What strength is here? What admirable choice of descriptive phrase, and truth of design, as in a Callot or Hogarth! what sense conveyed of press, of haste, of noise, of confusion, of stench, of uproar! We live in this crowd as we read.
De Vogüé asserts that the indecency of D'Annunzio is never 'polisonne ou grivoise'; that it is never vulgar, although it is unbridled. He admits the preference for the unclean, which almost amounts, indeed, to an hallucination, but he urges that in D'Annunzio it is always redeemed by art.
'A Rabelais, a Boccaccio, a Loti, or a D'Annunzio, give expression to a certain temperament, with the artistic resources which that temperament imposes on them,' writes De Vogüé, in his celebrated criticism,[1] 'they have nothing in common with tradesmen, who painfully produce the filth demanded by a publisher and a certain public. An abyss separates the former from the latter writers. This difference between them which our judgment perceives, we do not show by critical demonstration; our taste is conscious of it as our eyes distinguish a flower, venomous perhaps, but natural, from an artificial flower coloured by poisonous dyes.'
Now, in this passage there is much truth, but it is not equally true that D'Annunzio is at no time to be placed in the lower class. There is too frequently in his indecency a strain, an effort, a mannerism, an extravagance, sought, and unnecessary. The reader, if he desires to understand what I mean by this, can turn to page 320 in the Trionfo, or to Chapter X., in the Piacere (Italian version), in which there are ingenuities of indecency introduced which have no relation whatever to the narrative, nor any obligation to appear.
What is, I think, more offensive to taste, and more injurious to art than any sensual excess in description, is mere nastiness, mere filth; and of this D'Annunzio is as guilty as Zola is, and as Zola has been, always.
De Vogüé may pour out his scorn as he will on the industriel who composed La Bête Humaine, and may cover with the roses and lilies of his exquisite garlands of praise the creator of the Trionfo, the fact remains that the Satyr shows his cloven hoof as much in one as in the other; and the motives which move either of the writers we have no right to condemn or to appraise, for the entrance into personal motive is surely an intrusion which should never be attempted.
We may, nevertheless, suggest as probable that, however dissimilar be their atmosphere and circumstances, both Zola and D'Annunzio have been moved to study chiefly what is called immoral, and prurient, by a sincere desire to reach to the very depths of human nature, to shrink from no investigation, to deny no evidence, and to protest against the hypocrisy with which literary art has so frequently covered its eyes and turned away from the truth. 'Let us study life alone,' says D'Annunzio, as Zola said it; and if he seek life in its corruption, coming upon the corpse of putrid pleasure as the gay riders in the Campo Santo of Pisa check their startled steeds before the open biers, he does no more, and no less, offend art than Zola offends it in Nana.
Indeed, so little is De Vogüé's statement in this matter justified, that almost every Italian who has read D'Annunzio's works will, in speaking of him, regret his incessant recurrence to obscenity. Not from prudery, for Italians are never prudes, but from an artistic sense, that this perpetually intruded indecency is an error in taste, and becomes quite as tiresome as any other form of perpetual repetition.
The most conspicuous error of modern literature is, beyond doubt, its verbiage. It has completely forgotten the great canon of 'Ars est celare artem'; the supreme ability of conveying immeasurable suggestion in a mere word, in concentrating all the music of the soul in one brief note. All the arts err at this epoch in the same manner; literature has the common malady; it is prolix. The indecencies of D'Annunzio, like his other descriptions, are prolix; and the prolixity is not redeemed by the indecency, nor the indecency by the prolixity.
This tendency of redundancy is not his fault alone; it is that of his time. The enormous canvases and numerous figures of modern paintings, the crowded groups and tortured attitudes of modern sculpture, the elaborate scenic effects, and mechanical appliances, and endless acts, of modern opera and drama, are all forms of the same malady of repetition; of ignorance of how, and when, to break the laurel bough before it withers; of lack of skill to master the subtleties of concentration and suggestion. The descriptions of the modern writer are frequently mere inventories; they are painfully minute; they are like a mosaic, in which millions of little cubes are grouped to make a whole. As before a modern painting we are often unimpressed by the whole, but struck by the dexterity of the brush-work, so in modern literature we are little interested in the conception, but allured by the dexterity of the treatment. Too frequently, unappily, this multiplicity of words covers a sad poverty of ideas. But in D'Annunzio's works there is not a page without ideas; ideas which may displease or may disgust the reader at times, but which are, nevertheless, always worthy to arrest attention, even when they are only studies of depravity.
D'Annunzio is a greater writer than Zola, not because he has emulated or surpassed Zola's indecencies, but because he is what Zola never was—a scholar and a poet. His culture is of the most varied and classical kind, profound as well as brilliant; and his poetic powers were shown in his sonnets and lyrics before he wrote his romances. Zola is no scholar, and is not, either in temperament or expression, a poet. It would be impossible to conceive him creating such a poem as the Villa Chigi or the Riccordi di Ripetta of D'Annunzio. There are passages in Zola's works, notably in La Terre, which are, I think, as great as it is possible for prose to be, but they are never touched by any poetry of phrase or feeling.
Also, when De Vogüé states that the indecency of D'Annunzio is not indecency because the Italian language is never indecent, and alleges that what would be insupportable in any other tongue is possible in Italian, because Italian enjoys the privilege which pertained to its mother, Latin, i.e., to say with grace and impunity what in any other tongue would disgust the hearer, he says what is absolutely untrue; and one can only wonder if he knows anything of the Italian of the streets, of the fields, of the wine-houses, of the popular theatres. In this affirmation, as in others, he has imagined what he says to be the fact, and founded on the fabrications of his imagination a positive statement. It is a frequent habit with him, and makes the weakness of his arguments in many instances, on other themes than this.
We know that Italian is heard only occasionally by him during his visits to Italy, and is then heard by him only in its polished speech. To those by whom it is heard every day, as spoken by all classes, it certainly possesses nothing of this privilege which he claims for it. It can be, on the contrary, very coarse and crude; it has none of the subtleties and graces, and delicate gradations of French: it calls a spade a spade with the rudest frankness; and its curses are of an appalling ferocity and filthiness.
Nor can it be said that D'Annunzio ever tries to give it delicacy or veiled suggestion; his language is as broad and as gross as that of Ovid or Catullus. He never allows the smallest doubt about his meaning to exist at any time; and he is most especially explicit when treating of those subjects which in modern literature are generally