Part 4

All who love Rome and loathe her modern violation must thank him from their hearts for such passages, and must mourn with him that we cannot drive out the spoilers from our desecrated temples.

This is, indeed, his greatest strength, that, whilst still a young man, he yet has the courage to resist the intellectual tendencies of his contemporaries, to refuse to worship their gods, to see and despise the falseness of those scientific pretensions which enslave the multitude in modern life. His intellect, richly stored by learning, is, in a large measure, free of prejudice. This is a great and rare distinction in a generation which more completely than any which has preceded it, is the timid slave of formula and the credulous servant of professional bigotry.

He has kept a complete mental liberty; free from the superstitions of religion, which, in this day, it is easy to be; but also free from the superstitions of science, which is far harder, and incurs far greater obloquy and opposition.

In his study on Giorgione, he says what it needs much courage to say in these days:--

'The scientific spirit has invaded the generation of the second half of our century. Struck by the surprising results of physics and calculation, men were inclined to believe for a time, that by the aid of the one or the other, they would be able to penetrate into all mysteries and solve all problems. But to this proud exaltation has now succeeded a discouragement mingled with suspicion. They say to themselves, and not without reason: "Where is this certainty that science promised us?" If ever certainty were incomplete, deprived of solid criterion, it is that offered by natural science. As for the sciences called exact, some, like geometry, repose on a tottering base of arbitrary affirmations; others, like algebra, on mere methods of reasoning, and contain as much or as little certainty as the formula of a syllogism.'

This is emphatically true; but it is a fact which is by no means recognised by all, and which is still violently denied by those fanatics whose form of bigotry is either experimental or exact science.

The mind of D'Annunzio refuses all bondage. It is a law to itself, as the mind of the great writer should be. I imagine that the opinion of him held by others, is to him of the most absolute unimportance. His teaching is always to preserve the independence of the Ego, to live without attention to formula or usage, to be, both materially and spiritually, that which we were created to be by nature.

His morality is of the most primitive kind; or rather, he has none whatever, no more than has a South-Sea islander lying in the sun under a cocoa-nut tree whilst the surf bathes his naked limbs. It would be absurd to accuse him of immorality because the indulgence of the senses is as natural and as legitimate in his estimation, as Favetta's song amongst the golden furze, or the reapers' welcome of the purple wine. Yet by a not rare anomaly, this demand for perfect freedom of the passions is accompanied by a tendency to desire tyranny in political matters. He is disposed to deify force. In one or two expressions there is an echo of Carlyle which sounds oddly and jarringly amongst the amorous liberties and artistic debaucheries of the rest; and is not worthy of a writer who has so much courage in opposing scientific pharisaism and the thraldom of the schools. He is disposed to admire what is strong simply because it is strong, forgetful that such strength is sustained and nourished by the suffering of the weak. It is true that he has lived in an atmosphere in which the verities embodied in the aspirations, abortive but always noble, of the higher efforts of revolution have been received with fear and misunderstanding. The tendencies and training of the _Codini_ are visible through the eloquence of the poet and the conclusions of the philosopher. The entire lack in him of all altruism comes from this. Mazzini must be as unintelligible to him as Tolstoi. The mass of humanity is always to him the filthy, surging, bestial multitudes of the crowd at Casalbordino. But even this absence of benevolence is better than the pitiful sycophancy of writers who are as fulsome in their flattery to Demos as to kings; is manlier than the nauseating self-worship of a Humanity at once its own pimp and pander, its own adorer and assassin.

In his scorn of the human flocks of sheep, he forgets, I admit, too entirely the justice to which the humblest unit amongst these flocks has right, but that scorn, even when misdirected, is fresh and bracing as the dash of his own Adriatic waves, when the east wind drives them hurrying on to the shingle beach. He has no fear; and he never stoops to that base flattery of his own species which is the most nauseous feature of modern politics and of modern science.

'This alone is your office,' he cries to his contemporaries, if they would resist the debasing influences of their time, 'defend the dream which is in you. Since in this day mortals no longer bring tribute of love and honour to the choristers of the Muses, defend yourselves, O poets, with all your weapons, steep the point of your rapiers in the most biting poisons. Let your satires bear such corrosive acid in them that they shall pierce to the very pith of the spine and destroy it. Brand to the very bone the stupid forehead of those fools who would mark every soul with the same label, and make every brain like another, as the heads of nails are beaten into a common likeness by the blows of the nailmaker. Let your mordant laughter reach to heaven when you hear the stablemen of the Great Beast shouting in the parliaments of the earth.... Defend the thought which they menace, defend the beauty which they outrage, defend the antique freedom of your masters and the future freedom of your disciples, against the insane assaults of drunken slaves. Despair not, though you be few in number. You have the supreme force of the world: the written word.'

