Gabriele D'annunzio, the Novelist

“ TOM JONES and Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard are both excellent, and much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men.” This statement by Marjorie Fleming has abundant confirmation in the history of English literature for the last hundred and fifty years. And although this nineteenth century of ours has enjoyed throwing a great many stones at the eighteenth, we must acknowledge that we cannot find in English literature another novel and another poem that, taken together, give us a fuller knowledge of English-speaking men. There are times, in the twilights of the day and of the year, in the closing in of life, when we all contemplate death ; and the Elegy tells all our thoughts in lines that possess our memories like our mothers’ voices. It shows simple folk in sight of death, calm, natural, serious, high-minded. Thomas àa Kempis, Cato the younger, the cavaliers of the Light Brigade, may have thought upon death after other fashions, but for most of us the thoughts of our hearts have been portrayed by Gray.

Tom Jones is the contemplation of life in ordinary Englishmen. In the innocent days before Mr. Hardy and some other writers of distinction Tom Jones was reputed coarse, — one of those classics that should find their places on a shelf well out of reach of young arms. The manners of Squire Western and of Tom himself are such as often are best described in the Squire’s own language. But who is the man, as Thackeray says, that does not feel freer after he has read the book ? Fielding, in his rough and ready way, has described men as they are, made of the dust of the earth, and that not carefully chosen. We no longer read it aloud to our families, as was tiie custom of our great-grandfathers; but we do not all read Mr. Hardy aloud to our daughters. Tom Jones is a big, strong, fearless, honest book; it gives us a hearty slap on the back, congratulating us that we are alive, and we accept the congratulation with pleasure. Its richness is astonishing. It has flowed down through English literature like a fertilizing Nile. In it we find the beginnings of Sheridan, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot. In it we have those wonderful conversations between Square and Thwackum, which remind us of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Mrs. Seagrim talks for half a page, and we hold our noses against the smells in her kitchen.

The power of the book is its eulogy upon life. Is it not wretched to be stocks, stones, tenants of Westminster Abbey, mathematicians, or young gentlemen lost in philosophy ? Is not the exhilaration of wine good ? Is not dinner worth the eating ? Do not young women make a most potent and charming government? Fielding takes immense pleasure in the foolishness, in the foibles of men, and he finds amusement in their vices, but over virtue and vice, over wisdom and folly, be always insists upon the joy and the value of life.

When we shall have re-read Tom Jones and repeated Gray’s Elegy to ourselves, then we shall he in the mood in which we can best determine the value of foreign novels for us. And so, with this avowal of our point of view, we approach the stories of the distinguished Italian novelist, Gabriele d’Annunzio.

Men of action who apply themselves to literature are likely to have a generous confidence that skill will follow courage ; that if they write, the capacity to write effectively will surely come. Plays, novels, editorials, sonnets, are written by them straight upon the impulse. They plunge into literature as if it were as buoyant as their spirit, and strike out like young sea creatures. Gabriele d’Annunzio is a man of another complexion. He is not a man of action, but of reflection. He is a student; he lives in the world of books. Through this manycolored medium of literature he sees men and women ; but he is saved from an obvious artificiality by his sensitiveness to books of many kinds. He has submitted to laborious discipline ; he has sat at the feet of many masters. His early schooling may be seen in a collection of stories published in 1886 under the name of the first, San Pantaleone. One story is in imitation of Verga, another of de Maupassant; and in La Fattura is an attempt to bring the humor of Boccaccio into a modern tale. Even in the Decameron this renowned humor has neither affection nor pity for father ; in its own cradle it mewls like an ill-mannered foundling. In the hands of d’ Annunzio it acquires the ingenuous charm of Mr. Noah Claypole. We believe that d’Annunzio, consciously or unconsciously, became aware of his native antipathy to humor, for we have not found any other attempt at it in his work. It is in this absence of humor that we first feel the separation between d’Annunzio and the deep human feelings. In Italian literature there is no joyous, mellow, merry book, in which as a boy he might have nuzzled and rubbed off upon himself some fruitful pollen. One would as soon expect to find a portrait of Mr. Pickwick by Botticelli as the spirit of Dickens in any cranny of Italian literature. M. de Vogüé has said that d’Annunzio is born out of time ; that in spirit he is one of the cinqnecentisti. There is something ferocious and bitter in him. The great human law of gravitation, that draws man to man, does not affect him.

Nevertheless, these stories have much vigor and skillful description. In San Pantaleone, d’Annunzio depicts the frenzy and fierce emotions of superstition in southern Italy. Savage fanaticism interests him. The combination of high imagination and the exaltation of delirium with the stupidity and ignorance of beasts has a powerful attraction for him. The union of the intellectual and the bestial is to him the most remarkable phenomenon of life.

This early book is interesting also in that it shows ideas in the germ and in their first growth which are subsequently developed in the novels, and in that it betrays d’Annunzio’s notion that impersonality — that deliverance from the frailty of humanity to which he would aspire — is an escape from compassion and affection, and is most readily come at through contempt.

D’Annunzio has spared no pains to make his language as melodious and efficient an instrument as he can. Italian prose has never been in the same rank with Italian poetry. There have been no great Italians whose genius has forced Italian prose to bear the stamp and impress of their personalities. In the sixteenth century this prose was clear and capable, but since then it has gradually shrunk to fit the thoughts of lesser men. D’Annunzio has taken on his back the task of liberating the Italian tongue ; he will give it “ virtue, manners, freedom, power.” Not having within him the necessity of utterance, not hurried on by impetuous talents, he has applied himself to his task with deliberation and circumspection. He has studied Boccaccio and Petrarch and many men of old, so that his vocabulary shall be full, and his grammar as pure and flexible as the genius of the language will permit. He purposes to fetch from their hidingplaces Italian words long unused, that he shall be at no’loss for means to make plain the most delicate distinctions of meaning. He intends that his thoughts, which shall be gathered from all intellectual Europe, shall have fit words to house them.

