III

The various situations determined for the more eminent of George Sand’s intimate associates would always be independently interesting, thanks to the intrinsic appeal of these characters and even without the light reflected withal on the great agent herself; which is why poor Chopin’s figuration in the events of the year 1847, as Madame Karénine so fully reconstitutes them, is all that is wanted to point their almost nightmare quality. Without something of a close view of them we fail of a grasp of our heroine’s genius—her genius for keeping her head in deep seas morally and reflectively above water, though but a glance at them must suffice us for averting this loss. The old-world quality of drama, which throughout so thickens and tones the air around her, finds remarkable expression in the whole picture of the moment. Every connection involved bristles like a conscious consequence, tells for all it is worth, as we say, and the sinister complexity of reference—for all the golden clearings-up that awaited it on the ideal plane—leaves nothing to be desired. The great and odd sign of the complications and convulsions, the alarms and excursions recorded, is that these are all the more or less direct fruits of sensibility, which had primarily been indulged in, under the doom of a preparation of them which no preparation of anything else was to emulate, with a good faith fairly touching in presence of the eventual ugliness. Madame Sand’s wonderful mother, commemorated for us in “L’Histoire de ma Vie” with the truth surely attaching in a like degree to no mother in all the literature of so-called confession, had had for cousin a “fille entretenue” who had married a mechanic. This Adèle Brault had had in the course of her adventures a daughter in whom, as an unfortunate young relative, Madame Dupin had taken an interest, introducing her to the heiress of Nohant, who viewed her with favour—she appears to have been amiable and commendable—and eventually associated her with her own children. She was thus the third member of that illegitimate progeny with which the Nohant scene was to have become familiar, George Sand’s natural brother on her father’s side and her natural sister on her mother’s representing this element from the earlier time on. The young Augustine, fugitive from a circle still less edifying, was thus made a companion of the son and the daughter of the house, and was especially held to compare with the latter to her great advantage in the matter of character, docility and temper. These young persons formed, as it were, with his more distinguished friend, the virtual family of Chopin during those years of specifically qualified domestication which affect us as only less of a mystification to taste than that phase of the unrestricted which had immediately preceded them. Hence a tangled tissue of relations within the circle that became, as it strikes us, indescribable for difficulty and “delicacy,” not to say for the perfection of their impracticability, and as to which the great point is that Madame Sand’s having taken them so robustly for granted throws upon her temperamental genius a more direct light than any other. The whole case belongs doubtless even more to the hapless history of Chopin himself than to that of his terrible friend—terrible for her power to flourish in conditions sooner or later fatal to weaker vessels; but is in addition to this one of the most striking illustrations possible of that view or theory of social life handed over to the reactions of sensibility almost alone which, while ever so little the ideal of the Anglo-Saxon world, has largely governed the manners of its sister societies. It has been our view, very emphatically, in general, that the sane and active social body—or, for that matter, the sane and active individual, addressed to the natural business of life—goes wrongly about it toencouragesensibility, or to do anything on the whole but treat it as of no prime importance; the traps it may lay for us, however, being really of the fewest in a race to which the very imagination of it may be said, I think, to have been comparatively denied. The imagination of it sat irremovably, on the other hand, and as a matter of course, at the Nohant fireside; where indeed we find the play and the ravage chiefly interesting through our thus seeing the delicate Chopin, whose semi-smothered appeal remains peculiarly pathetic, all helpless and foredoomed at the centre of the whirl. Nothing again strikes us more in the connection than the familiar truth that interesting persons make everything that concerns them interesting, or seldom fail to redeem from what might in another air seem but meanness and vanity even their most compromised states and their greatest wastes of value. Every one in the particular Nohant drama here exposed loses by the exposure—so far as loss could be predicated of amounts which, in general, excepting the said sensibility, were so scant among them; every one, that is, save the ruling spirit of all, with the extraordinary mark in her of the practical defiance of waste and of her inevitable enrichment, for our measure, as by reflection from the surrounding shrinkage. One of the oddest aspects of the scene is also one of the wretchedest, but the oddity makes it interesting, by the law I just glanced at, in spite of its vulgar side. How could it not be interesting, we ask as we read, to feel that Chopin, though far from the one man, was the one gentleman of the association, the finest set of nerves and scruples, and yet to see how little that availed him, in exasperated reactions, against mistakes of perverted sympathy? It is relevant in a high degree to our view of his great protectress as reducible at her best to male terms that she herself in this very light fell short, missed the ideal safeguard which for her friend had been preinvolved—as of course may be the peril, ever, with the creature so transmuted, and as is so strikingly exemplified, in the pages before us, when Madame Karénine ingenuously gives us chapter and verse for her heroine’s so unqualified demolition of the person of Madame d’Agoult, devotee of Liszt, mother to be, by that token, of Richard Wagner’s second wife, and sometime intimate of the author of “Isidora,” in which fiction we are shown the parody perpetrated. If women rend each other on occasion with sharper talons than seem to belong on the whole to the male hand, however intendingly applied, we find ourselves reflect parenthetically that the loss of this advantage may well be a matter for them to consider when the new approximation is the issue.

