Before he has accomplished the seduction of his wife-sister he has precipitated her into a vulgar adventure with his own brother, a pattern of all the virtues. It is a part of his consummate art to create circumstantial evidence that will tend to put the paternity of her child upon a fellow author who in other days had been civil and courteous to his wife, and had sent her a copy of his latest book with an enigmatical inscription on the fly-leaf, but in reality he succeeds in creating an atmosphere from which one senses with readiness that the real father is his brother. The book, in so far as it is concerned with the nobility of Giuliana, the sweetness of life in the country, the lovability of her mother and her children, the way in which Giuliana's emotions and thought after the advent of the child are shaped that she may grow to hate it as he hates it, as well as the mental elaborations that justify him in seeking to destroy it, and the accomplishment of it, are done in a way that shows the author to be not only intimately familiar with the workings of the normal human mind but with the depraved human mind.
From the beginning of his literary career D'Annunzio was at no pains to conceal that he was the model from which he painted his heroes. The reader who identifies him with Tullio Hermil is the perspicacious reader, in the eyes of the author; the reader who considers the conduct of Tullio, infracting as it does the canons of law, of morality, and of decency, as the conduct of a superman, is, in the judgment of the author, the sapient reader. He who sees in Tullio and his conduct a beast abnormally freighted with lubricity, lacking in inhibitory qualities of a man unguided and uninfluenced by any obligation to God or man, and knowing no other obligation than the pursuit of his own pleasures and desires, is a fool, a weakling, an inanimate mass of protoplasm moulded in the form of a human being unworthy of consideration. D'Annunzio conceived himself a superman long before he began to write romances, and I am not one of those who believe that he got his conception from Nietzsche. He got it from the same indescribable source that that unbalanced monster of materialism got his. Its roots if they could be traced back to the days of the Hebrew prophets would be found to have their germinal sprouts in some descendant of Samuel or David.
D'Annunzio's romances are a mixture of materialism, sensualism, and pessimism reduced in a pagan mortar to a homogeneous consistency, and then skilfully admixed with honey so that it is acceptable to the Christian palate, but, once it has got beyond the taste-buds of the tongue, once it is taken into the system, its poisonous, corroding, and destructive qualities become operative. I doubt if D'Annunzio ever wrote a word or line in his plays or romances that any one was the better for having read or heard, and by better I mean that he added to his spiritual possessions, to his inherent nobility, or to his aspirations for a moral perfection, one iota. I doubt if any normal human being, normal physically, mentally, and spiritually, can read "Il Piacere" without feeling ill and humiliated, not because of the picture that the author draws of himself in the guise of Andrea Sperelli, this finished expert in the employments of love, nor of Donna Maria, nor of the woman more infernally expert in those matters, nor the score of other characters which he paints with a master-hand, but because of the way in which he draws his bow across the overtaut strings of sensuousness until they scream and wail in frenzied fashion and then finally burst asunder. The way in which he makes an appeal to his perverted sensuality through vicarious overstimulation of the senses with which he was endowed for self-conservation and self-preservation, the senses of smell and sight and touch and hearing, is in itself a perversion. He stimulates them until they shriek for mercy or for immersion in some benumbing balm. The true pervert is he who puts out of proportion and out of perspective the sources of æsthetic emanation, and who concentrates them upon the percipient apparatus of one or other of the senses so that it may be excited to a frenzied activity. The description of Andrea's room, in which he awaits Donna Maria, with its perfumes, lights, and colors, and the description of his toilet articles and his bedroom is one of the most nauseating things in all literature. Like Nietzsche, D'Annunzio looks upon women as creatures of an inferior race, instruments of pleasure and procreation who were created to serve. When they no longer are amusing, useful, or serviceable they are to be brushed aside and with the same sang froid as one would put aside an automobile that had broken down, worn out, or because it's "corpo non è più giovane," as he kept saying of Foscarina in "Il Fuoco," who belonged to him, "like the thing one holds in his fist, like the ring on one's finger, like a glove, like a garment, like a word that may be spoken or not, like a draft that may be drunk or poured on the ground."
In "Vergini delle Rocce" he expounds the theory that inequality is the essence of the state, and in this book as well as in "Il Trionfo della Morte" we find all the passion of language and of sentiment that one finds in Nietzsche. It is no longer to be doubted that he had kept his word "noi tendiamo l'orecchio alla voce del magnanimo Zarathustra e prepariamo nell' arte con sicura fede l'avvento del Uebermensch del superuomo"—we listen to the voicing of the magnanimous Zarathustra and we prepare with unfaltering faith for the coming of the superman to the arts.