The written word is indeed in his hand a scourge, a sword, a sheaf of arrows from the quiver of the divine Python Slayer.

And in no country more than in the Italy of his generation is such a scourge, such a sword, such flame-tipped arrows, needed to slay the courtiers, the usurers, the sycophants, the knaves, the brutes, the sellers of justice who fasten like leeches on her body.

This son of Italy is a great writer; a great poet. Read his works in the original text all ye who can, men and women for whom life has no secrets and truth has no terror.

He is young; the time will come, as it comes to all, when the joys of the senses will fade for him as the roses of the summer are scattered by autumn winds.

Let us hope that there will be later a second period of his creative art, in which there will be developed an original genius free of exotic influences, and untrammelled by the search for idioms and pruriencies. Genius, like the river at its source, takes the colour of the earth it springs from. It is only when it has reached its full volume, its deepest currents, that it becomes clear and reflects the sky alone.

Let us hope that such a future awaits him, and that more and more fully will he realise what he has already said in noble words:--

'Art! Here is the one faithful passion ever youthful, nay, immortal; here is the fountain of pure joy unknown to the multitude; here is the divine food which makes men like to gods. How could he have stooped to drink at other cups when he had once tasted of this?[3] How could he have bent to taste of other joys, once having known this ecstasy? How could his senses have let themselves be weakened and debased to lowest lusts when they had once been stirred to that highest sensibility which beholds the invisible, which touches the impalpable, which divines the most hidden secrets in the heart of nature?'

[Footnote 3: He is writing of Andrea Sperelli in _Il Piacere_.]

With these words, which are the greatest in meaning that he has hitherto written, I will, for the present moment, take my leave of him.

II

GEORGES DARIEN

Of all countries, France remains the land in which it is possible to tell the most truth. The nation of Montaigne and Moliere is always the first to recognise and award the title of talent to lay bare the shoulders of her community and use the scourge upon them. If at its first appearance the strange and terrible revelations contained in the work entitled _Biribi_ were met by official obstruction and attempted suppression, the book has conquered them, and has been allowed to carry the light of its torches into the dark places of military administration and oppression. In Italy, as in Germany and Austria, it would have been stopped by fine, exile, and seizure. In Russia it could never have been issued at all. In England it would have been as costly to the author as were his issues of Zola to the unhappy and martyrised Vizetelly. In France alone its pictures of the most terrible facts pass unarrested, by right of that literary liberty which the _esprit gaulois_ has always awarded, however much government and law may have been alarmed.

It has been said that the accusations contained in the works of Georges Darien are a _Retrissure a la France_, and as such should never have been made public by a patriotic writer and a ci-devant soldier. But here we merely meet again the hackneyed question whether the writer of talent is bound by patriotism or any other scruple to withhold truth, or whether he is not rather bound to disclose the truth as he believes it to be at all costs, whether to himself or to others. It is not necessary for me to say with which of these opinions I agree. The little which has been done towards any true progress of the human mind has been done by the expression of free thought, and by its fearless exposure of evils protected by the crystallisation of time, usage, and prejudice. Over the modern world which chatters of liberty, but does not anywhere possess it, or even know actually what it means, there hang, in heavy and icy weight, two ever-increasing despotisms: the scientific and the military. Of the former it is not necessary to treat in these pages; of the latter the yearly increase throughout Europe, ever since the war of 1870-71, must alarm every unbiassed thinker, bringing with it, as it does, the impoverishment of the people, the curse of youth and manhood, the endless strain of a fiscal burden, so enormous that every class groans under it, and the perpetual and diseased anxiety in which every nation lives, suspecting its neighbours, and turn by turn affronting them insolently and cringing to them obsequiously, according as it is made to feel the power of its own strength or the weakness of its own inferiority. Every syllable printed which tends to show the reality of military tyranny at this moment is valuable, and should be welcomed, however odious it may be to military authority and government; and especially valuable when it comes from one who has passed through the scenes which he depicts, and draws, not from imagination, but from memory.

Georges Darien has been the man whom he describes; treated as the worst of criminals, though wholly guiltless of breaking any criminal law. Georges Darien in using the first person, both in _Biribi_ and in _Bas les Coeurs_, is but writing portions of his own autobiography; he was a boy of ten, like his young hero in the latter book, and a volunteer like the gunner of the second class in the 41st battery of artillery in the former work, and to this fact there are owing that directness, simplicity, and virility which are the distinguishing characteristics of both these volumes. They are alive with life. The reader may resent them, detest them, dread them and their revelations; but he must be impressed by them; he must receive from their perusal that thrill which can only come from reality. They are saturated with the tears of blood of a strong man who feels his own impotency to rouse his generation and to change humanity; who knows that his voice is the voice of the prophet crying in the wilderness, and echoing over a desert of dead bones and drifting sand. There are few greater pangs than to see the truth and know it, and feel that the salvation of others lies in it, and to tell it in vain to deaf ears, and offer its water of life to lips closed by pride and cruelty and folly.