The great sign of the Nohant circle on all this showing, at any rate, is the intense personalism, as we may call it, reigning there, or in other words the vivacity, the acuity and irritability of the personal relations—which flourished so largely, we at the same time feel, by reason of the general gift for expression, that gift to which we owe the general superiority of every letter, from it scarce matters whom, laid under contribution by our author. How could people not feel with acuity when they could, when they had to, write with such point and such specific intelligence?—just indeed as one asks how letters could fail to remain at such a level among them when they incessantly generated choice matter for expression. Madame Sand herself is of course on this ground easily the most admirable, as we have seen; but every one “knows how” to write, and does it well in proportion as the matter in hand most demands and most rewards proper saying. Much of all this stuff of history seems indeed to have been susceptible of any amount of force of statement; yet we note all the while how in the case of the great mistress of the pen at least some shade of intrinsic beauty attends even the presentation of quite abominable facts. We can only see it as abominable, at least, so long as we have Madame Sand’s words—which are somehow a different thing from her word—for it, that Chopin had from the first “sided” with the atrocious Solange in that play of her genius which is characterised by our chronicler as wickedness for the sake of wickedness, as art for the sake of art, without other logic or other cause. “Once married,” says Madame Karénine, “she made a double use of this wickedness. She had always hated Augustine; she wished, one doesn’t know why, to break off her marriage, and by calumnies and insinuations she succeeded. Then angry with her mother she avenged herself on her as well by further calumnies. Thereupon took place at Nohant such events that”—that in fine we stop before them with this preliminary shudder. The cross-currents of violence among them would take more keeping apart than we have time for, the more that everything comes back, for interest, to the intrinsic weight of the tone of the principal sufferer from them—as we see her, as we wouldn’t for the world not see her, in spite of the fact that Chopin was to succumb scarce more than a year later to multiplied lacerations, and that she was to override and reproduce and pre-appointedly flourish for long years after. If it is interesting, as I have pronounced it, that Chopin, again, should have consented to be of the opinion of Solange that the relations between her brother Maurice and the hapless Augustine were of the last impropriety, I fear I can account no better for this than by our sense that the more thegenius locihas to feed her full tone the more our faith in it, as such a fine thing in itself, is justified. Almost immediately after the precipitated marriage of the daughter of the house has taken place, the Clésinger couple, avid and insolent, of a breadth of old time impudence in fact of which our paler day has lost the pattern, are back on the mother’s hands, to the effect of a vividest picture of Maurice well-nigh in a death-grapple with his apparently quite monstrous “bounder” of a brother-in-law, a picture that further gives us Madame Sand herself smiting Clésinger in the face and receiving from him a blow in the breast, while Solange “coldly,” with an iciness indeed peculiarly her own, fans the rage and approves her husband’s assault, and while the divine composer, though for that moment much in the background, approves the wondrous approval. He still approves, to all appearance, the daughter’s interpretation of the mother’s wish to “get rid” of him as the result of an amorous design on the latter’s part in respect of a young man lately introduced to the circle as Maurice’s friend and for the intimate relation with whom it is thus desirable that the coast shall be made clear. How else than through no fewer consistencies of the unedifying on the part of these provokers of the expressional reaction should we have come by innumerable fine epistolary passages, passages constituting in themselves verily such adornments of the tale, such notes in the scale of all the damaged dignity redressed, that we should be morally the poorer without them? One of the vividest glimpses indeed is not in a letter but in a few lines from “L’Histoire de ma Vie,” the composition of which was begun toward the end of this period and while its shadow still hung about—early in life for a projected autobiography, inasmuch as the author had not then reached her forty-fifth year. Chopin at work, improvising and composing, was apt to become a prey to doubts and depressions, so that there were times when to break in upon these was to render him a service.

But it was not always possible to induce him to leave the piano, often so much more his torment than his joy, and he began gradually to resent my proposing he should do so. I never ventured on these occasions to insist. Chopin in displeasure was appalling, and as with me he always controlled himself it was as if he might die of suffocation.

It is a vision of the possibilities of vibration in such organisms that does in fact appal, and with the clash of vibrations, those both of genius and of the general less sanctioned sensibility, the air must have more than sufficiently resounded. Some eight years after the beginning of their friendship and the year after the final complete break in it she writes to Madame Pauline Viardot:

Do you see Chopin? Tell me about his health. I have been unable to repay his fury and his hatred by hatred and fury. I think of him as of a sick, embittered, bewildered child. I saw much of Solange in Paris, the letter goes on, and made her my constant occupation, but without finding anything but a stone in the place of her heart. I have taken up my work again while waiting for the tide to carry me elsewhere.

All the author’s “authority” is in these few words, and in none more than in the glance at the work and the tide. The work and the tide rose ever as high as she would to float her, and wherever we look there is always the authority. “I find Chopinmagnificent,” she had already written from the thick of the fray, “to keep seeing, frequenting and approving Clésinger, who struck me because I snatched from his hands the hammer he had raised upon Maurice—Chopin whom every one talks of as my most faithful and devoted friend.” Well indeed may our biographer have put it that from a certain date in May 1847 “the twoLeitmotivewhich might have been called in the terms of Wagner theLeitmotifof soreness and theLeitmotifof despair—Chopin, Solange—sound together now in fusion, now in a mutual grip, now simply side by side, in all Madame Sand’s unpublished letters and in the few (of the moment) that have been published. A little later a third joins in—Augustine Brault, a motive narrowly and tragically linked to thebasso obligatoof Solange.” To meet such a passage as the following under our heroine’s hand again is to feel the whole temper of intercourse implied slip straight out of our analytic grasp. The allusion is to Chopin and to the “defection” of which he had been guilty, to her view, at the time when it had been most important that she might count on him. What we have first, as outsiders, to swallow down, as it were, is the state of things, the hysteric pitch of family life, in which any ideal of reticence, any principle, as we know it, of minding one’s business, for mere dignity’s sake if for none other, had undergone such collapse.