At the time of his first novels, d’Annunzio turned to Paris, the capital of the Latin world, as to his natural school. In Paris, men of letters (let us except a number of gallant young gentlemen disdainful of readers) begin by copying and imitation, that they may acquire the mechanical parts of their craft. They study Stendhal, Flaubert, de Maupassant ; they contemplate a chapter, they brood over a soliloquy, they grow lean over a dialogue. They learn how the master marshals his ideas, how he winds up to his climax, what tricks and devices he employs to take his reader prisoner. From time to time voices protestant are raised, crying out against the sacrifice of innocent originality. But the band of the lettered marches on. Why should they forego knowledge gathered together with great pains ? Shall a young man turn against the dictionary ?

In Paris d’Annunzio found a number of well-established methods for writing a novel. Some of these methods have had a powerful influence upon him ; therefore it may be worth while to remind ourselves of them, in order that we may the better judge his capacity for original work and for faithful imitation.

The first method is simply that of the old - fashioned novel of character and manners, and needs no description.

The second method, the familiar philoreal or philo-natural, hardly may be said to be a method for writing a novel; it is a mode of writing what you will ; but it has achieved its reputation in the hands of novelists. This method is supposed to require careful, painstaking, and accurate observation of real persons, places, and incidents ; but in truth it lets this duty sit very lightly on its shoulders, and commonly consists in descriptions, minute, elaborate, prolix. It pretends to be an apotheosis of fact; it is a verbal ritual. it has been used by many a man unconscious of schools. In practice it is the most efficacious means of causing the illusion of reality within the reach of common men. By half a dozen pages of deliberate and exact enumeration of outward parts, a man may frequently produce as vivid and memory-haunting a picture as a poet does with a metaphor or an epithet. M. Zola, by virtue of his vigor, his zeal, and his fecundity, has won popular renown as leader of this school.

The third method is the psychological. It consists in the delineation in detail of thoughts and feelings instead of actions, the inward and unseen in place of the outward and visible. The novelist professes an intimate knowledge of the wheels, cogs, cranks of the brain, and of the airy portraiture of the mind, and he describes them with an embellishment of scientific phrase, letting the outward acts take care of themselves as best they may. The danger of this method is lest the portrayal of psychic states constitute the novel, and lest the plot and the poor little incidents squeeze in with much discomfort. Perhaps M. Bourget is the most distinguished member of this school.

The fourth mode is that of the Symbolistes. These writers are not wholly purged from all desire for self-assertion; they wish room wherein openly to display themselves, and to this end they have withdrawn apart out of the shadow of famous names. They assert that they stand for freedom from old saws ; that the philosophic doctrine of idealism upsets all theories based upon the reality of matter; that the business of art is to use the imperfect means of expression at its command to suggest and indicate ideas ; that character, action, incidents, are but symbols of ideas. They hold individuality sacred, and define it to be that which man has in himself unshared by any other, and deny the name to all that he has in common with other men. Therefore, this individuality, being but a small part, a paring, as it were, of an individual, shows maimed and unnatural. And thus they run foul of seeming opposites, the individual and the abstract; for the revered symbol is neither more nor less than an essence abstracted from the motley company of individuals, filtered and refined, which returns decked out in the haberdashery of generalities, under the baptismal name of symbol. In order to facilitate this latter process of extracting and detaching unity from multiplicity, they murmur songs of mystic sensuality, as spiritualists burn tapers of frankincense at the disentanglement of a spirit from its fellows in the upper or nether world. One of the best known of these is Maurice Maeterlinck.

There is, moreover, a doctrine that runs across these various methods, like one pattern across cloths of divers materials, which affects them all. It is that the writer shall persistently obtrude himself upon the reader. Stated in this blunt fashion, the doctrine is considered indecent; it is not acknowledged; and, in truth, these Frenchmen do not reveal their personality. It may indeed be doubted if they have any such encumbrance. In its place they have a bunch of theories tied up with the ribbon of their literary experience ; and the exhalations of it, as if it were a bunch of flowers, they suffer to transpire through their pages. These theories are not of the writer’s own making; they are the notions made popular in Paris by a number of distinguished men, of whom the most notable are Taine and Renan. The inevitable sequence of cause and effect and its attendant corollaries, vigorously asserted and reiterated by M. Taine, and the amiable irony of M. Renan, have had success with men of letters out of all proportion to their intellectual value. Their theories have influenced novels very much, and life very little. Why should the dogmas of determinism and of unskeptical skepticism affect men in a novel more obviously than they affect men in the street?

Into this world of Parisian letters, in among these literary methods, walked young d’Annunzio, sensitive, ambitious, detached from tradition, with his ten talents wrapped up in an embroidered and scented napkin, with his docile apprentice habit of mind, and straightway set himself, with passion for art and the ardor of youth, to the task of acquiring these French methods, that he should become the absolute master of his talents, and be able to put them out at the highest rate of usury. Young enough to be seduced by the blandishments of novelty, he passed over the old-fashioned way of describing character, and studied the methods of the realists, the psychologists, the symbolists. With his clear, cool head he very soon mastered their methods, and in the achievement quickened and strengthened his artistic capacities, his precision, his sense of proportion, his understanding of form. But the nurture of his art magnified and strengthened his lack of humanity. Lack of human sympathy is a common characteristic of young men who are rich in enthusiasm for the written word, the delineated line, the carving upon the cornice. Devotion to the minute refinements of art seems to leave no room in their hearts for human kindliness. The unripeness of youth, overwork, disgust with the common in human beings, help to separate them from their kind. In their weariness they forget that the great masters of art are passionately human. D’Annunzio does not wholly admit that he is a human unit, and his sentiment in this matter has made him all the more susceptible to literary influences. We find in him deep impressions from his French studies. He has levied tribute upon Zola, Bourget, and Loti.

