Critical Studies Part 1

Critical Studies.

by Ouida.

PREFATORY NOTE

With exception of one, that on the poems of Mr Blunt, all these essays have previously appeared in _The Fortnightly Review_, _The Nineteenth Century Review_, or the _Nuova Antologia_. The two published in _The Nuova Antologia_ were written by me in Italian. I have now turned them into English myself. The article on D'Annunzio, in the _Fortnightly_, was the first ever printed in English on a writer who is now well known to all. I do not think that he has, since it was published, created anything equal to the _Trionfo_. The character of his genius is not adapted to the theatre, to which he now chiefly devotes himself. It will be interesting to see if it can be adapted to political life, which has lately tempted him. Perhaps he may become a new Rienzi. One is greatly needed in Italy.

OUIDA.

I

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO

In the world of letters the name of Gabriele d'Annunzio is now famous.

There is no cultured society which does not know something at least of the author of the _Innocente_ and the _Trionfo_, and is not aware that, in him, one of the ablest and most delicate of living critics believes that he has seen the personification of a renascence of Latin genius.

Imprisoned as his novels were in the limits of a language which, however great its beauty, is but little known except in its own land, he has been extraordinarily fortunate in finding such sponsors in the outside world as he has obtained in M. Herelle, in Rene Doumic, and in the Vicomte de Vogue. Never has any romance been so admirably heralded as the _Trionfo_ in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and never certainly, since lyre was strung or laurels were woven, was any praise ever heard so dulcet and so lavish as that with which he, who has been called the second Chateaubriand, has welcomed and introduced the new Boccaccio.

The grace and beauty of the style of the Vicomte de Vogue, and the culture of his intelligence, have gained him in literature this name of the second Chateaubriand. They are both incontestable. But they are apt to lead his readers away from the consideration of the value of his literary judgments. He is a critic of exquisite delicacy and fineness, but also of great enthusiasms, and these enthusiasms are at times much stronger than his judgment and overpower it. What he admires he admires _toto corde_, and is apt to lose in this generous ardour his power of selection, his accuracy of apprais.e.m.e.nt.

This fact has been always conspicuous in all his writings on Pasteur, and it has been equally conspicuous in the unmeasured idolatry with which he has dipped his pen in all the honey of Hymettus to sing the praises of the man he loves. But this adoption of D'Annunzio into French literature has, with its incontestable advantages, equal penalties and disadvantages for the author; for one reader outside Italy who will read him in the original text, ten thousand will know him only in the French version, and twenty thousand will accept De Vogue's description of his works without attempting to judge those for themselves. In the French version the romances gain in certain points; their excessive detail is abridged, their crudities are softened down, their wearisome a.n.a.lyses and too frequent obscenities are omitted. The translations of M. Herelle are, as all must know, admirable in grace and elegance, but, though as perfect as translations which are guilty of continual excisions can be, they fail to render the genius of D'Annunzio as it is to be seen and felt by those who read the works in the original tongue. In the French version they are much milder, much more tempered, much less unbridled, and much less cynically nude; but they are also much less vigorous, virile, impa.s.sioned, and furiously scornful. Many fine pa.s.sages have been esteemed _longueurs_, and have been omitted altogether, and entire chapters have been sacrificed to the exigencies of taste or of s.p.a.ce.

In the French edition of the _Trionfo_, nearly the whole book, ent.i.tled _La Vita Nuova_, containing the pilgrimage to Casalbordino is omitted.

But without perusal of this marvellous reproduction of a scene of Italian fanaticism and frenzy, and of similar portions of his works, it is impossible to estimate fully the real D'Annunzio, and judge of his magnificent powers of observation and description, as well as of his incessant search for what is loathsome, his cruel exultation in his examination of physical diseases and moral leprosies.

I know not why this pilgrimage was rejected, for it is not more indecent than other portions of the book, and it is singularly true to certain phases of Italian life, in which all the Paganism bred in the blood and bone of the people is displayed, mixed with the ferocity of Christian bigotry. Let me here translate the opening of it:--

'It was a marvellous and terrible spectacle, unexpected, unlike any other a.s.semblage of men and things, composed of mixtures so diverse, cruel and strange, that it eclipsed the most dreadful visions of a nightmare. All the hideousness of the eternal idiot, all the filthiness of vice and its stupidities, all the spasms and deformities of baptized flesh, all the tears of penitence, all the laughter of license; the mania, the cupidity, the craft, the l.u.s.t, the fraud, the imbecility, the silent desperation, the sacred choruses, the howls of the possessed, the shouts of the ambulatory vendors, the clanging of the bells, the squeal of the trumpets, the lowing, the neighing, the bleating; the fires crackling under the cauldrons, the heaps of fruits and sweetmeats, the display of utensils, of stuffs, of arms, of jewels, of rosaries; the obscene capers of the dancers, the convulsions of the epileptic, the blows of the quarrelsome, the rush of flying, frightened thieves through the crowd; the supreme froth of corruption poured forth from the filthy lanes of remote cities, and showered out on to an ignorant and astounded mult.i.tude, like horseflies on the flanks of beasts, shoals of parasites descended on a compact ma.s.s incapable of defending itself, all the base temptations of brutal appet.i.tes, all the treacheries playing on simplicity and stupidity, all the charlatanisms and the effronteries bared in full daylight; all the opposing contrasts were there, boiling and effervescing, around the House of the Virgin.'

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 Vogue a.s.serts 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 Vogue, 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.'

[Footnote 1: _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1^re janvier 1895.]

Now, in this pa.s.sage there is much truth, but it is not equally true that D'Annunzio is at no time to be placed in the lower cla.s.s. 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 Vogue may pour out his scorn as he will on the _industriel_ who composed _La Bete 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 Vogue'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 repet.i.tion.

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 att.i.tudes 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 repet.i.tion; 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 surpa.s.sed Zola's indecencies, but because he is what Zola never was--a scholar and a poet. His culture is of the most varied and cla.s.sical 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 pa.s.sages 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 Vogue 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 cla.s.ses, it certainly possesses nothing of this privilege which he claims for it. It can be, on the contrary, very coa.r.s.e 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 considered forbidden. Indeed, this anxiety to paint the brothel and the madhouse as carefully and minutely as the miniaturist paints on the ivory, leads to his great defect, over-elaboration. He does not trust enough to the power of suggestion, which is so strong in a great writer over the mind of a reader. He does not remember that half a chord may fill the ear with melody, and that a hint may rouse the senses to nausea or to desire.

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 enc.u.mbers 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 a.s.similated by foreign influences, to be dominated by them, to so great an extent indeed that his style is frequently b.a.s.t.a.r.dised 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 sh.e.l.l of his violin, Clausen does not weave the canvas he uses, Bartolome 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 pa.s.s 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, pa.s.sionate, 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 _devote_, 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 foetid 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 Maupa.s.sant 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 pa.s.sion 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 Vogue 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 pa.s.sions, 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 sh.o.r.es 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 Vogue 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. .h.i.therto written by D'Annunzio, because, despite their intensity of pa.s.sion, 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 Vogue 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 const.i.tutionally feeble; who gradually pa.s.ses 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 s.e.xes congregate, and there you will see an Ippolita in all her splendid vitality and magnificent growth, and beside her, nine times out of ten, there will be a Giorgio Aurispa, small, frail, half-blind, pallid, bloodless, beardless, sickly, and prematurely decrepit.

I should myself have preferred to trace the destroying influence of sensual pa.s.sion 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 gla.s.s. 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.