Part 22

So with the other finest passages of the story, notably the summer day spent by the lovers in a long dusty dreadful pilgrimage to a famous local miracle-working shrine, where they mingle with the multitude of the stricken, the deformed, the hideous, the barely human, and from which they return, disgusted and appalled, to plunge deeper into consoling but too temporary transports; notably also the incident, masterly in every touch, of the little drowned contadino, the whole scene of the small starved dead child on the beach, in all the beauty of light and air and view, with the effusions and vociferations and grimnesses round him, the sights and sounds of the quasi-barbaric life that have the relief of antique rites portrayed on old tombs and urns, that quality and dignity of looming larger which a great feeling on the painter’s part ever gives to small things. With this ampler truth the last page of the book is above all invested, the description of the supreme moment—for some time previous creeping nearer and nearer—at which the delirious protagonist beguiles his vaguely but not fully suspicious companion into coming out with him toward the edge of a dizzy place over the sea, where he suddenly grasps her for her doom and the sense of his awful intention, flashing a light back as into their monstrous past, makes her shriek for her life. She dodges him at the first betrayal, panting and trembling.

“Are you crazy?” she cried with wrath in her throat. “Are you crazy?” But as she saw him make for her afresh in silence, as she felt herself seized with still harsher violence and dragged afresh toward her danger, she understood it all in a great sinister flash which blasted her soul with terror. “No, no, Giorgio! Let me go! Let me go! Another minute—listen, listen! Just a minute! I want to say——!” She supplicated, mad with terror, getting herself free and hoping to make him wait, to put him off with pity. “A minute! Listen! I love you! Forgive me! Forgive me!” She stammered incoherent words, desperate, feeling herself overcome, losing her ground, seeing death close. “Murder!” she then yelled in her fury. And she defended herself with her nails, with her teeth, biting like a wild beast. “Murder!” she yelled, feeling herself seized by the hair, felled to the ground on the edge of the precipice, lost. The dog meanwhile barked out at the scuffle. The struggle was short and ferocious, as between implacable enemies who had been nursing to this hour in the depths of their souls an intensity of hate. And they plunged into death locked together.

The wonder-working shrine of the Abruzzi, to which they have previously made their way, is a local Lourdes, the resort from far and wide of the physically afflicted, the evocation of whose multitudinous presence, the description of whose unimaginable miseries and ecstasies, grovelling struggles and supplications, has the mark of a pictorial energy for such matters not inferior to that of Émile Zola—to the degree even that the originality of the pages in question was, if I remember rightly, rather sharply impugned in Paris. D’Annunzio’s defence, however, was easy, residing as it does in the fact that to handle any subject successfully handled by Zola (his failures are another matter) is quite inevitably to walk more or less in his footsteps, in prints so wide and deep as to leave little margin for passing round them. To which I may add that, though the judgment may appear odd, the truth and force of the young man’s few abject days at Guardiagrele, his _casa paterna_, are such as to make us wish that other such corners of life were more frequent in the author’s pages. He has the supremely interesting quality in the novelist that he _fixes_, as it were, the tone of every cluster of objects he approaches, fixes it by the consistency and intensity of his reproduction. In “The Virgins of the Rocks” we have also a _casa paterna_, and a thing, as I have indicated, of exquisite and wonderful tone; but the tone here is of poetry, the truth and the force are less measurable and less familiar, and the whole question, after all, in its refined and attenuated form, is still that of sexual pursuit, which keeps it within the writer’s too frequent limits. Giorgio Aurispa, in “Il Trionfo,” lives in communion with the spirit of an amiable and melancholy uncle who had committed suicide and made him the heir of his fortune, and one of the nephew’s most frequent and faithful loyalties is to hark back, in thought, to the horror of his first knowledge of the dead man’s act, put before us always with its accompaniment of loud southern resonance and confusion. He is in the place again, he is in the room, at Guardiagrele, of the original appalled vision.

He heard, in the stillness of the air and of his arrested soul, the small shrill of an insect in the wainscot. And the little fact sufficed to dissipate for the moment the extreme violence of his nervous tension, as the puncture of a needle suffices to empty a swollen bladder. Every particular of the terrible day came back to his memory: the news abruptly brought to Torretta di Sarsa, toward three in the afternoon, by a panting messenger who stammered and whimpered: the ride on horseback, at lightning speed, under the canicular sky and up the torrid slopes, and, during the rush, the sudden faintnesses that turned him dizzy in his saddle; then the house at home, filled with sobs, filled with a noise of doors slamming in the general scare, filled with the strumming of his own arteries; and at last his irruption into the room, the sight of the corpse, the curtains inflated and rustling, the tinkle on the wall of the little font for holy water.

