'I have lived several years in Rome; in that third Rome which should have represented "Love reigning by Latin blood on Latin soil," and have seen radiant on its heights the wondrous lights of a new Ideal. I have been witness to its most ignominious evolutions, to the most obscene unions that have ever desecrated a sacred place. And I have understood the symbolism hidden in that act of an Asiatic conqueror, who cast myriads of human heads in the fountains of Samarcand, when he desired to create a capital. The wise and cruel tyrant meant to signify the necessity of merciless destruction in the creation of a new order of things.
'The ship which bore the Thousand of Marsala only set sail that the art of exchange and barter should be protected and covered by the State!
'It was the epoch of the most frenzied fury of the destroyers and contractors on the site of Rome. With the storms of dust there were propagated a sort of lunacy of gain, a malignant delirium, seizing not only on the tradesman and money-lenders, and the workers in brick and mortar, but also on the elect heirs of the papal majorat, who primarily had looked with scorn and disgust on the newcomers from the windows of their palaces of travertine, indestructible under the encrustations of ages.
'The magnificent patrician races founded there, renewed and strengthened by nepotism, and the strife of opposing houses, descended and abased themselves one by one, slid down into the new mud, sank, and vanished. The illustrious riches, amassed through centuries of gorgeous pillage and Mæcenic luxury, were thrown into the whirlpool of the speculations of the Bourse.
'And around them, on these patrician lawns, where, only the previous spring, the violets had blossomed more numberless than the blades of grass, there were now mounds of lime, heaps of bricks, the wheels of stone-laden carts creaked on the turf, on the air were the oaths of the drivers, the shouts of the overseers, while every hour hastened on the brutal work which was to efface and occupy the sacred soil once dedicated to Beauty and to Dreams. There passed over Rome a blighting blizzard of barbarism, menacing all that greatness and loveliness which were without equals in the memory of the world. Even the laurels and the rose trees of the Villa Schiarra, for so many nights of so many summers hymned by their nightingales, fell destroyed, or remained in their desecration behind the gates of little gardens parcelled out to the little cockney boxes of tradesmen. The gigantic Ludovisian cypresses, those of the Aurora, those which spread the clouds of their solemn and mystic antiquity above the Olympian brows of Goethe, were now laid prone in line one after another, with all their dishonoured roots stretching towards the pallid sky, the black dishonoured roots which still seemed to hold in their immense network the web of a life greater than our own.
'Even over the box alleys of the Villa Albani, which had seemed as immortal as their Caryatides and their Hermes, there hung that shadow of a vandal's ruin. The contagion of destruction spread everywhere. In the ceaseless combat of gain, in the savage fury of avaricious greed and passions, in the disordered haste of commercial activity, every sense of common decency was forgotten, all respect for the past was trampled under foot. The struggle for gain was carried on with blind fury, with neither check nor curb. The pickaxe, the shovel, and the cunning of fraud were the weapons employed. And week after week, with incredible velocity, there arose on the violated earth the huge foolish cages of brick and mortar, pierced with square holes, surmounted with sham cornices, encrusted with shameful stucco ornaments. A kind of immense white tumour rose and spread on the wounded and bleeding side of the great Urbs and drained away its life.
'And then, day after day, at sunset, along the princely avenues of the Borghese Park, we could see in gorgeous brand-new equipages the new elect of Fortune, from whom not barber, nor tailor, nor boot-maker, had power to take away the ignoble stamp. We could see them pass and repass with the sonorous trot of their shining bay and brown horses; they were recognisable at a glance by the insolence of their pose and the awkward carriage of their rapacious and vulgar hands; and they seemed to cry aloud,—
'"We are the new rulers of Rome. Bow down to us!"
'In truth such are its rulers; such the present masters of that Rome which prophets and poets once likened to the bow of Ulysses.'
Often have I myself written similar things, but in me they have been considered exaggerations. They cannot be so considered in Gabriele D'Annunzio of Francavilla.
All who love Rome and loathe her modern violation must thank him from their hearts for such passages, and must mourn with him that we cannot drive out the spoilers from our desecrated temples.
This is, indeed, his greatest strength, that, whilst still a young man, he yet has the courage to resist the intellectual tendencies of his contemporaries, to refuse to worship their gods, to see and despise the falseness of those scientific pretensions which enslave the multitude in modern life. His intellect, richly stored by learning, is, in a large measure, free of prejudice. This is a great and rare distinction in a generation which more completely than any which has preceded it, is the timid slave of formula and the credulous servant of professional bigotry.
He has kept a complete mental liberty; free from the superstitions of religion, which, in this day, it is easy to be; but also free from the superstitions of science, which is far harder, and incurs far greater obloquy and opposition.
In his study on Giorgione, he says what it needs much courage to say in these days:—
'The scientific spirit has invaded the generation of the second half of our century. Struck by the surprising results of physics and calculation, men were inclined to believe for a time, that by the aid of the one or the other, they would be able to penetrate into all mysteries and solve all problems. But to this proud exaltation has now succeeded a discouragement mingled with suspicion. They say to themselves, and not without reason: "Where is this certainty that science promised us?" If ever certainty were incomplete, deprived of solid criterion, it is that offered by natural science. As for the sciences called exact, some, like geometry, repose on a tottering base of arbitrary affirmations; others, like algebra, on mere methods of reasoning, and contain as much or as little certainty as the formula of a syllogism.'
This is emphatically true; but it is a fact which is by no means recognised by all, and which is still violently denied by those fanatics whose form of bigotry is either experimental or exact science.
The mind of D'Annunzio refuses all bondage. It is a law to itself, as the mind of the great writer should be. I imagine that the opinion of him held by others, is to him of the most absolute unimportance. His teaching is always to preserve the independence of the Ego, to live without attention to formula or usage, to be, both materially and spiritually, that which we were created to be by nature.