I grant you I am not sorry that he has withdrawn from me the government of his life, for which both he and his friends wanted to make me responsible in so much too absolute a fashion. His temper kept growing in asperity, so that it had come to his constantly blowing me up, from spite, ill-humour and jealousy, in presence of my friends and my children. Solange made use of it with the astuteness that belongs to her, while Maurice began to give way to indignation. Knowing and seeingla chasteté de nos rapports, he saw also that the poor sick soul took up, withoutwanting toand perhaps without being able to help it, the attitude of the lover, the husband, the proprietor of my thoughts and actions. He was on the point of breaking out and telling him to his face that he was making me play, at forty-three years of age, a ridiculous part, and that it was an abuse of my kindness, my patience, and my pity for his nervous morbid state. A few months more, a few days perhaps, of this situation, and an impossible frightful struggle would have broken out between them. Foreseeing the storm, I took advantage of Chopin’s predilection for Solange and left him to sulk, without an effort to bring him round. We have not for three months exchanged a word in writing, and I don’t know how such a cooling-off will end.

She develops the picture of the extravagance of his sick irritability; she accepts with indifference the certainty that his friends will accuse her of having cast him out to take a lover; the one thing she “minds” is the force of evil in her daughter, who is the centre of all the treachery. “She will come back to me when she needs me, that I know. But her return will be neither tender nor consoling.” Therefore it is when at the beginning of the winter of this same dreadful year she throws off the free rich summary of what she has been through in the letter to M. Charles Poncy already published in her Correspondence we are swept into the current of sympathy and admiration. The preceding months had been the heaviest and most painful of her life.

I all but broke down under them utterly, though I had for long seen them coming. But you know how one is not always overhung by the evil portent, however clear one may read it—there are days, weeks, even whole months, when one lives on illusion and fondly hopes to divert the blow that threatens. It is always at last the most probable ill that surprises us unarmed and unprepared. To this explosion of unhappy underground germs joined themselves sundry contributive matters, bitter things too and quite unexpected; so that I am broken by grief in body and soul. I believe my grief incurable, for I never succeed in throwing it off for a few hours without its coming upon me again during the next in greater force and gloom. I nevertheless struggle against it without respite, and if I don’t hope for a victory which would have to consist of not feeling at all, at least I have reached that of still bearing with life, of even scarcely feeling ill, of having recovered my taste for work and of not showing my distress. I have got back outside calm and cheer, which are so necessary for others, and everything in my life seems to go on well.

We had already become aware, through commemorations previous to the present, of that first or innermost line of defence residing in George Sand’s splendid mastery of the letter, the gift that was always so to assure her, on every issue, the enjoyment of the first chance with posterity. The mere cerebral and manual activity represented by the quantity no less than the quality of her outflow through the post at a season when her engagements were most pressing and her anxieties of every sort most cruel is justly qualified by Madame Karénine as astounding; the new letters here given to the world heaping up the exhibition and testifying even beyond the finest of those gathered in after the writer’s death—the mutilations, suppressions and other freedoms then used, for that matter, being now exposed. If no plot of her most bustling fiction ever thickened at the rate at which those agitations of her inner circle at which we have glanced multiplied upon her hands through the later ’forties, so we are tempted to find her rather less in possession of her greatmoyenswhen handling the artificial presentation than when handling what we may call the natural. It is not too much to say that the long letter addressed to the cynical Solange in April ’52, and which these pages give usin extenso, would have made the fortune of any mere interesting “story” in which one of the characters might have been presented as writing it. It is a document of the highest psychological value and a practical summary of all the elements of the writer’s genius, of all her indefeasible advantages; it is verily the gem of her biographer’s collection. Taken in connection with a copious communication to her son, of the previous year, on the subject of his sister’s character and vices, and of their common experience of these, it offers, in its ease of movement, its extraordinary frankness and lucidity, its splendid apprehension and interpretation of realities, its state, as it were, of saturation with these, exactly the kind of interest for which her novels were held remarkable, but in a degree even above their maximum. Such a letter is an effusion of the highest price; none of a weight so baffling to estimation was probably ever inspired in a mother by solicitude for a clever daughter’s possibilities. Never surely had an accomplished daughter laid under such contribution a mother of high culture; never had such remarkable and pertinent things had to flow from such a source; never in fine was so urgent an occasion so admirably, so inimitably risen to. Marvellous through it all is the way in which, while a common recognition of the “facts of life,” as between two perfectly intelligent men of the world, gives the whole diapason, the abdication of moral authority and of the rights of wisdom never takes place. The tone is a high implication of the moral advantages that Solange had inveterately enjoyed and had decided none the less to avail herself of so little; which advantages we absolutely believe in as we read—thereis the prodigious part: such an education of the soul, and in fact of every faculty, such a claim for the irreproachable, it would fairly seem, do we feel any association with the great fluent artist, in whatever conditions taking place, inevitably, necessarily to have been. If we put ourselves questions we yet wave away doubts, and with whatever remnants of prejudice the writer’s last word may often have to clash, our own is that there is nothing for grand final rightness like a sufficientlygeneralhumanity—when a particularly beautiful voice happens to serve it.

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO1902

The great feast-days of all, for the restless critic, are those much interspaced occasions of his really meeting a “case,” as he soon enough learns to call, for his convenience and assistance, any supremely contributive or determinant party to the critical question. These are recognitions that make up for many dull hours and dry contacts, many a thankless, a disconcerted gaze into faces that have proved expressionless. Always looking, always hoping for his happiest chance, the inquirer into the reasons of things—by which I mean especially into the reasons of books—so often misses it, so often wastes his steps and withdraws his confidence, that he inevitably works out for himself, sooner or later, some handy principle of recognition. It may be a rough thing, a mere home-made tool of his trade, but it serves his purpose if it keeps him from beginning with mistakes. He becomes able to note in its light the signs and marks of the possible precious identity, able to weigh with some exactitude the appearances that make for its reality. He ends, through much expenditure of patience, by seeing when, how, why, the “case” announces and presents itself, and he perhaps even feels that failure and felicity have worked together to produce in him a sense for it that may at last be trusted as an instinct. He thus arrives at a view of all the candidates, frequently interesting enough, who fall short of the effective title, because he has at need, perhaps even from afar, scented along the wind the strongest member of the herd. He may perhaps not always be able to give us the grounds of his certainty, but he is at least never without knowing it in presence of one of the full-blown products that are the joy of the analyst. He recognises as well how the state of being full-blown comes above all from the achievement of consistency, of that last consistency which springs from the unrestricted enjoyment of freedom.

