Paradoxical as it may appear to say so, I think his wide culture has injured his style. I think he would have been a greater Italian writer if he had known no language save Italian and, of course, Latin and Greek.
The extreme culture and over-variety of modern education tends to destroy, or at least disturb, originality; it encumbers the mind under too vast a load of riches, it enlightens, but it also obstructs; if Shakespeare had been less ignorant he might, perhaps, have been also less great.
Foreign influence is not beneficial to the Italian. It makes him unreal; it makes him lose his charming natural grace and abandonment, it renders him artificial; he never really becomes what is implied by the word cosmopolitan (such a cosmopolitan as Lord Dufferin or the late Prince Lobanoff), and he does lose much of his own national qualities. It is very rarely that an Italian can, like the late lamented scholar Enrico Nencioni, steep his mind deeply in all the riches of foreign literature without in the least losing his own Italian individuality. D'Annunzio, on the contrary, allows himself to be absorbed and assimilated by foreign influences, to be dominated by them, to so great an extent indeed that his style is frequently bastardised by them, and many of his sentences read as though they were translations from foreign sources. He claims to have greatly embellished and amplified the Italian language; he has certainly rendered it more colloquial and more copious; but he has often grafted foreign idioms upon it, and he has perhaps robbed it of some of its dignity and grace. He considers that the artist should always remodel the instrument he uses; but the figure will not hold good in other arts, for Sarasate does not carve the shell of his violin, Clausen does not weave the canvas he uses, Bartolomé does not blast the marble out of the hill-side. The writer should use the language he writes in as it comes pure from its natural springs; he will but contaminate it if he pour into it alien streams.
D'Annunzio would probably protest that the patchwork effects of the foreign languages he introduces, do but correctly represent the mixture of tongues common in our days in those phases of life which pass under the generic name of society. In such protest there would, no doubt, be truth; but it could only apply to certain social scenes in the Piacere, and my objection is less to the introduction of foreign phrases directly than it is to the foreign complexion and contour which he so frequently gives to his own language; a fault never before him known in an Italian writer. Many of his phrases are of foreign construction. But he is not on that account a plagiarist, as has been said of him; he is never a plagiarist, but is a too highly educated, and a too sensitively susceptible, mental organisation. The mean charge of plagiarism is one so easy to bring and so difficult to refute, that it is cast by envy and inferiority at all those whose genius, like that of D'Annunzio, is proud, passionate, and defiant of criticism. That which has in it the elements of true greatness has always these pellets of mud thrown at it. In some ways, on the contrary, he seems to seek an exaggeration of original idiosyncrasies, and to no writer would conscious imitation be more odious or impossible.
There is unhappily, in all his works, an absolute absence of wit, of mirth, of humour. There is not a laugh, scarcely even a smile, in any of his pages; if we except the cruel laughter of a lover at his mistress's physical defects. Over all his genius there broods that 'green melancholy,' which is the too-common hue of modern thought, that dull greyness of death which has spread from the laboratories of science over all the worlds of literature. Not only is no joyous laugh ever heard, there is not even the indulgent smile which relieves melancholy and bitterness in many writers whose views of life are gloomy. Nowhere is this more seen than in the almost savage cruelty with which the poor old dévote, Gioconda Aurispa, is drawn; the merciless description of her senile love of sweetmeats, of her disappointment when her nephew forgets to bring them, of her expectant eyes, 'almost impudent in their entreaty,' of her short breath with its fœtid odour, of her tottering steps amongst her flowers; all is cruel, merciless, without a grain of pity or of sympathy to redeem its biting satire of so feeble and harmless a creature.
Compare with such treatment the exquisite tenderness of Pierre Loti's Tante Claire, think with how gentle a respect Thackeray drew the death of an old man, remember the touch with which Maupassant makes us akin even to poor Boule de Suiffe. Tragedy is not necessarily cruelty, nor accuracy necessarily brutality. Shakespeare makes us indignant for Lear and sharers in his sorrows; but D'Annunzio would concentrate our thoughts only on his ridiculous thin hair blown by the winter winds, the tremor of his toothless jaws, and palsy of his bent, unsteady limbs. In the highest art there is always pity because there is always comprehension. D'Annunzio has as yet no more pity than the demonstrator in a physiological amphitheatre. But it is not impossible that such pity may come to him later on, for pity is rarely a passion of youth; it is usually the fruit of reflection, comparison, realisation of what is alien and impersonal. That sense which he already feels of the inner life of all things cannot leave him for ever insensible to the sufferings of that life.
At present he is absorbed in the sensual ecstasies of early manhood, and the fumes of voluptuous delights obscure his sight to much else which surrounds him, and which finds him callous and negligent of it. De Vogüé sees in him the leader of a new school, but there is as yet little that is new in his manner of judging life. It is the manner of Le Disciple, though touched with warmer tones, and placed in richer landscapes, and vibrating with stronger passions, because Italian in scene and in temper.
If ever there be a true Latin renascence, which is scarcely to be hoped for, it will come, not from a writer who is saturated with French, Russian, German, and English influences, but one who has the Latin genius, the Latin temper, unalloyed. But does this now exist anywhere? If it do, it is in remote mountain sides and by lonely lake waters, not in clubhouses and on racecourses. Such a writer will more probably come, if he come at all, from the extreme south than from the north, perhaps even from the great and almost virgin island of the west. In the dense cork woods and on the desolate shores of Sardinia, a Salvator Rosa of literature might well be begotten, for there is also there a companion whom the Muses fear not—Misery.
I imagine that De Vogüé does not know much of the popular songs of the south and the west of Italy. I venture to think that in those stornelli, cantileni rispetti, and the rest, there is more of the genuine spirit of the Italian soil than in any of the works hitherto written by D'Annunzio, because, despite their intensity of passion, they are full of a pure poetical beauty and an idealised tenderness, which in his pictures of love are absent.
Even in the views which De Vogüé holds of the characters of these romances, there seems frequently a curious misconstruction of their salient points. For instance, he sees in the tragedy, with which the Trionfo closes, the fact that Aurispa loved so intensely that he felt impelled to destroy what he possessed, as the only absolute means of fully possessing it. But I do not see this. I see in Aurispa a young man habitually self-indulgent and constitutionally feeble; who gradually passes from frantic adoration of a woman possessed, to the nausea which so frequently follows on such possession. The proof of this lies in the cruel cynical criticism with which he discovers and enumerates her physical and mental defects, with which he views the deformity of her feet as they push the warm sand of the beach to and fro, and with which he realises the growing disgust which she awakes in him physically and morally. He feels that he can neither live with her, nor live without her; that she will be his destroyer in one way or the other; it is in a frenzy of hatred and of impotence that he seizes her in his last embrace, and plunges with her over the cliff, into the starlit depths of the sea below. To ignore this is to miss the whole meaning of the final act, and the absolute veracity of the whole work.
I have seen such physical jealousy in the man of feeble health of the vigorous strength of the woman whom he loved, and there is no form of jealousy more cruel or more incurable, and it is likely to become frequent in modern life, which develops the physical strength and social liberties of the female to so vast an extent. This is a painful fact, but it is one which cannot be disputed. Go wherever a crowd of both sexes congregate, and there