In 1889 d’Annunzio published Il Piacere. He lacks, as we have said, strong human feelings ; he does not know the interest in life as life; he has no zeal to live, and from the scantiness and barrenness of his external world he turns to the inner world of self. M. de Vogüé has pointed out that his heroes, Sperelli, Tullio Hermil, and Georgio Aurispa, are all studies of himself. D’Annunzio does not deny this. He would argue that it would be nonsense to portray others, as we know ourselves best. Sperelli, the hero of II Piacere, is an exact portrait of himself. He is described as " the perfect type of a young Italian gentleman in the nineteenth century, the true representative of a stock of gentlemen and dainty artists, the last descendant of an intellectual race. He is saturated with art. His wonderful boyhood has been nourished upon divers profound studies. From his father he acquired a taste for artistic things, a passionate worship of beauty, a paradoxical disdain for prejudice, avidity for pleasure. His education was a living thing; it was not got out of books, but in the glare of human reality.” The result was that “ Sperelli chose, in the practice of the arts, those instruments that are difficult, exact, perfect, that cannot be put to base uses, — versification and engraving ; and he purposed strictly to follow and to renew the forms of Italian tradition, binding himself with fresh ties to the poets of the new style and to the painters who came before the Renaissance. His spirit was formal in its very essence. He valued expression more than thought. His literary essays were feats of dexterity; studies devoted to research, technique, the curious. He believed with Taine that it would be more difficult to write six beautiful lines of poetry than to win a battle. His story of an hermaphrodite was imitative, in its structure, of the story of Orpheus by Poliziano ; it had verses of exquisite delicacy, melody, and force, especially in the choruses sung by monsters of double form, — centaurs, sirens, sphinxes. His tragedy La Simona, composed in lyrical metre, was of a most curious savor. Although its rhymes obeyed the old Tuscan models, it seemed as if it had been begotten in the fancy of an Elizabethan poet by a story from the Decameron : it held something of that music, rich and strange, which is in some of Shakespeare’s minor plays.”

Il Piacere is a study of the passion of love. Sperelli’s love for Elena, and afterwards for Maria, is made the subject of an essay in the guise of a novel upon two aspects of this passion. The first is the union of mind, almost non-human as if new-born, unacquainted with life, with the fact of sex. D’Annunzio takes this fact of sex in its simplest form, and portrays its effects upon the mind in the latter’s most sequestered state, separate and apart, uninfluenced by human things, divorced from all humanity. He observes the isolated mind under the dominion of this fact, and describes it in like manner as he depicts the sea blown upon by the wind. The shifting push of emotion, the coming and going of thought, the involutions and intricacy of momentary feeling, the whirl of fantastic dreams, the swoop and dash of memory, the grasp at the absolute, the rocketlike whir of the imagination, — all the motions of the mind, like the surface of a stormy sea, toss and froth before you.

Sperelli’s love for Maria, at least in the beginning, is as lovely as a girl could wish. It may be too much akin to his passion for art, it may have in it too much of the ichor that flowed in Shelley’s veins. It is delicate, ethereal; it is the passion of a dream man for a dream maiden. It feeds on beauty “ like a worm i’ the bud.” “ But long it could not be, till that” his baser nature " pull’d the poor wretch from its melodious lay to muddy death.” Yet the book is full of poetry. We hardly remember chapters in any novel that can match in charm those that succeed the narrative of the duel. We must free ourselves from habit by an effort, and put out of our simple bourgeois minds the fact that Maria has made marriage vows to another man; and we are able to do this, for the husband has no claims upon her except from those vows, and the poetry of the episode ends long before those vows are broken.

This novel, like the others, is decorated, enameled, and lacquered with cultivation. They are all like Christmas trees laden with alien fruit, — tinsel, candles, confectionery, anything that will catch the eye. England, France, Germany, Russia, contribute. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, are called upon to give color, form, structure, sound, and dreaminess to embellish the descriptions. The twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries parade before us in long pageant, — " L’uno e l’altro Guido,” Gallucci, Memling, Bernini, Pollajuolo, Pinturicchio, Storace, Watteau, Shelley, Rameau, Bach, Gabriel Rossetti, Bizet. The charm of a woman for him is that she resembles a Madonna by Gkirlandajo, an intaglio by Niccolò Niccoli, a quatrain by Cino. His ladies are tattooed with resemblances, suggestions, proportions, similarities. The descriptions of their attractions read like an index to The Stones of Venice. He does not disdain to translate Shelley’s verse into Italian prose without quotation marks. This passion for art is d’Annunzio’s means of escaping the vulgarity of common men; it is his refuge, his cleft in the rock, whither he may betake himself, and in which he may enjoy the pleasures of intellectual content and scorn. This taste emphasizes his lack of human kindliness, and it heightens the effect of unreality. At best it limits and clips off the interest of the common reader. D’Annunzio is like Mr. Pater in his nice tastes. He has noticed that the sentences of men who write from a desire to go hand in hand with other men, from an eagerness to propagate their own beliefs, trudge and plod, swinging their clauses and parentheses like loosely strapped panniers ; that they observe regulations that should be broken, and break rules that should be kept. Therefore he girds himself like a gymnast, and with dainty mincing periods glides harmonious down the page; but his grace sometimes sinks into foppishness. He would defend himself like Lord Foppington in the play.

“ Tom. Brother, you are the prince of coxcombs.

“ Lord Foppington. I am praud to be at the head of so prevailing a party.”

But even d’Annunzio’s great skill cannot rescue him from obvious artificiality. He is like Mr. Henry James; he lives in a hothouse atmosphere of abnormal refinement, at a temperature where only creatures nurtured to a particular degree and a half Fahrenheit can survive. Sometimes one is tempted to believe that d’ Annunzio, conscious of his own inhumanity, deals with the passions in the vain hope to lay hand upon the human. He hovers like a non-human creature about humanity, he is eager to know it, he longs to become a man ; and Setebos, his god, at his supplication turns him into a new form. The changeling thinks he is become a man ; but lo ! he is only an intellectual beast.

