I should myself have preferred to trace the destroying influence of sensual passion eating its way gradually into the health and strength of a complete masculine sanity, and of a robust masculine health, like aquafortis biting into a copper plate. Aurispa is already mentally diseased before the fateful day on which he sees Ippolita in the dusk of the chapel in Rome. He views all things animate and inanimate, human and animal, real and ideal, through that distorted medium which the mentally deformed habitually see through as through a convex and smoked glass. He is more than feeble, he is not sane. If he had not sought death on account of his mistress, he would have done so because Demetrius Aurispa had died before by his own hand; or for some other reason which in his cerebral condition would have seemed to him imperative and irresistible, as imaginary conditions do seem to those not sane.
We are told throughout the book to realise this extreme weakness, physical and moral, which ultimately drives him to destroy himself and her.
'"You love life?" he murmured, with a veiled bitterness.
'"Yes, life delights me," she answered, almost with vehemence.
'She had, in her voice, in her attitude, in all her person, a brightness of unusual joy and pleasure. She had in her whole aspect that satisfaction which the living creature only feels in those hours when life runs harmoniously in all its currents, in which there is a perfect balance in all the vital forces in accord with the favour and fairness of all surrounding circumstances. As in other similar moments, her whole being seemed to unclose in the freshness of the sea air, in the coolness of the summer evening, like one of those magnificent night-blooming flowers which only open the heart of their petals as the sun passes and sets.'
This is one of the innumerable beautiful images in which D'Annunzio excels, and nothing can surely be finer of its kind than the whole passage which I have quoted. But it clearly proves, especially if compared with its context, that the passion which Aurispa once felt for her had now become a furious envy of her more abounding life, of her perennial and indestructible capacity of enjoyment.
And that night, indeed, he kills her, not from excess of love, but from envy of her exultant and exuberant vitality and hatred of its contrast to his own impotence; from the sense, as I have said, that he could neither live with her nor without her. In this, D'Annunzio has linked cause and effect with excellent precision. Every minutia of feeling described is correctly described, and such feeling is made to arise from a natural source, precisely as dislike follows on satiety in real life. But very frequently there is no such natural connection in his treatment of circumstance and character.
The Trionfo is admirably balanced from its opening to its closing pages; and the tragedy on the Pincio, with which the work opens, fittingly and perfectly strikes the keynote of the whole, and the motif of the opera is suggested in the overture. But in the other romances there is too often a want of unison between the action described and its motives or sources. There is, at times, even an absolute lack of any rational cause at all; so that, in some degree, all his characters have in them more or less of the irresponsibility and unconnectedness of the insane. He leaves too much unexplained; too many actions motiveless; too many portraits floating indistinct like the night and river studies of Whistler. It is curious that this vagueness, this uncertainty and obscurity, should exist in one who is on the other hand so frequently and wearisomely minute in microscopic details. He constantly calls on us to believe what he gives us no data for believing. Even in the Trionfo he constantly introduces persons and incidents having no connection with the narrative. The whole family of Giorgio, the whole action passing at Guardiagrele, so elaborately painted, lead to nothing; we neither see nor hear of them again; neither they nor Guardiagrele ever enter his pages any more; and the momentous scene with Giorgio's father leads to nothing, but ends in a blind alley. Now this is a great fault in composition, and one which disappoints and irritates the reader. Of Demetrius Aurispa, again, much is made, but nothing is explained or continued; and his long exposition of one of Tennyson's poems is as unnecessary as the long disquisition upon Wagner further on in the book.
D'Annunzio is so profoundly engrossed in the psychology of his characters, that he frequently forgets to make their antecedents and actions consistent or credible. For instance, few women have been drawn in fiction more lovable, more real, more refined, more profoundly interesting, or more truly feminine, than Giuliana Hermil, in the Innocente. There is nothing in her character or in her circumstances which can render it the least probable to us that such a woman as she is described to be, would have been led into the half-unconscious sensual impulse which makes her unfaithful to her conjugal vows without the smallest excuse of passion or temptation. Nor is it conceivable for an instant that Tullio Hermil, on hearing her confession of this inconsapevole adultery, would serenely submit to remain in ignorance of the name of this lover of an hour, merely suspecting who it was from an inscription found in a novel, and would merely answer with gentle irony to her apology that the soul had had no share in her undoing! 'Povera anima!' he murmurs with an indulgent smile!
I will not say that this is impossible, for nothing is so in the relations of the sexes; but it is certainly improbable and incongruous, since Giuliana is throughout described as the gentlest, most timid, and, despite the infidelity in which we are asked to believe, the purest of her sex, submissive to desertion as Griselda, and incapable of an impure thought. It is contrary to all truth to human nature to make such a woman err in so common, stupid, and unintelligible a manner, and to make Tullio Hermil continue under such circumstances to live in the same house with her until the time of her delivery.
D'Annunzio has also a total lack of perception when the ridiculous mars the pathetic. This is a very common defect in his countrymen, and is one frequently traceable to a want of the humorous faculty. There is something ridiculous, which goes far to spoil all which is intended to be tragic in the motive or action of the Innocente, in the details accompanying and explaining its culminating act. The idea of this act is fine, and the hatred of the man for the child is natural, whilst the conception and carrying out of the semi-crime are subtle and original. But the filthy description of the infant (almost identical with that of the new-born babe in Zola's Joie de Vivre) and the perpetual references to its swaddling clothes, and the tedious profusion of details with which the subject is elaborated, destroy in the mind of the reader all sense of pity for the victim, and all blame for the act which sends it to its grave. One feels that the little squalling, dribbling, shapeless creature, with its scabby head and cat-like miawling, is much better destroyed, and this is not the sensation which the author desires to arouse; he would wish us to feel at once horror at, and compassion for, Tullio Hermil, but we can feel nothing except a vague contempt for this helpless young man. Had the semi-murder of it followed immediately on its birth, or had it been found by him after absence a fair two-year-old child, with all the rosebud loveliness of that age, this bathos would have been avoided; and the stealthy sin of its effacement would have carried in it the force of a powerful tragedy undiminished, as it actually is, by gross and comic images, which may be realism but are none the less bathos. It is perfectly natural that Tullio Hermil's abhorrence of this spurious offspring should grow with every day until the desire to destroy it becomes at last an over-mastering impulse; but to make this act tragic, and to awaken that sympathy for the victim which all true tragedy excites, the latter should be so described that the heart of the reader should bleed for it when exposed to the icy air which kills it, and that its martyred infancy should seem fitly lamented by those echoes of the distant Novena, which at the supreme moment float through all the silent house.
The Innocente has many passages in its pages of perfect beauty like this episode of the Novena; its defects are due to its author's incapacity to perceive where the ludicrous damages the pathetic and destroys the terrible. The writer's artistic instinct moved him to create a situation unique, and full of the keenest interest, abounding in opportunity for the analysis of temptations and emotions; and of such analysis he is a master, if too prolix in his expositions of it. But a want of the perception which warns us off the line of demarcation dividing the dramatic from the grotesque, has allowed him to pass this line, and merge the dramatic