The name _Biribi_ sounds too light for such a subject; it sounds like a joke; but the joke is grim indeed, grim as the dance of skeletons round a gallows-tree. In actual fact _Biribi_ is the nickname given by French and native soldiers in Algeria to the punishment-battalions of the Franco-African army; a slangy _petit nom_ given in jest to one of the most awful hells that earth holds. The tortures which are suffered in every army, in the best army, and in the time of greatest peace, can scarcely ever be over-rated; and they are not the less, but the more terrible, because almost always endured in silence and ignored by authority. Now and then a voice is raised from the ranks, occasionally, very rarely, some punishment, or injustice, more brutal than usual, comes to light, and rouses public indignation. _Biribi_ is one of those rare utterances rising from the sealed pits, in which uncared-for and unpitied lives are beaten into senseless pulp of bruised and bleeding flesh.

There is great originality in the literary talent of Georges Darien. His style is all his own. His manner of relation resembles no other. He has nothing of the modern school, except its hopelessness; he is strong, intense, virile, rough; he seeks no ornament, he strives for no effect; he writes as he feels, boldly, passionately, with that eloquence which is the offspring of simplicity and of veracity, and that potency which comes from wide knowledge of literatures and of mankind. Belonging by birth to the _bourgeoisie_, son of a Catholic father and a Calvinist mother, his early years were embittered by religious strife. He has later on travelled much; he has known the lowest classes and the hardest ways of life; he is still young in years, but old in the most varied experiences; and he has, certainly, uncommon powers, which have as yet not been duly recognised, for he offends the prejudices and vested interests of his generation, and even in France prejudice and vested interests are strong and close many channels.

He disdains, moreover, to appeal to that large class of readers who require a book, cast in the form of a story, to possess a story. Like the famous knife-grinder he has none to tell, if by story we understand, as most people do, a love-tale in some one of its forms. _Biribi_ is the stern and terrible narrative of the career of an _insoumis_; _Bas les Coeurs_ is the simple, domestic record of a boy's recollections of the _Annee Terrible_. In neither is there any hint or fragment of romance. This fact at once limits his public to the restricted number who appreciate the skill which can afford to dispense with the elements of romance, and to rely solely on its own power of description and analysis of character. In this respect for literary excellence and harmonious treatment I should place _Bas les Coeurs_ before _Biribi_. The relation of events at Versailles, before and after the Prussian occupation, as seen from the point of view of a family of the town, is told with such perfect naturalness that the reader follows it with the deepest interest, and remains fascinated by the admirable manner in which the most tragic and momentous events of history are reflected in the mind of a boy of ten years old.

The tranquillity and precision of his use of the etching-needle, with which he describes the daily life and street scenes in Versailles, contrasts curiously with the hot colour and broad charcoal marks with which he portrays the tortures of the punishment-battalions in Africa.

This testifies to the flexibility of Darien's talent, since nothing can be more different to the impetuous and turgid violence of _Biribi_ than the restrained and delicate irony of _Bas les Coeurs_: the one is a battle-piece of Vereschagin, crowded with begrimed and panting figures, in which the dumb canvas seems to shriek with war and smoke with blood; the other is a cabinet picture of Meissonier's, finished, polished, small in measurement, illimitable in suggestion, fine as the point of a needle, cruel as the fork of a snake's tongue. For, undoubtedly, Darien is cruel; but he is cruel from the impotent rage which is in him, the powerless sorrow and scorn which his country, his generation, his fellow mortals, his vision of things as they are, awaken in his memory and in his desires.

The apathy and sheepishness of the general multitude fill him with wrath; he longs to pull down on the world its temple, like Samson, regardless of the fall of the column and the roof on himself. No one who loves received doctrines, crystallised commonplaces, undisputed formulae, should open these books. Such persons will only see in them blasphemies against their honoured gods; for this author is not suited to the smug self-complacency of Philistinism, 'sanding its sugar and praising its Lord.'

To represent war as it is done in the terrible pages of _La Debacle_, or in the heartrending sketch of the _Attaque du Moulin_, is not difficult to the novelist who has power and knowledge. To represent the effects of war on entirely uninteresting and commonplace persons, and yet keep the attention of the reader riveted to what is passing in one ordinary household during a frightful national calamity, is a far more difficult feat; especially when all the sympathies of the reader which would be easily roused by noble sentiments in the sufferers are voluntarily alienated, and the only motives and feelings depicted are sordid, egotistic, and miserable, except in the young narrator, whose childish intelligence is so slowly awakened to the baseness of those around him, but whose naturally honest and patriotic little soul burns and thrills with shame when once it becomes conscious of the meanness and cowardice of his family and of his neighbours. The highest literary faculty seems to me to show itself in the completeness with which the childlikeness of the young observer is retained, the vague apprehension, the slowly awakening comprehension, the gradually dawning horror with which the events around him impress themselves on a mind remaining instinctively loyal and just in the midst of corrupt and unworthy examples.

