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.
'I have lived several years in Rome; in that third Rome which should have represented "Love reigning by Latin blood on Latin soil," and have seen radiant on its heights the wondrous lights of a new Ideal. I have been witness to its most ignominious evolutions, to the most obscene unions that have ever desecrated a sacred place. And I have understood the symbolism hidden in that act of an Asiatic conqueror, who cast myriads of human heads in the fountains of Samarcand, when he desired to create a capital. The wise and cruel tyrant meant to signify the necessity of merciless destruction in the creation of a new order of things.
'The ship which bore the Thousand of Marsala only set sail that the art of exchange and barter should be protected and covered by the State!
'It was the epoch of the most frenzied fury of the destroyers and contractors on the site of Rome. With the storms of dust there were propagated a sort of lunacy of gain, a malignant delirium, seizing not only on the tradesman and money-lenders, and the workers in brick and mortar, but also on the elect heirs of the papal majorat, who primarily had looked with scorn and disgust on the newcomers from the windows of their palaces of travertine, indestructible under the encrustations of ages.
'The magnificent patrician races founded there, renewed and strengthened by nepotism, and the strife of opposing houses, descended and abased themselves one by one, slid down into the new mud, sank, and vanished. The illustrious riches, amassed through centuries of gorgeous pillage and Mæcenic luxury, were thrown into the whirlpool of the speculations of the Bourse.
'And around them, on these patrician lawns, where, only the previous spring, the violets had blossomed more numberless than the blades of grass, there were now mounds of lime, heaps of bricks, the wheels of stone-laden carts creaked on the turf, on the air were the oaths of the drivers, the shouts of the overseers, while every hour hastened on the brutal work which was to efface and occupy the sacred soil once dedicated to Beauty and to Dreams. There passed over Rome a blighting blizzard of barbarism, menacing all that greatness and loveliness which were without equals in the memory of the world. Even the laurels and the rose trees of the Villa Schiarra, for so many nights of so many summers hymned by their nightingales, fell destroyed, or remained in their desecration behind the gates of little gardens parcelled out to the little cockney boxes of tradesmen. The gigantic Ludovisian cypresses, those of the Aurora, those which spread the clouds of their solemn and mystic antiquity above the Olympian brows of Goethe, were now laid prone in line one after another, with all their dishonoured roots stretching towards the pallid sky, the black dishonoured roots which still seemed to hold in their immense network the web of a life greater than our own.
'Even over the box alleys of the Villa Albani, which had seemed as immortal as their Caryatides and their Hermes, there hung that shadow of a vandal's ruin. The contagion of destruction spread everywhere. In the ceaseless combat of gain, in the savage fury of avaricious greed and passions, in the disordered haste of commercial activity, every sense of common decency was forgotten, all respect for the past was trampled under foot. The struggle for gain was carried on with blind fury, with neither check nor curb. The pickaxe, the shovel, and the cunning of fraud were the weapons employed. And week after week, with incredible velocity, there arose on the violated earth the huge foolish cages of brick and mortar, pierced with square holes, surmounted with sham cornices, encrusted with shameful stucco ornaments. A kind of immense white tumour rose and spread on the wounded and bleeding side of the great Urbs and drained away its life.
'And then, day after day, at sunset, along the princely avenues of the Borghese Park, we could see in gorgeous brand-new equipages the new elect of Fortune, from whom not barber, nor tailor, nor boot-maker, had power to take away the ignoble stamp. We could see them pass and repass with the sonorous trot of their shining bay and brown horses; they were recognisable at a glance by the insolence of their pose and the awkward carriage of their rapacious and vulgar hands; and they seemed to cry aloud,—
'"We are the new rulers of Rome. Bow down to us!"
'In truth such are its rulers; such the present masters of that Rome which prophets and poets once likened to the bow of Ulysses.'
Often have I myself written similar things, but in me they have been considered exaggerations. They cannot be so considered in Gabriele D'Annunzio of Francavilla.
All