Many of us will doubtless not have forgotten how we were witnesses a certain number of years since to a season and a society that had found themselves of a sudden roused, as from some deep drugged sleep, to the conception of the “esthetic” law of life; in consequence of which this happy thought had begun to receive the honours of a lively appetite and an eager curiosity, but was at the same time surrounded and manipulated by as many different kinds of inexpertness as probably ever huddled together on a single pretext. The spectacle was strange and finally was wearisome, for the simple reason that the principle in question, once it was proclaimed—a principle not easily formulated, but which we may conveniently speak of as that of beauty at any price, beauty appealing alike to the senses and to the mind—was never felt to fall into its place as really adopted and efficient. It remained for us a queer high-flavoured fruit from overseas, grown under another sun than ours, passed round and solemnly partaken of at banquets organised to try it, but not found on the whole really to agree with us, not proving thoroughly digestible. It brought with it no repose, brought with it only agitation. We were not really, not fully convinced, for the state of conviction is quiet. This was to have been the state itself—that is the state of mind achieved and established—in which we were to know ugliness no more, to make the esthetic consciousness feel at home with us, or learn ourselves at any rate to feel at home withit. That would have been the reign of peace, the supreme beatitude; but stability continued to elude us. We had mustered a hundred good reasons for it, yet the reasons but lighted up our desert. They failed to flower into a single concrete esthetic “type.” One authentic, one masterful specimen would have done wonders for us, would at least have assuaged our curiosity. But we were to be left till lately with our curiosity on our hands.

This is a yearning, however, that Signor D’Annunzio may at last strike us as supremely formed to gratify; so promptly we find in him as a literary figure the highest expression of the reality that our own conditions were to fail of making possible. He has immediately the value of giving us by his mere logical unfolding the measure of our shortcomings in the same direction, that of our timidities and penuries and failures. He throws a straighter and more inevitable light on the esthetic consciousness than has, to my sense, in our time, reached it from any other quarter; and there is many a mystery that properly interrogated he may help to clear up for us, many an explanation of our misadventure that—as I have glanced at it—he may give. He starts with the immense advantage of enjoying the invoked boon by grace and not by effort, of claiming it under another title than the sweat of his brow and the aspiration of his culture. He testifies to the influence of things that have had time to get themselves taken for granted. Beauty at any price is an old story to him; art and form and style as the aim of the superior life are a matter of course; and it may be said of him, I think, that, thanks to these transmitted and implanted instincts and aptitudes, his individual development begins where the struggle of the mere earnest questioner ends. Signor D’Annunzio is earnest in his way, quite extraordinarily—which is a feature of his physiognomy that we shall presently come to and about which there will be something to say; but we feel him all the while in such secure possession of his heritage of favouring circumstance that his sense of intellectual responsibility is almost out of proportion. This is one of his interesting special marks, the manner in which the play of the esthetic instinct in him takes on, for positive extravagance and as a last refinement of freedom, the crown of solicitude and anxiety. Such things but make with him for ornament and parade; they are his tribute to civility; the essence of the matter is meanwhile in his blood and his bones. No mistake was possible from the first as to his being of the inner literary camp—a new form altogether of perceptive and expressive energy; the question was settled by the intensity and variety, to say nothing of the precocity, of his early poetic production.

Born at Pescara, in the Regno, the old kingdom of Naples, “toward” 1863, as I find noted by a cautious biographer, he had while scarce out of his teens allowed his lyric genius full opportunity of scandalising even the moderately austere. He defined himself betimes very much as he was to remain, a rare imagination, a poetic, an artistic intelligence of extraordinary range and fineness concentrated almost wholly on the life of the senses. For the critic who simplifies a little to state clearly, the only ideas he urges upon us are the erotic and the plastic, which have for him about an equal intensity, or of which it would be doubtless more correct to say that he makes them interchangeable faces of the same figure. He began his career by playing with them together in verse, to innumerable light tunes and with an extraordinary general effect of curiosity and brilliancy. He has continued still more strikingly to play with them in prose; they have remained the substance of his intellectual furniture. It is of his prose only, however, that, leaving aside the Intermezzo, L’Isottèo, La Chimera, Odi Navali and other such matters, I propose to speak, the subject being of itself ample for one occasion. His five novels and his four plays have extended his fame; they suggest by themselves as many observations as we shall have space for. The group of productions, as the literary industry proceeds among us to-day, is not large, but we may doubt if a talent and a temperament, if indeed a whole “view of life,” ever built themselves up as vividly for the reader out of so few blocks. The writer is even yet enviably young; but this solidity of his literary image, as of something already seated on time and accumulation, makes him a rare example. Precocity is somehow an inadequate name for it, as precocity seldom gets away from the element of promise, and it is not exactly promise that blooms in the hard maturity of such a performance as “The Triumph of Death.” There are certain expressions of experience, of the experience of the whole man, that are like final milestones, milestones for his possible fertility if not for his possible dexterity; a truth that has not indeed prevented “Il Fuoco,” with its doubtless still ampler finality, from following the work just mentioned. And we have had particularly before us, in verse, I must add, “Francesca da Rimini,” with the great impression a great actress has enabled this drama to make.