This young man’s great mistake, we are told, had been his insistence on regarding love as a form of enjoyment. He would have been in a possible relation to it only if he had learned to deal with it as a form of suffering. This is the lesson brought home to the heroine of “Il Fuoco,” who suffers indeed, as it seems to us, so much more than is involved in the occasion. We ask ourselves continually why; that is we do so at first; we do so before the special force of the book takes us captive and reduces us to mere charmed absorption of its successive parts and indifference to its moral sense. Its defect is verily that it has no moral sense proportionate to the truth, the constant high style of the general picture; and this fact makes the whole thing appear given us simply because it has happened, because it was material that the author had become possessed of, and not because, in its almost journalistic “actuality,” it has any large meaning. We get the impression of a direct transfer, a “lift,” bodily, of something seen and known, something not really produced by the chemical process of art, the crucible or retort from which things emerge for a new function. Their meaning here at any rate, extracted with difficulty, would seem to be that there is an inevitable leak of ease and peace when a mistress happens to be considerably older than her lover; but even this interesting yet not unfamiliar truth loses itself in the great poetic, pathetic, psychologic ceremonial.

That matters little indeed, as I say, while we read; the two sensibilities concerned bloom, in all the Venetian glow, like wondrous water-plants, throwing out branches and flowers of which we admire the fantastic growth even while we remain, botanically speaking, bewildered. They are other sensibilities than those with which we ourselves have community—one of the main reasons of their appearing so I shall presently explain; and, besides, they are isolated, sequestrated, according to D’Annunzio’s constant view of such cases, for an exclusive, an intensified and arid development. The mistress has, abnormally, none of the protection, the alternative life, the saving sanity of other interests, ties, employments; while the hero, a young poet and dramatist with an immense consciousness of genius and fame, has for the time at least only those poor contacts with existence that the last intimacies of his contact with his friend’s person, her poor _corpo non più giovane_, as he so frequently repeats, represent for him. It is not for us, however, to contest the relation; it is in the penetrating way again in which the relation is rendered that the writer has his triumph; the way above all in which the world-weary interesting sensitive woman, with her infinite intelligence, yet with her longing for some happiness still among all her experiments untasted, and her genius at the same time for familiar misery, is marked, featured, individualised for us, and, with the strangest art in the world—one of those mysteries of which great talents alone have the trick—at once ennobled with beauty and desecrated by a process that we somehow feel to be that of exposure, to spring from some violation of a privilege. “ ‘Do with me,’ ” says the Foscarina on a certain occasion, “ ‘whatever you will’; and she smiled in her offered abjection. She belonged to him like the thing one holds in one’s fist, like the ring on one’s finger, like a glove, like a garment, like a word that may be spoken or not, like a draught that may be drunk or poured on the ground.” There are some lines describing an hour in which she has made him feel as never before “the incalculable capacity of the heart of man. And it seemed to him as he heard the beating of his own heart and divined the violence of the other beside him that he had in his ears the loud repercussion of the hammer on the hard anvil where human destiny is forged.” More than ever here the pitch of the personal drama is taken up by everything else in the scene—everything else being in fact but the immediate presence of Venice, her old faded colour and old vague harmonies, played with constantly as we might play with some rosy fretted faintly-sounding sea-shell.

It would take time to say what we play with in the silver-toned “Virgins of the Rocks,” the history of a visit paid by a transcendent young man—always pretty much the same young man—to an illustrious family whose fortunes have tragically shrunken with the expulsion of the Bourbons from the kingdom of Naples, and the three last lovely daughters of whose house are beginning to wither on the stem, undiscovered, unsought, in a dilapidated old palace, an old garden of neglected pomp, a place of fountains and colonnades, marble steps and statues, all circled with hard bright sun-scorched volcanic scenery. They are tacitly candidates for the honour of the hero’s hand, and the subject of the little tale, which deals with scarce more than a few summer days, is the manner of their presenting themselves for his admiration and his choice. I decidedly name this exquisite composition as my preferred of the series; for if its tone is thoroughly romantic the romance is yet of the happiest kind, the kind that consists in the imaginative development of observable things, things present, significant, related to us, and not in a weak false fumble for the remote and the disconnected.