Our judgment of d’Annunzio’s work, however, is based upon other considerations than that of the appropriate subordination of his cultivation to his story. It depends upon our theory of human conduct and our philosophy of life, upon our answers to these questions: Has the long, long Struggle to obtain new interests — interests that seem higher and nobler than the old, interests the record of which constitutes the history of civilization— been mere unsuccessful folly ? Are the chief interests in life the primary instincts ? Are we no richer than the animals, after all these toiling years of renunciation and self-denial ? Is the heritage which we share with the beasts the best that our fathers have handed down to us ? There seem to be in some corners of our world persons who answer these questions in the affirmative, saying, “ Let us drop hypocrisy, let us face facts and know ourselves, let English literature put off false traditions and deal with the realities of life,” and much more, all sparkling with brave words. Persons like Mr. George Moore, who have a profound respect for adjectives, say these instincts are primary, they are fundamental, and think that these two words, " like open sesame,” have admitted us into the cave of reality. We are unable to succumb to the hallucination. The circulation of the blood is eminently primary and fundamental, yet there was literature of good repute before it was dreamed of. For ourselves, we find the interests of life in the secondary instincts, in the thoughts, hopes, sentiments, which man has won through centuries of toil, — here a little, there a little. We find the earlier instincts interesting only as they furnish a struggle for qualities later born. We are bored and disgusted by dragons of the prime until we hear the hoofs of St. George’s horse and see St. George’s helmet glitter in the sun. The dragon is no more interesting than a cockroach, except to prove the prowess of the hero. The bucking horse may kick and curvet ; we care not, till the cowboy mount him. These poor primary instincts are mere bulls for the toreador, bears for the baiter ; they are our measures for strength, self-denial, fortitude, courage, temperance, chastity. The instinct of self-preservation is the ladder up which the soldier, the fireman, the lighthouse-keeper, lightly trip to fame. What is the primary and fundamental fear of death? With whom is it the most powerful emotion ? " O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee! ” Is it with mothers ? Ask them.

D’Annunzio, with his predilections for aristocracy, thinks that these primary instincts are of unequaled importance and interest because of their long descent. He forgets that during the last few thousand years power has been changing hands; that democracy has come upon us ; and that a virtue is judged by its value to-day, and not by that which it had in the misty past. Literature is one long story of the vain struggles of the primary instincts against the moral nature of man. From Œdipus Tyrannus to The Scarlet Letter the primary passions are defeated and ruined by duty, religion, and the moral law. The misery of broken law outlives passion and tramples on its embers. The love of Paolo and Francesca is swallowed up in their sin. It is the like in Faust. Earthly passion cannot avail against the moral powers. This network of the imagination binds a man more strongly than iron shackles. Tragedy is the conquest of passion by more potent forces. The relations of our souls, of our higher selves, to these instincts, are what absorb us. We are thrilled by the stories in which these moral laws, children of instinct, have arisen and vanquished their fathers, as the beautiful young gods overcame the Titans. If duty loses its savor, life no longer is salted. The primary passions may continue to hurl beasts at one another ; human interest is gone. Were it not for conscience, honor, loyalty, the primary instincts would never be the subject of a story. They would stay in the paddocks of physiological textbooks. “ What a piece of work is man " that be has been able to cover a fact of animal life with poetry more beautifully than Shakespeare dresses a tale from Bandello ! He has created his honor as wonderful as his love ; soldiers, like so many poets, have digged out of cruelty and slaughter this jewel of life. Where is the instinct of self-preservation here ? At Roncesvaux, when Charlemagne’s rearguard is attacked by overwhelming numbers, Roland denies Oliver’s request that he blow his horn for help, His one thought is that poets shall not sing songs to his dishonor : —

And is the belief in chastity, which has run round the world from east to west, nothing but a superstition born of fear ? Has it lasted so long only to be proved at the end a coward and a dupe ? Is this sacrifice of self mere instinctive folly in the individual ? Does he gain nothing by it ? Are the worship of the Virgin Mary, the praise of Galahad, the joys of self-denial, no more than monkish ignorance and timidity ?

We are of the opinion that l’art de la pourriture is popular because it is easily acquired. It deals with the crude, the simple, the undeveloped. It has nothing to do with the complicated, intertwined mass of relations that binds the individual to all other individuals whether he will or not. It does not try to unravel the conglomerate sum of human ties. It does not see the myriad influences that rain down upon a man from all that was before him, from all that is contemporaneous with him ; it does not know the height above him, the depth beneath, the mysteries of substance and of void. It deals with materials that offer no resistance, no difficulty, and cannot take the noble and enduring forms of persisting things. It ignores the great labors of the human mind, and the transforming effect of them upon its human habitation. This art cannot give immortality. One by one the artists who produce it drop off the tree ot living literature and are forgotten. The supreme passion of love has been told by Dante :_

Does d’Annunzio think that he would have bettered the passage ? In the great delineation of passion, vulgarity and indecency, insults to manners, the monotony of vice, are obliterated; the brutality of detail slinks off in silence.

In 1892 d’Annunzio published L’Innocente. In this novel, as M. de Vogüé has pointed out, he has directed his powers of imitation towards the great Russian novelists. But his spirit and talents are of such different sort from those of Tourgenieff, Tolstoi, and Dostoiewsky that the copy is of the outside and show. D’Annunzio’s faculties have not been able to incorporate and to assimilate anything of the real Slav; they are the same, and express themselves in the same way, in L’Innocente as in Il Piacere. We therefore pass to his most celebrated novel. Il Trionfo della Morte, published in 1894. A translation of it — that is, of as much of it as was meet for French readers — was soon after published in the Revue des Deux Mondes. This novel won the approval of M. de Vogüé, and has made Gabriele d’Annunzio a famous name throughout Europe.