Only I must immediately in this connection also add that Signor D’Annunzio’s plays are, beside his novels, of decidedly minor weight; testifying abundantly to his style, his romantic sense and his command of images, but standing in spite of their eloquence only for half of his talent, largely as he yet appears in “Il Fuoco” to announce himself by implication as an intending, indeed as a pre-eminent dramatist. The example is interesting when we catch in the fact the opportunity for comparing with the last closeness the capacity of the two rival canvases, as they become for the occasion, on which the picture of life may be painted. The closeness is never so great, the comparison never so pertinent, as when the separate efforts are but different phases of the same talent. It is not at any rate under this juxtaposition that the infinitely greater amplitude of portrayal resident in the novel strikes us least. It in fact strikes us the more, in this quarter, for Signor D’Annunzio, that his plays have been with one exception successes. We must none the less take “Francesca” but for a success of curiosity; on the part of the author I mean even more than on the part of the public. It is primarily a pictorial and ingenious thing and, as a picture of passion, takes, in the total collection, despite its felicities of surface and arrangement, distinctly a “back seat.” Scarcely less than its companions it overflows with the writer’s plenitude of verbal expression, thanks to which, largely, the series will always prompt a curiosity and even a tenderness in any reader interested precisely in this momentous question of “style in a play”—interested in particular to learn by what esthetic chemistry a play would as a work of art propose to eschew it. It is in any such connection so inexpugnable that we have only to be cheated of it in one place to feel the subject cry aloud for it, like a sick man forsaken, in another.

I may mention at all events the slightly perverse fact that, thanks, on this side, to the highest watermark of translation, Signor D’Annunzio makes his best appeal to the English public as a dramatist. Of each of the three English versions of other examples of his work whose titles are inscribed at the beginning of these remarks it may be said that they are adequate and respectable considering the great difficulty encountered. The author’s highest good fortune has nevertheless been at the hands of his French interpreter, who has managed to keep constantly close to him—allowing for an occasional inconsequent failure of courage when the directness of the originalbrave l’honnêteté—and yet to achieve a tone not less idiomatic, and above all not less marked by “authority,” than his own. Mr. Arthur Symons, among ourselves, however, has rendered the somewhat insistent eloquence of “La Gioconda” and the intricate and difficult verse of “Francesca” with all due sympathy, and in the latter case especially—a highly arduous task—with remarkably patient skill. It is not his fault, doubtless, if the feet of his English text strike us as moving with less freedom than those of his original; such being the hard price paid always by the translator who tries for correspondence from step to step, tries for an identical order. Even less is he responsible for its coming still more home to us in a translation that the meagre anecdote here furnishing the subject, and on which the large superstructure rests, does not really lend itself to those developments that make a full or an interesting tragic complexity. Behind the glamour of its immense literary association the subject of “Francesca” is for purposes of essential, of enlarged exhibition delusive and “short.”

These, however, are for the moment side-issues; what is more relevant is the stride taken by our author’s early progress in his first novel and his second, “Il Piacere” and “L’Innocente”; a pair from the freshness, the direct young energy of which he was, for some of his admirers, too promptly and to markedly to decline. We may take it as characteristic of the intensity of the literary life in him that his brief career falls already thus into periods and supplies a quantity of history sufficient for those differences among students by which the dignity of history appears mainly to be preserved. The nature of his prime inspiration I have already glanced at; and we are helped to a characterisation if I say that the famous enthroned “beauty” which operates here, so straight, as the great obsession, is not in any perceptible degree moral beauty. It would be difficult perhaps to find elsewhere in the same compass so much expression of the personal life resting so little on any picture of the personal character and the personal will. It is not that Signor D’Annunzio has not more than once pushed his furrow in this latter direction; but nothing is exactly more interesting, as we shall see, than the seemingly inevitable way in which the attempt falls short.

“Il Piacere,” the first in date of the five tales, has, though with imperfections, the merit of giving us strongly at the outset the author’s scale and range of view, and of so constituting a sort of prophetic summary of his elements. All that is done in the later things is more or less done here, and nothing is absent here that we are not afterwards also to miss. I propose, however, that it shall not be prematurely a question with us of what we miss; no intelligible statement of which, for that matter, in such considerations as these, is ever possible till there has been some adequate statement of what we find. Count Andrea Sperelli is a young man who pays, pays heavily, as we take it that we are to understand, for an unbridled surrender to the life of the senses; whereby it is primarily a picture of that life that the story gives us. He is represented as inordinately, as quite monstrously, endowed for the career that from the first absorbs and that finally is to be held, we suppose, to engulf him; and it is a tribute to the truth with which his endowment is presented that we should scarce know where else to look for so complete and convincing an account of such adventures. Casanova de Seingalt is of course infinitely more copious, but his autobiography is cheap loose journalism compared with the directed, finely-condensed iridescent epic of Count Andrea.

This young man’s years have run but half their course from twenty to thirty when he meets and becomes entangled with a woman more infernally expert even than himself in the matters in which he is most expert—and he is given us as a miracle of social and intellectual accomplishment—the effect of whom is fatally to pervert and poison his imagination. As his imagination is applied exclusively to the employments of “love,” this means, for him, a frustration of all happiness, all comfortable consistency, in subsequent relations of the same order. The author’s view—this is fundamental—is all of a world in which relations of any other order whatever mainly fail to offer themselves in any attractive form. Andrea Sperelli, loving, accordingly—in the manner in which D’Annunzio’s young men love and to which we must specifically return—a woman of good faith, a woman as different as possible from the creature of evil communications, finds the vessel of his spirit itself so infected and disqualified that it falsifies and dries up everything that passes through it. The idea that has virtually determined the situation appears in fact to be that the herowouldhave loved in another manner, or would at least have wished to, but that he had too promptly put any such fortune, so far as his capacity is concerned, out of court. We have our reasons, presently manifest, for doubting the possibility itself; but the theory has nevertheless given its direction to the fable.