It is indeed the romantic mind itself that makes the picture, and there could be no better case of the absolute artistic vision. The mere facts are soon said; the main fact, above all, of the feeble remnant of an exhausted race waiting in impotence to see itself cease to be. The father has nothing personal left but the ruins of his fine presence and of his old superstitions, a handful of silver dust; the mother, mad and under supervision, stalks about with the delusion of imperial greatness (there is a wonderful page on her parading through the gardens in her rococo palanquin, like a Byzantine empress, attended by sordid keepers, while the others are hushed into pity and awe); the two sons, hereditarily tainted, are virtually imbecile; the three daughters, candidly considered, are what we should regard in our Anglo-Saxon world as but the stuff of rather particularly dreary and shabby, quite unutterably idle old maids. Nothing, within the picture, occurs; nothing is done or, more acutely than usual, than everywhere, suffered; it is all a mere affair of the rich impression, the complexity of images projected upon the quintessential spirit of the hero, whose own report is what we have—an affair of the quality of observation, sentiment and eloquence brought to bear. It is not too much to say even that the whole thing is in the largest sense but a theme for style, style of substance as well as of form. Within this compass it blooms and quivers and shimmers with light, becomes a wonderful little walled garden of romance. The young man has a passage of extreme but respectful tenderness with each of the sisters in turn, and the general cumulative effect is scarcely impaired by the fact that “nothing comes” of any of these relations. Too little comes of anything, I think, for any very marked human analogy, inasmuch as if it is interesting to be puzzled to a certain extent by what an action, placed before us, is designed to show or to signify, so we require for this refined amusement at least the sense that some general idea _is_ represented. We must feel it present.

Therefore if making out nothing very distinct in “Le Vergini” but the pictorial idea, and yet cleaving to the preference I have expressed, I let the anomaly pass as a tribute extorted by literary art, I may seem to imply that a book may have a great interest without showing a perfect sense. The truth is undoubtedly that I am in some degree beguiled and bribed by the particularly intense expression given in these pages to the author’s esthetic faith. If he is so supremely a “case” it is because this production has so much to say for it, and says it with such a pride of confidence, with an assurance and an elegance that fairly make it the last conceivable word of such a profession. The observations recorded have their origin in the narrator’s passionate reaction against the vulgarity of the day. All the writer’s young men react; but Cantelmo, in the volume before us, reacts with the finest contempt. He is, like his brothers, a _raffiné_ conservative, believing really, so far as we understand it, only in the virtue of “race” and in the grand manner. The blighted Virgins, with all that surrounds them, are an affirmation of the grand manner—that is of the shame and scandal of what in an odious age it has been reduced to. It consists indeed of a number of different things which I may not pretend to have completely fitted together, but which are, with other elements, the sense of the supremacy of beauty, the supremacy of style and, last not least, of the personal will, manifested for the most part as a cold insolence of attitude—not manifested as anything much more edifying. What it really appears to come to is that the will is a sort of romantic ornament, the application of which, for life in the present and the future, remains awkwardly vague, though we are always to remember that it has been splendidly forged in the past. The will in short _is_ beauty, is style, is elegance, is art—especially in members of great families and possessors of large fortunes. That of the hero of “Le Vergini” has been handed down to him direct, as by a series of testamentary provisions, from a splendid young ancestor for whose memory and whose portrait he has a worship, a warrior and virtuoso of the Renaissance, the model of his spirit.

He represents for me the mysterious meaning of the power of style, not violable by any one, and least of all ever by myself in my own person.

And elsewhere:—

The sublime hands of Violante [the beauty and interest of hands play a great part, in general, in the picture], pressing out in drops the essence of the tender flowers and letting them fall bruised to the ground, performed an act which, as a symbol, corresponded perfectly to the character of my style; this being ever to extract from a thing its very last scent of life, to take from it all it could give and leave it exhausted. Was not this one of the most important offices of my art of life?

The book is a singularly rich exhibition of an inward state, the state of private poetic intercourse with things, the kind of current that in a given personal experience flows to and fro between the imagination and the world. It represents the esthetic consciousness, proud of its conquests and discoveries, and yet trying, after all, as with the vexed sense of a want, to look through other windows and eyes. It goes all lengths, as is of course indispensable on behalf of a personage constituting a case. “I firmly believe that the greatest sum of future dominion will be precisely that which shall have its base and its apex in Rome”—such being in our personage the confidence of the “Latin” spirit. Does it not really all come back to style? It was to the Latin spirit that the Renaissance was primarily vouchsafed; and was not, for a simplified statement, the last word of the Renaissance the question of taste? That is the esthetic question; and when the Latin spirit after many misadventures again clears itself we shall see how all the while this treasure has been in its keeping. Let us as frankly as possible add that there is a whole side on which the clearance may appear to have made quite a splendid advance with Signor D’Annunzio himself.