The plot, if we may use an old-fashioned word to express new matter, is this : Georgio Aurispa, a young man of fortune, who leads a life of emptiness in Rome, one day meets Ippolita, the wife of another man. On this important day he has gone to hear Bach’s Passion Music in a private chapel, and there he sees the beautiful Ippolita. Bored and disgusted by coarse pleasures, he throws himself with rapture into a poetical passion for this pale-faced, charming, slender Roman woman. The story begins just before the second anniversary of their meeting in the chapel. The husband has absconded, and Ippolita lives with her family. No suggestion of a possible marriage is made, although Aurispa frequently meditates with anguish on the thought that she may forsake him. He is wholly given to examining his mind and feelings ; he follows their changes, he explains their causes, he anticipates their mutations. He picks up each sentiment delicately, like a man playing jackstraws, holds it suspended, contemplates it from this side and from that, balances it before the faceted mirror of his imagination, and then falls into a melancholy. He dandles his sentiment for her, he purrs over it, he sings to it snatches of psychical old tunes, he ministers to it, fosters it, cherishes it, weeps over it, wonders if it be growing or decreasing.

For some reasons of duty Ippolita is obliged to be away from Rome from time to time, once in Milan with her sister. Aurispa hears of her, that she is well, that she is gay. “ She laughs ! Then she can laugh, away from me; she can be gay ! All her letters are full of sorrow, of lamentation, of hopeless longing.” The English reader is taken back to that scene in The Rivals where Bob Acres tells Faulkland that he has met Miss Melville in Devonshire, and that she is very well.

“ Acres. She has been the belle and spirit of the company wherever she has been, — so lively and entertaining ! So full of wit and humor !”

“ Faulkland. There, Jack, there. Oh, by my soul! there is an innate levity in woman that nothing can overcome. What! happy, and I away !

Aurispa is peculiarly sensitive ; the bunches of nerve fibres at the base of his brain, the ganglia in his medulla oblongata, are extraordinarily alert, delicate, and powerful. Every sensation runs through them like a galloping horse ; memory echoes the beating of its hoofs, and imagination speeds it on into the future, till it multiplies, expands, and swells into a troop. Aurispa yearns to lose himself in happiness, and then droops despondent, for a sudden jog of memory reminds him that he was in more of an ecstasy when he first met Ippolita than he is today. “ Where are those delicate sensations which once I had ? Where are those exquisite and manifold pricks of melancholy, those deep and twisted pains, wherein I lost my soul as in an endless labyrinth ? ”

In the zeal of his desire for fuller, more enduring pleasure, he takes Ippolita to a lonely house beside the sea that shall be their hermitage.

Aurispa feels that there are two conditions necessary to perfect happiness : one that he should be the absolute master of Ippolita, the other that he should have unlimited independence himself. " There is upon earth but one enduring intoxication : absolute certainty in the ownership of another, — certainty fixed and unshakable.” Aurispa proposes to attain this condition. He puts his intelligence to slavish service in discovery of a method by which he shall win that larger life and perfect content of which almost all men have had visions and dreams. Long ago Buddha sought and thought to attain this condition. Long ago the Stoics devised plans to loose themselves from the knots that tie men to the common life of all. Long ago the Christians meditated a philosophy that should free them from the bonds of the flesh, that they might live in the spirit. Heedless of their experience, Aurispa endeavors to find his content in sensuality ; but once in their hermitage, he soon perceives that the new life he sought is impossible. He feels his love for Ippolita dwindle and grow thin. He must physic it quickly or it will die ; and if love fail, nothing is left but death. Sometimes he thinks of her as dead. Once dead, she will become such stuff as thoughts are made of, a part of pure idealism. “ Out from a halting and lame existence she will pass into a complete and perfect life, forsaking forever her frail and sinful body. To destroy in order to possess, — there is no other way for him who seeks the absolute in love.”

That was for Aurispa a continuing thought, but first his fancy turned for help to the religious sensuousness of his race. “ He had the gift of contemplation, interest in symbol and in allegory, the power of abstraction, an extreme sensitiveness to suggestions by sight or by word, an organic tendency to haunting visions and to hallucinations.”He lacked but faith. At that time, superstition like a wind swept over the southern part of Italy ; there were rumors of a new Messiah ; an emotional fever infected the whole country round. A day’s journey from the hermitage lay the sanctuary of Casalbordino. Once the Virgin had appeared there to a devout old man, and had granted his prayer, and to commemorate this miracle the sanctuary had been built ; and now the countryfolk swarmed to the holy place. Georgio and Ippolita go thither. All the description of this place, as a note tells us is the result of patient observation. About the sanctuary are gathered together men and women from far and near, all in a state of high exaltation. Troop upon troop, singing,

trudge over the dusty roads. These people d’Annunzio depicts with the quick eye and the patient care of an Agassiz. Monstrous heads, deformed chests, shrunken legs, club-feet, distorted hands, swollen tumors, sores of many colors, all loathsome diseases to which flesh is heir and for which d’Annunzio’s medical dictionary has names, are here set forth. “ How much morbid pathology has done for the novelist! ” he is reported to have said. Certainly its value to d’Annunzio cannot be rated too high. Aurispa and Ippolita, excited by the fanatic exaltation, fight their way into the church. There a miserable mass of huddled humanity, shrieking for grace, struggles toward the altar rail. Behind the rail, the fat, stolid-faced priests gather up the offerings. The air is filled with nauseous smells. The church is a hideous charnel-house roofing in physical disease and mental deformity. Outside, mountebanks, jugglers, gamesters, foul men and women, intercept what part of the offerings they can. The memory of this day made Aurispa and Ippolita sick, — her for human pity, him for himself ; for he became conscious that there is no power which can enthrall absolute pleasure. He had turned toward heaven to save his life, and he has proved by experience his belief in the emptiness of its grace.

