The last books of D'Annunzio, illustrating his new attitude toward life, are "La Leda senza-cigno" ("Leda without the Swan"), "Per la più grande Italia" ("For Greater Italy"), "La Beffa di Buccari" ("Buccari's Joke"), "La Riscossa" ("The Rescue"), "Bestetti e Tuminelli" ("Italy and Death"), "Contro Uno e contro Tutti" ("Against One and against All"), and a series of volumes under the title of "The Archives of Icarius," which are all concerned with incidents in the Great War.
It is too soon to attempt to guess the pedestal that posterity will allot Gabriele D'Annunzio in the gallery of fame. The committee that will do it will estimate his qualifications of lyric poet and Hellenic dramatist—perhaps as warrior.
D'Annunzio is a poet who abounds in lyrical ecstacies. His style is the most remarkable thing about him. He describes armor, architecture, archæology like an expert. He knows the dynamic point of view. He knows how to depict dramatic situations. His personages are all living personages. He is concerned with the neurotic, decadent, hectic, temperamental type of human beings. All his characters have a love of beauty. He is the true decadent of the nineteenth-century literature, to whom the decadent French symbolists cannot hold a candle.
After he had sucked the luscious orange of Italy dry and eaten of its pomegranates to satiety; after he had exhausted sensation in the search for sensation and he could no longer hope for stimulation from vision, from image, from sound, from color; when the nets of Eros were so lacerated and worn from having been dragged upon the rocks and crags of life; when Italian food, though appetizingly spiced and washed down with rare vintage of the Castelli Romani, would no longer nourish him, he abandoned his native land and went to France. His writings while in France were like those of a man who is dominated by a dementia following a protracted delirium, and as he emerged from this dementia he published a pietistic piece called "The Contemplation of Death." It seems to have been suggested to him by the death of the poet Pascoli, for whom he professed an admiration, but more particularly by Adolfo Bermond, whom he had met after he went to France and who apparently had been able to depict the beauties of humility so that they were recognizable to D'Annunzio. In his fatigued, emotional, and enfeebled mental state he asked himself whether humility was not more desirable than pride, love not stronger than hate, spiritual aristocracy more ennobling than aristocracy of blood, of money, of brain, of privilege. In this state of mock humility he wrote: "I always feel above me the presence of the sacrifice of Christ. I see now that the glory of my life is not in the beauty of my possessions. I have never felt so miserable and at the same time so powerful. Never since I lived have I had within me an instinct, a need so deep and so storming. I am aware that a part of my being, maybe the best part, is deeply asleep within me." But soon this spiritual awakening was throttled by the influence of Nietzsche. "What will become of me if I surrender wholly to the Saviour? Surely I want the world to know if in my life, filled with base instincts, there comes the moment of changing. Even if my glory be destroyed I will not be a prisoner to the worse that speaks within me." It was from that hour that he decided to be the Garibaldi of the third Italy. He would then be another Gabriel standing in the presence of God and sent to speak to them and show them glad tidings.
It was a strange awakement that D'Annunzio had when he went to Rome in the early '90's. Perhaps it was before that time that he encountered "L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable," and later "La Sagesse et la Destinée," and he absorbed some of its æsthetic mysticism. He realized that it was another variety of search for wisdom because it is happiness, and he began to portray it in his poetry and tragedies. From the day he began to write he accustomed himself to take as it pleased him from others' writings, and not only lines and paragraphs but subjects, movements, cadences, thoughts, and images which determined the character and decided the nature of the production. Italian critics have taken the trouble to return to the original creators the borrowed constituents of some of his productions, "L'Asiatico," for instance; and that which then remained was the caressing modulation of the verses. When his romances appeared in French many of the passages taken bodily from Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, de Maupassant, Pêladan, de Goncourt, Huysmans, and many others were prudently suppressed. But no one can fail to recognize that he read these authors with a keen eye, a note-book by his side. But he has known how to use what he borrowed. The day came when the conduct of a corrupt people in a decadent fictitious world no longer sufficed to divert him; having drunk from the poisoned springs of lust not only to satiety but to disgust, he, like his prototype of Huysmans's creation, "Des Esseintes," the Thebaide raffinée of "A Rebours," must hide himself away far from the world, in some retreat where he might deaden the discordant sounds of the rumblings of inflexible life, as one deadens the street with straw where an important or beloved one is sick. This retreat was Paris and there we must leave him making scenic plays and erudite verse for a Russian ballerina, and working out his destiny in contemplation of death and in planning the selection of warriors for Valhalla.
We are not concerned with his conduct or with his morals. We are concerned with his activities to divert and instruct us, and the influence that his efforts had upon the people of his time. He wrote artistically perfect novels; his poetry is the highest form of lyric expression; he made his dramas the revivification of the elements of Greek tragedy; and he strove to prove that Eros was unconquerable by priest, sage, or warrior. Now, with the world in ferment, they are the only earnest for our acceptation of his assurance that he can shape the fate of Italy more acceptably than its statesmen.
Before the Great War he had practically passed from the stage of letters. That epochal occurrence resurrected him. We can wait to hear what posterity will say of him.
[CHAPTER IV
THE FUTURIST SCHOOL OF ITALIAN WRITERS]
The Italians are a people of great emotional complexity, displaying a strange mixture of idealism and realism. They are at present engaged in constructing an edifice which shall be the admiration of the world for all time, to wit, a third Italy. Naturally the designers, the architects, the builders and the prospective inhabitants hope that it will be more ideal, more commodious, more adapted to its purposes than its predecessors. To the sympathetic observer, however, they appear to limit themselves narrowly to old building material.