For the rest the author’s three sharpest signs are already unmistakable: first his rare notation of states of excited sensibility; second his splendid visual sense, the quick generosity of his response to the message, as we nowadays say, of aspects and appearances, to the beauty of places and things; third his ample and exquisite style, his curious, various, inquisitive, always active employment of language as a means of communication and representation. So close is the marriage between his power of “rendering,” in the light of the imagination, and whatever he sees and feels, that we should much mislead in speaking of his manner as a thing distinct from the matter submitted to it. The fusion is complete and admirable, so that, though his work is nothing if not “literary,” we see at no point of it where literature or where life begins or ends: we swallow our successive morsels with as little question as we swallow food that has by proper preparation been reduced to singleness of savour. It is brought home to us afresh that there is no complete creation without style any more than there is complete music without sound; also that when language becomes as closely applied and impressed a thing as for the most part in the volumes before us the fact of artistic creation is registered at a stroke. It is never more present than in the thick-sown illustrative images and figures that fairly bloom under D’Annunzio’s hand. I find examples in “Il Piacere,” as elsewhere, by simply turning the pages. “His will”—of the hero’s weakness—“useless as a sword of base temper hung at the side of a drunkard or a dullard.” Or of his own southern land in September: “I scarce know why, looking at the country in this season, I always think of some beautiful woman after childbirth, who lies back in her white bed, smiling with a pale astonished inextinguishable smile.” Or the incision of this: “Where for him now were those unclean short-lived loves that left in the mouth the strange acidity of fruit cut with a steel knife?” Or the felicity of the following, of a southern night seen and felt from the terrace of a villa. “Clear meteors at intervals streaked the motionless air, running over it as lightly and silently as drops of water on a crystal pane.” “The sails on the sea,” he says of the same look-out by day, “were as pious and numberless as the wings of cherubim on the gold grounds of old Giottesque panels.”

But it is above all here for two things that his faculty is admirable; one of them his making us feel through the windows of his situation, or the gaps, as it were, of his flowering wood, the golden presence of Rome, the charm that appeals to him as if he were one of the pilgrims from afar, save that he reproduces it with an authority in which, as we have seen, the pilgrims from afar have mainly been deficient. The other is the whole category of the phenomena of “passion,” as passion prevails between his men and his women—and scarcely anything else prevails; the states of feeling, of ecstasy and suffering engendered, the play of sensibility from end to end of the scale. In this direction he has left no dropped stitches for any worker of like tapestries to pick up. We shall here have made out that many of his “values” are much to be contested, but that where they are true they are as fresh as discoveries; witness the passage where Sperelli, driving back to Rome after a steeplechase in which he has been at the supreme moment worsted, meets nothing that does not play with significance into his vision and act with force on his nerves. He has before the race had “words,” almost blows, on the subject of one of the ladies present, with one of the other riders, of which the result is that they are to send each other their seconds; but the omens are not for his adversary, in spite of the latter’s success on the course.

From the mail-coach, on the return, he overtook the flight toward Rome of Giannetto Rutolo, seated in a small two-wheeled trap, behind the quick trot of a great roan, over whom he bent with tight reins, holding his head down and his cigar in his teeth, heedless of the attempts of policemen to keep him in line. Rome, in the distance, stood up dark against a zone of light as yellow as sulphur; and the statues crowning St. John Lateran looked huge, above the zone, in their violet sky.Then it was that Andrea fully knew the pain he was making another soul suffer.

Nothing could be more characteristic of the writer than the way what has preceded flowers into that last reality; and equally in his best manner, doubtless, is such a passage as the following from the same volume, which treats of the hero’s first visit to the sinister great lady whose influence on his soul and his senses is to become as the trail of a serpent. She receives him, after their first accidental meeting, with extraordinary promptitude and the last intimacy, receives him in the depths of a great Roman palace which the author, with a failure of taste that is, unfortunately for him, on ground of this sort, systematic, makes a point of naming. “Then they ceased to speak. Each felt the presence of the other flow and mingle with his own, with her own, very blood; till it washerblood at last that seemed to have become his life, and his that seemed to have become hers. The room grew larger in the deep silence; the crucifix of Guido Reni made the shade of the canopy and curtains religious; the rumour of the city came to them like the murmur of some far-away flood.” Or take for an instance of the writer’s way of showing the consciousness as a full, mixed cup, of touching us ourselves with the mystery at work in his characters, the description of the young man’s leaving the princely apartments in question after the initiation vouchsafed to him. He has found the great lady ill in bed, with remedies and medicine-bottles at her side, but not too ill, as we have seen, to make him welcome. “Farewell,” she has said. “Love me! Remember!”

It seemed to him, crossing the threshold again, that he heard behind him a burst of sobs. But he went on, a little uncertain, wavering like a man who sees imperfectly. The odour of the chloroform clung to his sense like some fume of intoxication; but at each step something intimate passed away from him, wasting itself in the air, so that, impulsively, instinctively, he would have kept himself as he was, have closed himself in, have wrapped himself up to prevent the dispersion. The rooms in front of him were deserted and dumb. At one of the doors “Mademoiselle” appeared, with no sound of steps, with no rustle of skirts, standing there like a ghost. “This way, signor conte. You won’t find it.” She had an ambiguous, irritating smile, and her curiosity made her grey eyes more piercing. Andrea said nothing. The woman’s presence again disconcerted and troubled him, affected him with a vague repugnance, stirred indeed his wrath.