With instinctive repulsion from death, he looks for escape to thought. Thought which has enslaved him may set him free. He ponders over some maxims of Zoroaster on good and evil. Away with the creeds of weakness, the evangel of impotence ! Assert the justice of injustice, the righteousness of power, the joy of creation and of destruction ! But Aurispa cannot. Nothing is left him but death. He abandons all wish for perfect union with Ippolita, yet jealousy will not suffer him to leave her alive. His love for her has turned into hate. In his thoughts it is she that hounds him to death like a personal demon. He grows supersensitive. He cannot bear the red color of underdone beef. He is ready to die of a joint, in juicy pain. He gathers together in a heap and gloats over all that he finds disagreeable and repellent in Ippolita. What was she but his creation ? “ Now, as always, she has done nothing but submit to the form and impressions that I have made. Her inner life has always been a fiction. When the influence of my suggestion is interrupted, she returns to her own nature, she becomes a woman again, the instrument of base passion. Nothing can change her, nothing can purify her.” And at last, by treachery and force, he drags her with him over a precipice to death beneath.

Such is the plot, but there is no pretense that the plot is interesting or important except as a scaffold on which to exhibit a philosophy of life. That philosophy is clearly the author’s philosophy. D’Annunzio’s novel shows in clear view and distinct outline how the whirligig of time brings about its revenges.

Bishop Berkeley made famous the simple theory of idealism, — that a man cannot go outside of the inclosure of his mind; that the material world is the handiwork of fancy, with no reality, no length, nor breadth, nor fixedness ; that the pageant of life is the march of dreams. Berkeley expected this theory to destroy materialism, skepticism, and infidelity. It did, in argument. Many a man has taken courage in this unanswerable retort to the materialist. He slings this theory, like a smooth pebble from the brook, at the Goliaths who advance with the ponderous weapons of scientific discovery.

The common idealist keeps his philosophy for his library, and walks abroad like his neighbors, subject to the rules, beliefs, and habits of common sense. But d’Annunzio, who has received and adopted a bastard scion of this idealism, is, as befits a man of leisure and of letters, more faithful to his philosophy. He has set forth his version of the theory in this novel with characteristic clearness. Aurispa looks on the world as an instrument that shall serve his pleasure. He will play upon it what tunes he can that he may enjoy the emotions and passions of life. He is separate from his family and of a private fortune. His world is small and dependent upon him. In this world Aurispa has no rival; in it there is no male thing to bid him struggle for supremacy ; it is his private property, and the right of private property is fixed as firm beyond the reach of question as the fact of personal existence. Gradually a transformation takes place ; this well-ordered and obedient world changes under the dominion of Aurispa’s thought. Little by little object and subject lose their identity ; like the thieves of the Seventh Bolge in the Inferno, they combine, unite, form but one whole. In this change the material world is swallowed up, and out from the transformation crawls the ideal world of Aurispa’s thought:—

This ideal world is Aurispa’s. It varies with his volition, for it is the aggregate of his thoughts, and they are the emanations of his will. In this dominion he stands like a degenerate Cæsar, drunk with power, frenzied with his own potent impotence. Everything is under his control, and yet there is a something imperceptible, like an invisible wall, that bars his way to perfect pleasure. He wanders all along it, touching, feeling, groping, all in vain. Think subtly as he will, he finds no breach. Yet his deepest, his only desire is to pass beyond. Perhaps life is this barrier. He will break it down, and find his absolute pleasure in death. And in exasperation of despair before this invisible obstacle he has recourse to action. In the presence of action his ideal world wrestles once more with reality, and amid the struggles Aurispa finds that the only remedy for his impotent individuality is to die. Both idealism and fact push him towards death.

If we choose to regard Aurispa as living in a real world, as a man responsible for his acts, as a member of human society, we have little to say concerning him. He is a timid prig, a voluptuous murderer, an intellectual fop, smeared with self-love, vulgar to the utmost refinement of vulgarity, cruel, morbid, a flatterer, and a liar.

For poor Ippolita we have compassion. Had she lived out of Aurispa’s world, with her alluring Italian nature she might have been charming. There is a rare feminine attractiveness about her: had she been subject to sweet influences, bad she been born to Tourgenieff, she would have been one of the delightful women of fiction. All that she does has an attendant possibility of grace, eager to become incorporate in action. Delicacy, sensitiveness, affection, fitness for the gravity and the gayety of life, hover like ministering spirits just beyond the covers of the book ; they would come down to her, but they cannot. This possibility died before its birth. Ippolita’s unborn soul, like the romantic episode in Il Piacere, makes us feel that d’Annunzio may hereafter break loose from his theories, free himself from his cigarette-smoking philosophy, smash the looking - glass in front of which he sits copying his own likeness, and start anew, able to understand the pleasures of life and prepared to share in the joys of the struggle. Surely M. de Vogüé is looking at these indications of creative ability and poetic thought, and not at accomplishment, when he hails d’ Annunzio as the leader of another Italian Renaissance. It is hope that calls forth M. de Vogüé’s praise. A national literature has never yet been built upon imitation, sensuality, and artistic frippery.

