Take again this very different picture:—
'He found the gorse.
'On a tableland the thickly-growing gorse had flowered so densely as to spread a vast golden mantle over all the soil. Five maidens were gathering the flowers and filling with them skips and baskets, singing as they worked. They sang a song of thirds and fives in perfect harmony. When one of them reached a special phrase she lifted her whole bust out of the yellow maze of blossom that the notes might go forth from her throat with fuller liberty, and held it long sustained in air, looking her companions in the eyes whilst they applauded with their hands of flowers.
'When they saw the stranger they stopped and bent again over the gorse. Stifled saucy laughter rippled under the yellow sea. Giorgio asked,—
'"Which of you is Favetta?"
'A girl, brown as an olive, raised her head in reply, amazed, almost terrified: "It is I, sir."
'"Are you not the finest singer of San Vito?"
'"No, sir. That is not true."
'"It is true. It is true!" cried her companions.
'"Sir! make her sing."
'"No, sir, it is not true. I cannot sing."
'She hid herself, laughing, her face all aflame; she twisted her apron whilst the others teased her. She was of short stature but well-formed; her bosom was high and large, swollen with songs. She had curly hair, dark eyebrows, aquiline profile; something in her carriage wild and free. After the first resistance she yielded.
'The others, taking her by the arms, held her in their circle. They were up to their waists in the flowering gorse, whilst round them the bees were humming.
'Favetta began unsteadily, but with each note her voice grew firmer. It was limpid, liquid, crystal, clear as a water spring. She sang a couplet and the others sang in chorus a ritornello. They prolonged the harmonies, putting their mouths close to form one single vocal flute; the song rose and fell in the light air with the slow regularity of a litany.
'Favetta sang:—
'"All the springs are dry,
O poor love of mine!
He dies of thirst.
Where is the water thou broughtest me?
We have brought thee an earthen jar,
But round it is a chain of gold!"'The others sang:—
'"Long live Love!"
'It was the salutation of May to Passion, pouring from young breasts, which perchance as yet knew not its sweetness and perchance never would know its sorrow.'
Or take the following passage which is as essentially true in its accurate observation as it is beautiful in its expression. Tullio Hermil and Giuliana are listening at Villa Lilla to the first songster of that spring.
'The nightingale sang. At first it was like a burst of melodious glee; a jet of easy trills which fell through the air like pearls falling on the glass of a harmonium. Then came a pause. A shake arose, agile, marvellously prolonged, like a proof of strength, in an impulse of insolence, a challenge to some unknown rivals.
'A second pause. A phrase of three notes with a tone of interrogation passed on a chain of light variations repeating the interrogative phrase five or six times, modulated softly like a slender reed flute on which is played a pastoral. A third pause: the song becomes elegiac, turns to a minor key, tender as a sigh; it is almost a groan; it expresses all the grief of the lonely lover, a heartrending desire; a vain hope; it flings out a last appeal, improvised, acute as a scream of anguish: then it ceases. A longer pause, more ominous. Then one hears a new accent which scarcely seems to come from the same throat so humble is it, so timid, so slight; it resembles the twitter of scarce-fledged birds, the chirrup of sparrows; then, with a miraculous volubility, this noisy note changes into a breathless song, more and more rapid in its trills, vibrating in sustained shakes, turning in daring flights of sound, leaping, growing, bounding, attaining the highest heights of the soprano. The songster is drunk with his own song. With pause so brief that one note scarce ceases ere another succeeds it, he spends his delirium in ever-varied melody, impassioned and sweet, subdued and ear-piercing, light and grave, now interrupted by broken sighs, by lament and supplication, now by impetuous lyrical improvisation and supreme appeal. It seems that even the gardens are listening, that the sky stoops over the old tree from whose summit this poet, invisible to mortal eyes, pours out such floods of eloquence. The flowers breathe deeply and silently. A yellow glow lingers in the west. This last lingering glance of the dying day is sad. But a single star has risen, alone and tremulous like a drop of luminous dew.'
He who can write thus is a great writer; and the charm of this passage is not alone its poetry but its exact truth. The song of the nightingale varies much in accord with age, with species (for there are two species, Luscinia Philomela, and Luscinia Major), with climate, with the sense of security, and the want of security, but the song of a nightingale in its maturity, who is unalarmed and feels at home in the gardens of his choice, is precisely such a song as is described in this passage, and is more completely echoed in it than in the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven. This sympathy with the melody of birds is the more singular in D'Annunzio, because Italians are almost invariably indifferent to such melody, and snare the divine songster in the net, or shoot him whilst he shouts his nuptial Io Triumphe! with the most stolid indifference. And it may, perhaps, be that D'Annunzio does not care for the bird himself more than the rest of his countrymen, but only cares for his own eloquence concerning it. It may be said, without risk of injustice to him, that great tenderness is at no moment found in him. He has not 'the pathetic fallacy'; but he approaches it very nearly at times. When women shall have lost for him some of the intensity of their physical charm, nature in her wider and more profound meanings will, perhaps, become more visible and more dear to him. Perhaps, however, it will not, for the Italian is rarely impersonal.
Something of the affectation to which the delicate taste of my Italian correspondent justly objects must be admitted to mar, by its artificiality, the many magnificent pages dedicated by him to the sea. Magnificent they are, true also, entirely true; but some mannerism there is in them, some over-intricate embroidery of phrase. The sea he knows best, and remembers always, is the Adriatic, of which the extreme beauty of the colour, like the leaves of the silverweed, as wind and sun pass over the meadows, has always before him been too little noted except, I may venture to say, by myself.
'O, fair, clear seas of September!' he cries in the Piacere. 'The water is calm and innocent as a sleeping child, and lies outstretched under a pearl-like sky. Sometimes it is all green of the brilliant and intense green of malachite, and on it the small rosy sails seem like wandering fires. Sometimes it is all azure, of an intense blue, like the ultramarine which heralds use for blazonries, veined with gold like lapis-lazuli, and on it the painted sails seem like a procession of standards, of banners, of spears borne on a Catholic holy day. And yet again at other moments it takes on a metallic gleam, a silvery paleness, the hues of a ripening lemon, something indefinable and strange, and on this mystical surface the boats then glide and fade, and are seen no more as the illumined wings of cherubim sink into the faint fundamental hues of an old Giottesque fresco.
'The sea was not alone for him a delight for the eyes, but it was a perennial wave in which he steeped his thirsting thoughts; a magical fountain of youth in which his body recovered health and his mind nobility. The sea had for him the mysterious attraction of a native country, and he abandoned himself to it with filial confidence, as a weak child in the arms of an omnipotent father; and he derived consolation from it, for no one had ever confided his sorrows, his desires, or his dreams to the ear of the sea in vain.'
So, we are told by D'Annunzio, thinks Andrea Sperelli, and so thought also Giorgio Aurispa. But the sea has no permanent power on the soul of either; the one returns from his contemplations of it to his life of voluptuous pleasure, and the other drowns both himself and the woman, whom he has adored to frenzy, in its waves, whilst the dog mourns 'forsaken beneath the olive trees, and the waters murmur softly, rocking as in a cradle the reflections of the stars.'
Only once in D'Annunzio's work does genuine and yearning regret, of which it is impossible to doubt the spontaneity and sincerity, thrill through him, and move him to intense emotion and unstudied eloquence. It is when, in the person of Claudio Cantelmo, he speaks in furious invective of the modern desecration of Rome; in these passages he is strong without effort, eloquent without study, and veracious alike in sorrow and in scorn. His invective is poured from his heart's depths, and thrills with the force of the Latin orators of the ruined Forum.