and summing up of the testimony and evidence by proponent or opponent advocate. The way of synthesis would be the way to approach an interpretation of D'Annunzio if the man were under discussion, but here only an estimate of his literary career is attempted.
There is no dearth of evidence to show that he was a precocious child and a youth of prodigious intellectual acumen and prehensility, of boundless self-confidence and fathomless egocentrism. His first collection of verse, "Primo Vere" ("First Beginnings"), was published when he was fifteen years old, and two years later he published a second edition "corrected with pen and fire and augmented." From the beginning it was pointed out by critic and commentator that he plagiarized line and verse from poets of Italy, such as Giambattista Marino, Niccolo Tommaseo, and Giosuè Carducci, and of other countries; but if the accusations made any impression upon him it was not evident in his future conduct, for later he took from Verga and Capuana, from Nietzsche and Tolstoy, from Maeterlinck and Flaubert, from Ibsen and Dostoievsky, and from countless others that which it pleased him to take.
His fame in Italy as a poet was heralded by the poet Giuseppe Chiarini, who published an article which did for him what Octave Mirabeau's article in the Figaro of August 24, 1890, did for Maeterlinck. Before he had reached his maturity he was hailed as the coming poet, whose originality was admirable, whose sensuality was shocking but acceptable, whose versatility was marvellous. There is nothing morbid, decadent, or blatant in his early poems. In the "Canto Novo," published in 1882, he displayed the torridity of his temperament, the splendor of his imagination, the ardency of his loves, and the implacability of his hatreds. It swept like a fire over Italy. It was a lyric of the joy of life, "the immense joy of living, of being strong, of being young, of biting with eager teeth the fruits of the earth, of looking with flaming eyes upon the divine face of the world, as a lover looks upon his mistress." It was followed in quick succession by "Terra Vergine," "Intermezzo di Rime," and "Il libro delle Vergini" ("The Book of the Virgins"), which enhanced his reputation and caused the Italians to hail him intemperately.
He then went to Rome and began work as a journalist, but this did not interfere with his output of poetry, and by 1892, when he began publishing romances, he had established, by the publication of "Isaotta Guttadauro," the "Elegie romane" and the "Odi navali," a reputation with the reading public of being the most appealing, most satisfying poet in Italy, and the critics were not at all sure he would not surpass Carducci, who was then considered Italy's greatest poet and whose fame has steadily increased.
His fame as a poet being established to his own satisfaction he turned to the field of romance, and in the next five years (1893-1898) there flowed from the printing-presses a series of romances that veritably flooded literary Italy: "L'Innocente," "Il Piacere," "Giovanni Episcopo," "Trionfo della Morte," "Le Vergini delle Rocce," "Forse che si forse che no," and the "Novelle della Pescara." They had a quality that is not easily characterized by word or brief description. They were "sensuous," "decadent," "daring," "shocking," "brilliant." They were modelled on Flaubert, Prevost, Huysmans; they were saturated with the philosophy of Nietzsche, the psychology of Ibsen, the mysticism of Maeterlinck, the morality of Petronius; they reek of the bestialities of Wilde and Verlaine; they are the glorification of pagan ethics; they are the apotheosis of lust. But they were read, discussed, admired, praised, not only in Italy but the world over. I doubt that praise was ever given so lavishly, so widely, and so unjustifiably as was given to this series of romances, which to-day, a generation after their publication, are as constant a reminder of a wayward step which Italian literature took at the end of the nineteenth century as the linea alba on the torso of a woman whose reputation for virtue is established and admitted reminds her of a faux pas of her youth.
In these volumes the author showed that he had a marvellous capacity to depict states of exalted sensibility; that he had an extraordinary, almost superhuman sensitiveness to beauty as it is revealed in nature and in art; that he had a clairvoyant knowledge of the activity of the unconscious mind of human beings and how it conditions their behavior under circumstances and environments fortuitous or chosen—in other words, until it is revealed to them behavioristically; that he had a comprehensive familiarity with plastic and pictorial art; an intimacy with ancient history and modern literature that was stupendous, and withal a capacity to externalize his visions, his emotional elaboration, and his mental content in words so linked together that the very juxtaposition of them is a pleasure to the eye and a satisfaction to the soul.
But that which he knew best of all was the history of eroticism. Not only was he familiar with its ancestry to the remotest time, but he had guarded its infant days with such solicitude that he knew every impression that worldly contact made upon its plastic consciousness, and when it got its growth he set to work to ornament it so that contact with it would be the apogee of all beauty, intimacy with it the purpose of all ambition, union with it the object of all strife.
There are features of his romances that cannot be adequately praised; there are features that cannot be sufficiently condemned. A poem that contains no particular thought may excite our profoundest admiration, just as does a papier-mâché triumphal arch or monument; but a romance or novel depicts some phase or aspect of life, reveals man's aspirations or accomplishments, his behaviors and reactions under certain conditions, reflects his nobilities, depicts his frailties, and extols his ambitions and what he would like to do, experience, or accomplish. In a general way, it is expected that it shall be tuned to an ethical pitch that will not give offense to the man of average Christian or pagan morality, or outrage universally accepted and acceptable convention. The most successful horticulturist in the world would find no market for his roses, even though they were more exquisite than those of all other florists, should he impregnate them with a scent obtained from the Mustelidæ. This is what D'Annunzio did.
It would be very difficult to find a religion, a form of government, a code of ethics, a type of beauty, a map of life, a canon of morals, a custom, habit, or a convention that something could not be said in praise of it. Bolshevism has its attractive facet, even though the present-day proponents of it have got it so deeply submerged in the mire of ambition and power, and so defaced with lust for revenge that it cannot be recognized. There is scarcely any form of those various indulgences and commissions which are labelled "vice" that have not some commendable and praiseworthy feature, but there is one aberration of human conduct that has never had a champion in the open. It is incest, and Gabriele D'Annunzio is its champion. Concealed or openly, it goes through his writings with the same constancy that streams flow through plains that go out from glacier mountains. In the English translations of his romances elaborate descriptions of other forms of perversion of the genesic instinct have been largely expurgated, but it is impossible to purge them entirely of the incest theme, for in many of his writings it is beyond the verbal description. It is the atmosphere of the book. Take, for instance, the novel "L'Innocente." On the face of it, it is the narration of the conduct of a man who, having wedded a superior woman of great intellectual charm and bodily attractions, yields to the temptations of the life of dissipation in which he had distinguished himself previous to an ideal matrimony and a contented paternity. He realizes that his digressions are scandalous, and that their frequent deliberate repetitions justify his wife in living apart from him, though her love, being beyond control, still continues. They agree to live with each other as brother and sister. The moment he succeeds in placing her in his soul as his sister an irresistible impulse seizes him to have carnal possession of her, and the burden of the book is a description of his seduction of his own wife, who in the new covenant is his sister. Meanwhile with consummate art he has described in the first chapter as the only true love that which exists between brother and sister, his apostrophe of it having been called forth by recalling the sister whom death had fortunately removed.