After finishing the last page of The Triumph of Death, quick as a flash we pass through many phases of emotion. In the instant of time before the book leaves our hand, our teeth set, our muscles contract, we desire to hit out from the shoulder. Our memory teems with long-forgotten physical acts, upper-cuts, left-handers, swingers, knock-outs. By some mysterious process, words that our waking mind could not recall surge up in capital letters ; all the vocabulary of Shakespearean insult rings in our ears, — base, proud, shallow, beggarly, silkstocking knave, a glass - gazing finical rogue, a coward, a pander, a cullionly barber-monger, a smooth-tongued bolting-hutch of beastliness. Our thoughts bound like wild things from prize-fights to inquisitors, from them to Iroquois, to devils. Then succeeds the feeling as of stepping on a snake, a sentiment as of a struggle between species of animals, of instinctive combat for supremacy; no sense of ultimate ends or motives, but the sudden knowledge that our gorge is rising and that we will not permit certain things. We raise no question of reason; we put aside intelligence, and say, The time is come for life to choose between you and us. The book, after leaving our hand, strikes the opposite wall and flutters to the floor. We grow calmer ; we draw up an indictment; we will try Aurispa-d’ Annunzio before a jury of English-speaking men. Call the tale. Colonel Newcome ! Adam Bede ! Baillie Jarvie! Tom Brown! Sam Weller! But nonsense ! these men are not eligible. Aurispa-d’Annunzio must be tried by a jury of his peers. By this time we have recovered our composure, and rejoice in the common things of life, — shavingbrushes, buttoned boots, cravats, counting-stools, vouchers, ledgers, newspapers. All the multitude of little things, forgiving our old discourtesy, heap coals of fire upon our heads with their glad proofs of reality. For a moment we can draw aside " the veil of familiarity ” from common life and behold the poetry there ; we bless our simple affections and our daily bread. The dear kind solid earth stands faithful and familiar under our feet. How beautiful it is!

D’Annunzio’s latest novel, Le Vergini delle Rocce, was published in 1896. In it he appears as a symbolist, and by far the most accomplished of the school. The story is not of real people, but concerns the inhabitants of some spiritual world, as if certain instantaneous ideas of men, divorced from the ideas of the instant before and of the instant after, and therefore of a weird, unnatural look, had been caught there and kept to inhabit it, and should thenceforward live after their own spiritual order, with no further relations to humanity. These figures bear no doubtful resemblance to the men and women in the pictures of Dante Rossetti and of Burne-Jones. One might fancy that a solitary maid gazing into a beryl stone would see three such strangely beautiful virgins, Massimilla, Anatolia, Violante, move their weary young limbs daintily in the crystal sphere.

The landscape is the background of an English preraphaelite painter. Here d’Annunzio’s style is in its delicate perfection. It carries these three strange and beautiful ladies along as the river that runs down to many-towered Camelot bore onward the shallop of the Lady of Shalott. It is translucent; everything mirrors in it with a delicate sensitiveness, as if it were the mind of some fairy asleep, in which nothing except what is lovely and harmonious could reflect, and as if the slightest discord, the least petty failure of grace, would wake the sleeper and end the images forever. D’Annunzio’s sentences have the quality of an incantation. This is the work of a master apprentice. But there the mastery ends. A story so far removed from life, a fairy story, must have order and law of its own, must be true to itself, or else it must move in some fairy plane parallel to human life, and never pretermit its correspondence with humanity.

Claudio, the teller of the story, is a scion of a noble Italian family, of which one Alessandro had been the most illustrious member. When the tale begins Claudio is riding over the Campagna, thinking aloud, as it were. His mind is full of speculation. What is become of Rome ?— Rome, the home of the dominant Latin race, born to rule and to bend other nations to its desires. What is the Pope ? What is the King ? Who, who will combine in himself the triune powers of passion, intellect, and poetry, and lift the Italian people back to the saddle of the world ? By severe selfdiscipline Claudio has conceived his own life as a whole, as material for art, and has succeeded to so high a degree that now he holds all his power of passion, intellect, and poetry like a drawn sword. He will embody in act the concept of his life. He reflects how the Nazarene failed, for he feared the world and knowledge, and turned from them to ignorance and the desert; how Bonaparte failed, for he had not the conception of fashioning his life as a great work of art ; and Claudio’s mind turns to his own ancestor, the untimely killed Alessandro, and ponders that he did not live and die in vain, but that his spirit still exists, ready to burst forth in some child of his race. Claudio’s duty is to marry a woman who shall bear a son, such that his passion, intellect, and poetry shall make him the redeemer of the world, and restore Rome mistress of nations. As he rides he calls upon the poets to defend the beautiful from the attacks of the gross multitude, and upon the patricians to assume their rightful place as masters of the people, to pick up the fallen whip and frighten back into its sty the Great Beast that grunts in parliament and press.

Filled with these images of his desire, Claudio goes back to his ancestral domain in southern Italy. An aged lord, at one time friend to the last Bourbons of Naples, dwells in a neighboring castle with his three virgin daughters. About this castle we find all the literary devices of Maeterlinck. “ The splendor falls on castle walls,” but it is a strange light, as of a moon that has overpowered the sun at noon. The genius of the castle is the insane mother, who wanders at will through its chambers, down the paths of its gardens, rustling in her ancient dress, with two gray attendants at her heels. She is hardly seen, but, like a principle of evil, throws a spell over all the place. In front of the palace the fountain splashes its waters in continuous jets into its basin with murmurous sounds of mysterious horror. Two sons hover about, gazing in timid fascination upon their mother, wondering when the inheritance of madness shall fall upon them. One is already doomed ; the other, with fearful consciousness, is on the verge of doom. The three daughters have each her separate virtue. Massimilla is a likeness of Santa Clara, the companion of St. Francis of Assisi. She is the spirit of the love that waits and receives. Her heart is a fruitful garden with an infinite capability for faith. Anatolia is the spirit of the love that gives. She has courage, strength, and vitality enough to comfort and support a host of the weak and timid. Violante is the tragical spirit of the power of beauty. The light of triumph and the beauty of tragedy hang over her like a veil. From among these three beautiful virgins Claudio must choose one to be the mother of him who, composed of passion, power, and poetry, shall redeem the disjointed world, straighten the crooked course of nature, and set the crown of the world again on the forehead of Rome. He chooses Anatolia, and here the book enters the realm of reality. Anatolia is a real woman; she feels the duties of womanhood, her bonds to her father, her mother, and her brothers, and in a natural and womanly way she refuses to be Claudio’s wife. There the book ends, with the promise of two more volumes. Anatolia is a living being in this strange world of fantasy, and though she is not true to the spirit of the story, she is one of the indications of d’Annunzio’s power.