Even the best things suffer by detachment from their context; but so it is that we are inpossessionof the young man’s exit, so it is that the act interests us. Fully announced from the first, among these things, was D’Annunzio’s signal gift of never approaching the thing particularly to be done, the thing that so presents itself to the painter, without consummately doing it. Each of his volumes offers thus its little gallery of episodes that stand out like the larger pearls occurring at intervals on a string of beads. The steeplechase in “Il Piacere,” the auction sale of precious trinkets in Via Sistina on the wet afternoon, the morning in the garden at Schifanoia, by the southern sea, when Donna Maria, the new revelation, first comes down to Andrea, who awaits her there in the languor of convalescence from the almost fatal wound received in the duel of which the altercation on the race-course has been the issue: the manner of such things as these has an extraordinary completeness of beauty. But they are, like similar pages in “Il Trionfo” and “Il Fuoco,” not things for adequate citation, not things that lend themselves as some of the briefer felicities. Donna Maria, on the September night at Schifanoia, has been playing for Andrea and their hostess certain old quaint gavottes and toccatas.

It lived again wondrously beneath her fingers, the eighteenth-century music, so melancholy in its dance-tunes—tunes that might have been composed to be danced, on languid afternoons of some St. Martin’s summer, in a deserted park, among hushed fountains and pedestals without their statues, over carpets of dead roses, by pairs of lovers soon to love no more.

Autobiographic in form, “L’Innocente” sticks closely to its theme, and though the form is on the whole a disadvantage to it the texture is admirably close. The question is of nothing less than a young husband’s relation to the illegitimate child of his wife, born confessedly as such, and so born, marvellous to say, in spite of the circumstance that the wife adores him, and of the fact that, though long grossly, brutally false to her, he also adores his wife. To state these data is sufficiently to express the demand truly made by them for superiority of treatment; they require certainly two or three almost impossible postulates. But we of course never play the fair critical game with an author, never get into relation with him at all, unless we grant him his postulates. His subject is what is given him—given him by influences, by a process, with which we have nothing to do; since what art, what revelation, can ever really make such a mystery, such a passage in the private life of the intellect, adequately traceable for us? His treatment of it, on the other hand, is what he actively gives; and it is with what he gives that we are critically concerned. If there is nothing in him that effectually induces us to make the postulate, he is then empty for us altogether, and the sooner we have done with him the better; little as the truly curious critic enjoys, as a general thing, having publicly to throw up the sponge.

Tullio Hermil, who finally compasses the death of the little “innocent,” the small intruder whose presence in the family life has become too intolerable, retraces with a master’s hand each step of the process by which he has arrived at this sole issue. Save that his wife dumbly divines and accepts it his perpetration of the deed is not suspected, and we take the secret confession of which the book consists as made for the relief and justification of his conscience. The action all goes forward in that sphere of exasperated sensibility which Signor D’Annunzio has made his own so triumphantly that other story-tellers strike us in comparison as remaining at the door of the inner precinct, as listening there but to catch an occasional faint sound, while he alone is well within and moving through the place as its master. The sensibility has again in itself to be qualified; the exasperation of feeling is ever the essence of the intercourse of some man with some woman who has reduced him, as in “L’Innocente” and in “Il Trionfo,” to homicidal madness, or of some woman with some man who, as in “Il Fuoco,” and also again by a strange duplication of its office in “L’Innocente,” causes her atrociously to suffer. The plane of the situation is thus visibly a singularly special plane; that, always, of the more or less insanely demoralised pair of lovers, for neither of whom is any other personal relation indicated either as actual or as conceivably possible. Here, it may be said on such a showing, is material rather alarmingly cut down as to range, as to interest and, not least, as to charm; but here precisely it is that, by a wonderful chance, the author’s magic comes effectively into play.

Little in fact as the relation of the erotically exasperatedwiththe erotically exasperated, when pushed on either side to frenzy, would appear to lend itself to luminous developments, the difficulty is surmounted each time in a fashion that, for consistency no less than for brilliancy, is all the author’s own. Though surmounted triumphantly as to interest, that is, the trick is played without the least falsification of the luckless subjects of his study. They remain the abject victims of sensibility that his plan has originally made them; they remain exasperated, erotic, hysterical, either homicidally or suicidally determined, cut off from any personal source of life that does not poison them; notwithstanding all of which they neither starve dramatically nor suffer us to starve with them. How then is this seemingly inevitable catastrophe prevented? We ask it but to find on reflection that the answer opens the door to their historian’s whole secret. The unfortunates are deprived of any enlarging or saving personal relation, that is of any beneficent reciprocity; but they make up for it by their relation both to theideain general and to the whole world of the senses, which is the completest that the author can conceive for them. He may be described as thus executing on their behalf an artisticvolte-faceof the most effective kind, with results wonderful to note. The world of the senses, with which he surrounds them—a world too of the idea, that is of a few ideas admirably expressed—yields them such a crop of impressions that the need of other occasions to vibrate and respond, to act or to aspire, is superseded by their immense factitious agitation. This agitation runs its course in strangely brief periods—a singular note, the brevity, of every situation; but the period is while it lasts, for all its human and social poverty, quite inordinately peopled and furnished. The innumerable different ways in which his concentrated couples are able to feel about each other and about their enclosing cage of golden wire, the nature and the art of Italy—these things crowd into the picture and pervade it, lighting it scarcely less, strange to say, because they are things of bitterness and woe.

It is one of the miracles of the imagination; the great shining element in which the characters flounder and suffer becomes rich and beautiful for them, as well as in so many ways for us, by the action of the writer’s mind. They not only live in his imagination, but they borrow it from him in quantities; indeed without this charitable advance they would be poor creatures enough, for they have in each case almost nothing of their own. On the aid thus received they start, they get into motion; it makes their common basis of “passion,” desire, enchantment, aversion. The essence of the situation is the same in “Il Trionfo” and “Il Fuoco” as in “L’Innocente”: the temporarily united pair devour each other, tear and rend each other, wear each other out through a series of erotic convulsions and nervous reactions that are made interesting—interesting tous—almost exclusively by the special wealth of their consciousness. The medium in which they move is admirably reflected in it; the autumn light of Venice, the afterglow of her past, in the drama of the elderly actress and the young rhetorician of “Il Fuoco”; the splendour of the summer by the edge of the lower Adriatic in that of the two isolated erotomaniacs of “Il Trionfo,” indissolubly linked at last in the fury of physical destruction into which the man drags the woman by way of retribution for the fury of physical surrender into which she has beguiled him.