But there is another side, which I have been too long in coming to, yet which I confess is for me much the more interesting. No account of our author is complete unless we really make out what becomes of that esthetic consistency in him which, as I have said, our own collective and cultivated effort is so earnestly attempting and yet so pathetically, if not so grotesquely, missing. We are struck, unmistakably, early in our acquaintance with these productions, by the fact that their total beauty somehow extraordinarily fails to march with their beauty of parts, and that something is all the while at work undermining that bulwark against ugliness which it is their obvious theory of their own office to throw up. The disparity troubles and haunts us just in proportion as we admire; and our uneasy wonderment over the source of the weakness fails to spoil our pleasure only because such questions have so lively an interest for the critic. We feel ourselves somehow in presence of a singular incessant _leak_ in the effect of distinction so artfully and copiously produced, and we apply our test up and down in the manner of the inquiring person who, with a tin implement and a small flame, searches our premises for an escape of gas. The bad smell has, as it were, to be accounted for; and yet where, amid the roses and lilies and pomegranates, the thousand essences and fragrances, can such a thing possibly be? Quite abruptly, I think, at last (if we have been much under the spell) our test gives us the news, not unaccompanied with the shock with which we see our escape of gas spring into flame. There is no mistaking it; the leak of distinction is produced by a positive element of the vulgar; and that the vulgar should flourish in an air so charged, intellectually speaking, with the “aristocratic” element, becomes for us straightway the greatest of oddities and at the same time, critically speaking, one of the most interesting things conceivable.

The interest then springs from its being involved for us in the “case.” We recognise so many suggested consequences if the case is really to prove responsible for it. We ask ourselves if there be not a connection, we almost tremble lest there shouldn’t be; since what is more obvious than that, if a high example of exclusive estheticism—as high a one as we are likely ever to meet—is bound sooner or later to spring a leak, the general question receives much light? We recognise here the value of our author’s complete consistency: he would have kept his bottom sound, so to speak, had he not remained so long at sea. If those imperfect exponents of his faith whom we have noted among ourselves fail to flower, for a climax, in any proportionate way, we make out that they are embarrassed not so much by any force they possess as by a force—a force of temperament—that they lack. The anomaly I speak of presents itself thus as the dilemma in which Signor D’Annunzio’s consistency has inexorably landed him; and the disfigurement breaks out, strikingly enough, in the very forefront of his picture, at the point where he has most lavished his colour. It is where he has most trusted and depended that he is most betrayed, the traitor sharing certainly his tent and his confidence. What is it that in the interest of beauty he most elaborately builds on if not on the love-affairs of his heroes and heroines, if not on his exhibition of the free play, the sincere play, the play closely studied and frankly represented, of the sexual relation? It is round this exercise, for him, that expressible, demonstrable, communicable beauty prevailingly clusters; a view indeed as to which we all generously go with him, subject to the reserve for each of us of our own expression and demonstration. It is these things on his part that break down, it is his discrimination that falls short, and thereby the very kind of intellectual authority most implied by his pretension. There is according to him an immense amenity that can be saved—saved by style—from the general wreck and welter of what is most precious, from the bankruptcy determined more and more by our basely democratic conditions. As we watch the actual process, however, it is only to see the lifeboat itself founder. The vulgarity into which he so incongruously drops is, I will not say the space he allots to love-affairs, but the weakness of his sense of “values” in depicting them.

We begin to ask ourselves at an early stage what this queer passion may be in the representation of which the sense of beauty ostensibly finds its richest expression and which is yet attended by nothing else at all—neither duration, nor propagation, nor common kindness, nor common consistency with other relations, common congruity with the rest of life—to make its importance good. If beauty is the supreme need so let it be; nothing is more certain than that we can never get too much of it if only we get it of the right sort. It is therefore on this very ground—the ground of its own sufficiency—that Signor D’Annunzio’s invocation of it collapses at our challenge. The vulgarity comes from the disorder really introduced into values, as I have called them; from the vitiation suffered—that we should have to record so mean an accident—by taste, impeccable taste, itself. The truth of this would come out fully in copious examples, now impossible; but it is not too much to say, I think, that in every principal situation presented the fundamental weakness causes the particular interest to be inordinately compromised.