The faults of the book are great. But all books are not meant for all persons. Who shall judge the merits of such a book ? The men who live in a world of action, or the men who live in a world half made of dreams ? Shakespeare has written The Tempest for both divisions, but other men must be content to choose one or the other. This book is for the latter class. Yet even for them it has great faults. The mechanical contrivances, the solitary castle, the insane mother, the three virgins, the chorus of the fountain, the iteration of thought, the repetition of phrase, are all familiar to readers of Maeterlinck. The element of the heroic, the advocacy of a patrician order, the love of Rome, the adulation of intellectual power, are discordant with the mysterious nature of the book. Claudio full of monster thoughts — of a timid Christ, of an ill - rounded Napoleon, of the world’s dominion restored to Rome — sits down to flirt with Massimilla in the attitude of a young Baudelaire. The reader feels that he has been watching a preraphaelite opera bouffe.

We cannot be without some curiosity as to what is d’Annunzio’s attitude towards his own novels. In Bourget’s Le Disciple we had a hero in very much the same tangle of psychological theory as is Aurispa. The disciple wandered far in his search for experience, for new fields and novel combinations of sentiment. His world lost all morality. There was neither right nor wrong in it, but it still remained a real world. In the preface, the only chapter in which, under the present conventionalities of novel-writing, the writer is allowed to speak in his own voice, Bourget, with Puritan earnestness, warns the young men of France to beware of the dangers which he describes, to look forward to the terrible consequences in a world in which there is neither right nor wrong, to turn back while yet they may. It seems reasonable to look to the prefaces to learn what d’Annunzio s attitude towards his own books is, and we find no consciousness in them of right and wrong, of good and evil, such as troubled Bourget. All d’Annunzio’s work is built upon a separation between humanity — beings knowing good and evil — and art.

Nevertheless, d’Annunzio has a creed. He believes in the individual, that he shall take and keep what he can ; that this is no world in which to play at altruism and to encumber ourselves with hypocrisy. He believes that power and craft have rights better than those of weakness and simplicity ; that a chosen race is entitled to all the advantages accruing from that choice; that a patrician order is no more bound to consider the lower classes than men are bound to respect the rights of beasts. He proclaims this belief, and preaches to what he regards as the patrician order his mode of obtaining from life all that it has to give. Art is his watchword, the art of life is his text. Know the beautiful ; enjoy all that is new and strange ; be not afraid of the bogies of moral law and of human tradition, — they are idols wrought by ignorant plebeians.

He finds that the main hindrance to the adoption of this creed is an uneasy sense of relativity of life. Even the patrician order entertains a suspicion that life — the noblest material for art to work in — is not of the absolute grain and texture that d’Annunzio’s theory presupposes. The individual life, wrought with greatest care, and fashioned into a shape of beauty after d’Annunzio’s model, may seem to lose all its loveliness when it is complete and the artist lies on his deathbed. And therefore, in order to obtain disciples, d’Annunzio perceives that he must persuade his patricians to accept the phenomena of life, which the senses present, as final and absolute. The main support for the theory of the relativity of life is religion. In long procession religious creeds troop down through history, and on every banner is inscribed the belief in an Absolute behind the seeming. D’Annunzio must get rid of all these foolish beliefs. He would argue,

“ They are a train of superstition, ignorance, and fear. They have failed and they will fail because they dare not face truth. What is the religious conception of the Divine love for man, and of the love of man for God ? God ’s love is a superstitious inference drawn from the love of man for God ; and man’s love of God in its turn is but a blind deduction from man’s love for woman. In the light of science man’s love for woman shrinks to an instinct. This Divine love that looks so fair, that has made heroes and sustained mystics, is mere sentimental millinery spun out of a fact of animal life. This fact is the root of the doctrine of relativity. From it has sprung religion, idealism, mysticism. Examine this fact scientifically ; see what it is, and how far, how very far, it is from justifying the inferences drawn from love, and without doubt the whole intellectual order of patricians must accept my beliefs.” Another man might say : " Suppose it be so ; suppose this animal fact be the root from which springs the blossoming tree of Divine love : this inherent power of growth dumfounds me more, makes me more uncertain of my apparent perceptions, than all the priestly explanations.

In d’ Annunzio’s idolatry of force there is a queer lack or the masculine; his voice is shrill and sounds soprano. In his morbid supersensitiveness, in his odd fantasy, there is a feminine strain ; and yet not wholly feminine. In his incongruous delineation of character there is a mingling of hopes and fears, of thoughts and feelings, that are found separate and distinct in man and woman. In all his novels there is an unnatural atmosphere, which is different from that in the books of the mere décadents. There is the presence of an intellectual and emotional condition that is neither masculine nor feminine, and yet partaking of both. There is an appeal to some elements in our nature of which theretofore we were unaware. As sometimes on a summer’s day, swimming on the buoyant waters of the ocean, we fancy that once we were native there, so in reading this book we have a vague surmise beneath our consciousness that once there was a time when the sexes had not been differentiated, and that we are in ourselves partakers of the spiritual characteristics of each ; and yet the feeling is wholly disagreeable. We feel as if we had been in the secret museum at Naples, and we are almost ready to bathe in hot lava that we shall no longer feel unclean.

We do not believe that a novel of the first rank can be made out of the materials at d’Annunzio’s command. Instead of humor he has scorn and sneer; in place of conscience he gives us swollen egotism ; for the deep affections he proffers lust. We are human, we want human beings, and he sets up fantastic puppets ; we ask for a man, and under divers aliases he puts forth himself. We grow weary of caparisoned paragraph and bedizened sentence, of clever imitation and brilliant cultivation; we demand something to satisfy our needs of religion, education, feeling ; we want bread, and he gives us a gilded stone. There are great regions of reality and romance still to be discovered by bold adventurers, but Gabriele d 'Annunzio will not find them though he stand a-tiptoe.

Henry D. Sedgwick, Jr.