In his life of Cola di Rienzo D'Annunzio again took occasion to lampoon and traduce the common people, describing them as the great beast which must be crushed and annihilated. "Il Trionfo della Morte" is the very essence of Heraclitan philosophy and Dionysan ethics. The hero, who is a paragon of knowledge which he displays for the reader's edification, meets the young and pretty wife of a business man who bores her. He is successful finally in permitting her to pass a few weeks with him in his villa by the sea. During these weeks they run the gamut of every conceivable sensation and the reader gets a description of them and of the gradual hatred that develops in him for his subjection of her. "Every human soul carries in it for love a definite quality of sensitive force. This quality is used up with time and when it is used up no effort can prevent love from ceasing." But, unlike the animal when his concupiscence is satiated and he is still urged to greater display, the hero is not content with driving her from him; he must needs mete out the same fate to her that he did to the infant in "Il Piacere," so he lures her to the edge of a sea cliff and hurls her into space. "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 definite, forsaking forever the infirmities of her weak, luxurious flesh. Destroy to possess. There is no other way for him who seeks the absolute in love."
The reader yields to the enchantment of his style, to the seductiveness of his lyrism, to the intoxications of his descriptions of beauty; and the critic and fellow writer to his mastery of technic and consummate mastery of behavioristic psychology. From the critics' point of view "The Triumph of Death" and "The Fire" are the high-water marks of D'Annunzio as a stylist, and they mark his completest moral dissolution.
In "Il Fuoco" we get the same ethics, philosophy, æsthetics, and glorification of sensuousness that we get in all his other books. Here the two leading characters are exact replicas of himself and of the world's greatest actress of her day portrayed in an environment, Venice, that is redolent of beauty in decay, like a cracked Grecian vase overfilled with withered rose leaves which fall from it at every puff of wind. This environment makes an ideal palette upon which he blends the colors whose pigments he has been selecting and experimenting with for a quarter of a century. The publication of it promoted his voluntary exile from Italy. His fellow countrymen could not condone the monstrous offense of depicting therein as the pliant mediator of his perverted sensuousness their beloved actress. And they have not yet forgiven him, nor are they likely to forgive him.
After D'Annunzio had established a reputation as a neoromanticist with a classical tendency he turned to drama, and the year 1897 marked his advent into that field. His first efforts, three one-act parables—"The Foolish Virgins and the Wise Virgins," "The Rich Man and Poor Lazarus," and "The Prodigal Son"—were published in the Mattino of Naples, a newspaper controlled by the husband of his friend and fellow writer, Matilde Serao. They are noteworthy merely to show the way in which a sensuous pagan can transform simple characters into decadent, perverted proselyters of pleasure. It was not until he wrote "The Dream of a Spring Morning" and "The Dream of an Autumn Sunset" that he displayed the same measure of lascivious imagery and capacity for description of the perverse manifestations of eroticism that he revealed in his romances. These were revealed in lines that truly may be said to be masterpieces of lyric beauty, and when the Mad Woman of the first and the Messalina of the second were interpreted by Eleanora Duse the musical sound of the words and the emotional force of the sentiment gained a quality of importance and grandeur which enhanced their inherent qualities.
In "La Città Morta," his most successful drama, he returned to his favorite topic, incest. Though his purpose in writing it, the most successful of all his dramas, was to revive in form, structure, and unity the Greek drama, it gave him an opportunity to display his knowledge of the classics and archæology. The philosophy and mysticism of the play he got from Maeterlinck. Its theme is lust and crime. Lust is portrayed in almost every conceivable form of perversion, in poetic thoughts and graceful diction, especially in the delineation of Leonardo, the explorer, who lusts for his sister. The dreamy, meditative languor of the dramatis personæ, their insensitiveness to every form of ethical conformation, their perversion of every form of moral relationship, constitute an atmosphere that the northerner does not breath pleasurably. It was thoroughly purged before it was put on the boards in this country.
His next play, "La Gioconda," is an exposition of the exemption which D'Annunzio thinks the artist of his own superman caliber should have from conforming to the laws of estate or custom. The contention is a simple one. He should do anything that he pleases—which means give himself over to the pleasure of the senses and the appetites until the indulgence is followed by satiety and thus his progress toward perfection through gratification of desires will be accomplished. After satiety comes disgust, and then a period of dementia, but this is merely the prelude to another fling of erotic fury in his conformation to the doctrine of purification through pleasure.