Idling in Italy: Studies of literature and of life

by Joseph Collins

The hero is a psychopathic individual, sensitive, aboulic, distractible, impressionable, impulsive, vacillating, and suicidal. He is married to a woman who apparently has every beauty of soul and body that a woman can have. But, alas, she is virtuous! She has not the key to the jewel-casket of his genius. That is possessed by his model Gioconda Dianti, the source of all his inspirations. One quiver of her eyelid causes his soul to dissolve like sugar in water, while two make him feel that he is lord of the universe.

The tragedy of the play is the permanent mutilation of the wife's hands, the only somatic feature that has "appealed" to the artist. She attempts to save his masterpiece which the model pushes over in temper on being told falsely that she is to be banished. Her mutilated hands serve to remind her the rest of her life that virtue is its own reward.

The two dramas of D'Annunzio which are best known to the English-speaking public are "La Figlia d'Jorio" and "Francesca di Rimini." "The Daughter of Jorio" is a tragedy laid in the mountains of Abruzzi. D'Annunzio knows the customs, habits, and traditions of the shepherds and mountaineers, their superstitions and emotions, as he knows art, archæology, and eroticism. The first act is a description of the betrothal of the son of a brutal shepherd to a simple girl with whom he is not particularly in love. At the ceremony of betrothal the daughter of Jorio, who is suspected to have evil powers, claims protection from certain shepherds who had designs upon her. The first impulse of the joyous party was to cast her out, but when the betrothed young man was about to do so he saw behind her his lustful desire presented to his eyes in the guise of an angel, which made him hesitate, and the daughter of Jorio was allowed to remain. In the next act he is seen as her lover. He quarrels about her with his father and kills him. The parricide's punishment is to be sewed into a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and a monkey and cast into the sea. The daughter of Jorio comes to the rescue and convinces the people that she is the real criminal. Eros is unconquerable.

In "Francesca di Rimini," a historical play filled with erudite archæological details, he displays a knowledge of the thirteenth century and of the customs of the time which has never been excelled save by historical writers. It is a picture of war and bloodshed, of treachery and accusation. The central theme is the love of Francesca and Paolo. They may be taken as the typical human beings of the thirteenth-century Italy, fond of luxury and beautiful things but savage in their reactions. Perhaps Francesca is one of the best feminine figures that D'Annunzio has ever drawn.

In 1904 there appeared two volumes entitled "Praises of the Sky, the Sea, the Earth and of Heroes." After that period his tragedies, "The Light under the Bushel," "The Ship," "Fedra," and "The Mystery of San Sebastian" appeared in French, and soon he adopted France as his home, having previously published a spiritual autobiography of eight thousand four hundred lines entitled "Laus Vitæ," in which he summarizes the motives of his past and lays the basis of his new inspiration.

D'Annunzio's war poems have all been inspired with the belief that Italy's future lies on the sea. It is much to be regretted that they have not yet been collected into a single volume. When it is done he will not unlikely be recognized as the most legitimate of Pindar's descendants. Undoubtedly he will want them to be the conspicuous, permanent wreath on his tomb. The Libyan War inspired him to the production of his noblest war poetry, "Canzoni della Gesta d'Oltremare" ("Songs of Achievements across the Sea").

In the "Canzoni di Mario Bianco" he foresaw the beginning of a new era for Italy, and he forecast the aspirations and promises of the third Italy. His "Canzone del Quarnaro" describes the raid of the three Italian torpedo-boats on the Buccari, a few miles to the southeast of Fiume. It is short and forceful. The introductory "beffa" describes the raid in detail. D'Annunzio is inordinately fond of using Christian imagery, and he reverts to it here in the distribution of his little tricolor flags, which has a mystic import. "It is a true eucharistic sacrament, the closest and most complete communion of the spirit with beautiful Italy. There is no need of consecrating words; the tricolor wafer was converted through our faith into the living beauty of our country. We are purified, we are sundered from the shore and from our daily habits, separated from the land and all vulgar cares, from our homes and from all useless idleness, from profane love and all base desires; we are immune from the thought of return."

The "Cantico per l'ottava della Vittoria" is a wish fulfilment for him. As the boat enters the Quarnaro and runs up the coast of Istria it is, for D'Annunzio, the guarantor of the treaty of London, and he sees all the cities and islands of this coast restored to Italy, and these cities and all the places hallowed by the war join in the pæan of triumph.

In "Songs of Achievements across the Sea" D'Annunzio established an incontestable claim to be the great inspiring poet, even the prophet, of his generation in Italy, and he produced work which has not been surpassed, but he was still the poet only, singer of the deeds of others, in which he had no share himself. The contrast between his pretensions and his achievements made the affectations of his early years appear ridiculous to many people, and tended to obscure the true value of his work. He was still seeking and the years that followed in Paris showed that he had discovered no new world to explore, but when Italy joined the Allies he suddenly found himself. All the brooding sense of incomplete achievement of other days vanished in a moment. The speeches and addresses that he delivered between May 4 and 25, 1915, showed that he had been preparing for what he knew would be "The Day" for him.

It was widely believed in Italy in 1917 and 1918 that on the evening of May 4, 1915, when D'Annunzio addressed a meeting at Quarto to commemorate an anniversary of Garibaldi's departure with his faithful thousand to deliver Sicily and Naples from the Bourbon yoke, and a few days later when he addressed them in the Costanzi Theatre in Rome and then went with the enormous crowd to ring the bell of the Campidoglio, the signal was given for the declaration of war against Austria and Germany.