As for “L’Innocente” again, briefly, there is perhaps nothing in it to match the Roman passages of “Il Piacere”; but the harmony of the general, the outer conditions pervades the picture; the sweetness of the villeggiatura life, the happiness of place and air, the lovability of the enclosing scene, all at variance with the sharpness of the inner tragedy. The inner tragedy of “L’Innocente” has a concentration that is like the carrying, through turns and twists, upstairs and down, of some cup filled to the brim, of which no drop is yet spilled; such cumulative truth rules the scene after we have once accepted the postulate. It is true that the situation as exhibited involves for Giuliana, the young wife, the vulgarest of adventures; yet she becomes, as it unfolds, the figure of the whole gallery in whom the pathetic has at once most of immediate truth and of investing poetry. I much prefer her for beauty and interest to Donna Maria in “Il Piacere,” the principal other image of faith and patience sacrificed. We see these virtues as still supreme in her even while she faces, in advance, her ordeal, in respect to which it has been her hope, in fact her calculation, that her husband will have been deceived about the paternity of her child; and she is so truthfully touching when this possibility breaks down that even though we rub our eyes at the kind of dignity claimed for her we participate without reserve in her predicament. The origin of the infant is frankly ignoble, whereas it is on the nobleness of Giuliana that the story essentially hinges; but the contradiction is wonderfully kept from disconcerting us altogether. What the author has needed for his strangest truth is that the mother shall feel exactly as the husband does, and that the husband shall after the first shock of his horror feel intimately and explicitly with the mother. They take in this way the same view of their woeful excrescence; and the drama of the child’s advent and of the first months of his existence, his insistent and hated survival, becomes for them in respect to the rest of the world a drama of silence and dissimulation, in every step of which we feel a terror.

The effect, I may add, gains more than one kind of intensity from that almost complete absence ofothercontacts to which D’Annunzio systematically condemns his creatures; introducing here, however, just the two or three that more completely mark the isolation. It may doubtless be conceded that our English-speaking failure of insistence, of inquiry and penetration, in certain directions, springs partly from our deep-rooted habit of dealing with man, dramatically, on his social and gregarious side, as a being the variety of whose intercourse with his fellows, whatever forms his fellows may take, is positively half his interesting motion. We fear to isolate him, for we remember that as we see and know him he scarce understands himself save in action, action which inevitably mixes him with his kind. To see and know him, like Signor D’Annunzio, almost only in passion is another matter, for passion spends itself quickly in the open and burns hot mainly in nooks and corners. Nothing, too, in the picture is more striking than the manner in which the merely sentimental abyss—that of the couple brought together by the thing that might utterly have severed them—is consistently and successfully avoided. We should have been certain to feel it in many other hands yawning but a few steps off. We see the dreadful facts in themselves, are brought close to them with no interposing vaguenesses or other beggings of the question, and are forcibly reminded how much more this “crudity” makes for the communication of tenderness—what is aimed at—than an attitude conventionally more reticent. We feel what the tenderness can be when it rests onallthe items of a constituted misery, not one of which is illogically blinked.

For the pangs and pities of the flesh in especial D’Annunzio has in all his work the finest hand—those of the spirit exist with him indeed only as proceeding from these; so that Giuliana for instance affects us, beyond any figure in fiction we are likely to remember, as living and breathing under our touch and before our eyes, as a creature of organs, functions and processes, palpable, audible, pitiful physical conditions. These are facts, many of them, of an order in pursuit of which many a spectator of the “picture of life” will instinctively desire to stop short, however great in general his professed desire to enjoy the borrowed consciousness that the picture of life gives us; and nothing, it may well be said, is more certain than that we have a right in such matters to our preference, a right to choose the kind of adventure of the imagination we like best. No obligation whatever rests on us in respect to a given kind—much light as our choice may often throw for the critic on the nature of our own intelligence.Thereat any rate, we are disposed to say of such a piece of penetration as “L’Innocente,” there is a particular dreadful adventure, as large as life, for those who can bear it. The conditions are all present; it is only the reader himself who may break down. When in general, it may be added, we see readers do so, this is truly more often because they are shocked at really finding the last consistency than because they are shocked at missing it.

“Il Trionfo della Morte” and “Il Fuoco” stand together as the amplest and richest of our author’s histories, and the earlier, and more rounded and faultless thing of the two, is not unlikely to serve, I should judge, as an unsurpassable example of his talent. His accomplishment here reaches its maximum; all his powers fight for him; the wealth of his expression drapes the situation represented in a mantle of voluminous folds, stiff with elaborate embroidery. The “story” may be told in three words: how Giorgio Aurispa meets in Rome the young and extremely pretty wife of a vulgar man of business, her unhappiness with whom is complete, and, falling in love with her on the spot, eventually persuades her—after many troubled passages—to come and pass a series of weeks with him in a “hermitage” by the summer sea, where, in a delirium of free possession, he grows so to hate her, and to hate himself for his subjection to her, and for the prostration of all honour and decency proceeding from it, that his desire to destroy her even at the cost of perishing with her at last takes uncontrollable form and he drags her, under a pretext, to the edge of a sea-cliff and hurls her, interlocked with him in appalled resistance, into space. We get at an early stage the note of that aridity of agitation in which the narrator has expended treasures of art in trying to interest us. “Fits of indescribable fury made them try which could torture each other best, which most lacerate the other’s heart and keep it in martyrdom.” But they understand, at least the hero does; and he formulates for his companion the essence of theirimpasse. It is not her fault when she tears and rends.

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