Take this as an example of its style:--

'Shouts are heard afar off in the woods.

'"Ah, my poor child!" says my aunt, weeping, "what a hideous thing is war!"

'She looks very feeble, very worn, my poor great-aunt Moreau. The sight of her thin face, her skeleton-like hands, moves me painfully. She sees this.

'"At my age," she murmurs, "these events, my dear, are hard to bear."

'However, she assures me the Germans are not very cruel. The Captain in command of those billeted on her, despite his rude exterior, is not uncivil.

'At that moment, indeed, this officer returns with his men; his heels ring on the bricks of the ante-chamber. He opens the door of the little room where we are sitting.

'"Do not be disturbed, Madame," he says, addressing my aunt, "on account of the firing you may have heard. There is nothing of any consequence. A wood-cutter, in whose hut we found arms, and whom we have shot: nothing more."

'He salutes and retires. My aunt shudders. She turns white, her eyes close, her head falls back against the chair. She is faint. I call her maid, who runs to my summons, with the cook and the servant just come to fetch me. The three women try and revive her. She remains so weak when again conscious, that they carry her to her chamber. She is grieved to have fainted.

'"When my dear little Jean came to see me," she murmurs! "It was the thought of that poor wood-cutter--"

'She trembles like a leaf as I leave her.

'Germaine, who has come from my grandfather's to fetch me, asks me to wait a moment; she has a message for the Prussian Captain from my grandfather. The officer is walking up and down, smoking, under the lime-trees. I hear his guttural voice as he answers, "Tell your master that I shall expect him here." What can this mean? When I reach my grandfather's house I rush to the dining-room to question the old man, but Germaine catches hold of my arm.

'"You must not disturb Monsieur. He is engaged with someone."

'Through the door, which I hold half-opened, I have seen that someone. He is a person dressed like a peasant, who looks not like a peasant, nevertheless. His large hat is worn too gracefully; his ragged blue blouse is too old to accord with his proud and delicate features. Is he an officer of franc-tireurs? A French spy, perhaps? Is my grandfather giving or receiving information? Is he not, as I hope, planning to surprise the Prussians? I question Germaine. She is astonished at my anxiety.

'"That man? He wanted to see the Mayor, and as the Germans have put the Mayor in prison, he was brought here. Do not trouble yourself about him, Monsieur Jean."

'I hear a sound of closing doors. It is, of course, the stranger going away.

'My grandfather joins me.

'"Well, how is your aunt?"

'I tell him what happened, the story of the wood-cutter and its effect upon her.

'"Ah! what a pity!--humph, humph!--I will go and see her. Germaine, my cloak."

'"Shall I come with you, grandpapa?"

'"No, no; not worth while. I shall be back in half an hour."

'In twenty minutes' time he returns.

'"You see I am as good as my word. I made haste, eh?"

'"Is my aunt better?"

'"Your aunt? Yes--no--that is, yes, much better."

'"Jean," he says to me after dinner, "you were to go back the day after to-morrow, but as I must go on business to Versailles in the morning early, I will take you with me. Does it disappoint you, eh?"

'"A little, yes."

'"Bah! you shall make up for it another time. You shall come again soon for several days, and send your lessons to the deuce."

'I laugh. I think I must have been mistaken. The man whom I saw must have been really a peasant. My grandsire could not be so gay if there were to be fighting at Maussy this evening. However, before going to bed I look out over the country, and when I lie down I strain my ear to catch a sound. All night long I cannot sleep; I can only listen. All at once a hand touches my elbow. I start up, screaming. Germaine laughs.

'"What is the matter, Monsieur Jean? Were you dreaming?"

'I stare round me in amaze. It is broad day.

'"Make haste and get up; the chocolate is ready; master is waiting."

'Half an hour later we leave the house. We are at the end of the street which opens on to the Versailles road, when a platoon of Prussian soldiers, with bayonets fixed, appears upon that road. My grandfather seizes me brutally and throws me down under a fence behind a hedge. I look through the branches. The Prussians pass at quick march. Amidst them marches a man, with his hands tied behind his back. I see a broad-leafed hat, a pale proud face, an old blue blouse. It is the man of yesterday. I know him at a glance.

'"Grandfather, who is that?"

'"Eh! Who? who? Some vagabond a Prussian patrol has picked up out of some ditch. The Prussians are very severe for--for--for wayfarers. It is better not to be seen in these affairs--it is better not to be mixed up--I mean--"