The Thinking Corner

The Flame of D'Annunzio

Years ago I read a panegyric by Arnold Bennett upon the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel The Flame of Life — that elaboration of his amour with the famous Eleonora Duse. Lately I went through the book. D'Annunzio the poet has tried to be at full blast in its prose. But I am afraid this heated prose has not the vibrant genuineness I prize. Though there is no doubt that D'Annunzio has an extremely expressive mind, his expression here is rarely shot with imagination enough to make it great poetic literature. I find him more a rhetorician than a poet. There is a basic want of piercing felicitous vision and intuition in his language, and to cover that lack he has brought an artificial vehemence, a forced intensity.

The true furor poeticus does not shout and gesticulate: it has a deep reserve in the midst of even its dithyrambs: one feels that the Word simply has to be itself and its revelation is secured, there is no need to usher it with stage-effect and a flourish of trumpets. D'Annunzio appears mostly to clutch his words by the hair and drag them out, and, even then, they are generally the wrong sort! Wrong not in the sense of entire inappositeness, for whatever is said has a point and a power, but both point and power are without the crystallised keenness which forms poetry. The creative idea and the creative vision are absent and instead we have the oratorical effect, the theatrical gesture. The theme of the book is excellent because it deals with lights and shades of emotion and character which are of considerable value; only, the treatment of them is not equal to their intrinsic worth.

D'Annunzio tries almost throughout to keep up a high pitch of imaginative excitement but succeeds in producing little except verbal fever. There comes to one in all supreme passages of literature a perfect balance of vision and word, of thought and tone. No excess is there, resulting in mere sound-fury or falsetto. Poetry has been described as a fine

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excess, but it is not an extravagance or a violence; it goes beyond the ordinary pitch of feeling and range of sight in order to give richness and magic, yet the strange new light falls as if from an atmosphere to which it is completely natural - it carries an authentic spontaneity, while D'Annunzio again and again seems to shake and fume and vociferate as though somehow the dream divine failed to glow and he were attempting to create a glaring heat to make us forget that the revelatory light is not there, it is quite true that in places the inspiration is genuine; still, he has the air of always giving us an apocalypse whereas in reality it is only brilliant fireworks that we get. The poet in him has seen and felt the wonder and beauty of Venice and the moonlight that is love; hence we cannot escape being filled with a sense of the greatness of the theme and the picture, yet this is in spite of the writer and his work! We receive the touch of stupendous upheavals of experience without actually being stirred to our foundations by the account of them in the book. The tone is generally too loud, the writer thinks we would not catch the deepest secrets unless he bawled them out. D'Annunzio has flogged his heart and mind and the outcome is a many-coloured shriek. A man of immature genius has written the book: the genius is perceived in a certain verve and rush but it is put at the service of a pseudo-aesthetic consciousness which likes to be showy and dramatic: it underlines thickly every little phrase as an utterance of superlative value and it overcrowds every moment of experience with superfluous tensions. The play of the poet in D'Annunzio is obscured by the lavishness of the actor: a thousand pities! - since a really beautiful and profound subject is treated, a subject which should have given rise to a piercing and mighty yet unpretentious splendour.

Surely, episodes occur where the language and attitude escape being hectic. Whenever Richard Wagner is introduced, we at once catch something genuine. The picture of him alive or in a faint or in the sleep of death is always impressive: somehow he seems to be the undeclared hero of

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the book - a hero mostly absent from the foreground of the story but present as a kind of ideal throughout. Perhaps D'Annunzio meant him to compare with Stelio Effrena, the central figure, and to confirm the portrayal of poetic frenzy attempted in the latter. I, however, find that he serves as a touchstone which shows up the rhetorical exuberance of Stelio by his quiet and tremendous authenticity. Other passages of beauty can also be extricated: I liked the whole incident of the dogs in Lady Myrta's garden - there is in it a speed of imagination and a sympathetic insight. Then, the visit to the workshop where delicate dreams are shaped to glassware is memorable. I wish everything were as truly conceived and executed, and the language everywhere charged with the poetic vision such as animates the phrase about the stones of Venice "along the hidden veins of which the human spirit rises towards the ideal as the sap ascends to the flower through the fibres of the plant" - or the simple yet vividly true sentence: "And the still formless work he was nourishing leapt with a great shudder of life" - or, finally, that most magnificent image in the whole book: "An infinite smile diffused itself there, so infinite that the lines of her mouth trembled in it like leaves in the wind, her teeth shone in it like jasmine blossoms in the light of stars - the slenderest of shapes in a vast element." Why cannot the man write always like that if he has a penchant for the prodigious? Or else why cannot he avoid the empty painted hysteria in which he so often luxuriates and express himself with a controlled beauty that never rings false?

Well, D'Annunzio has to be D'Annunzio, I suppose - and there must be many to admire him for being what he is. I cannot bring myself to worship either the writer or much of the man. The figure he cuts in Isadora Duncan's autobiography is very equivocal: one is made to think that he can play divinely the lover but at the same time there is an impression of shallowness and gush. It strikes me that there is too much conscious poetry about him - and whenever a thing like poetry which has to be deeply one with the pulse

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and the breath of life becomes outwardly conscious, it is liable to degenerate into a pose or at least an ornamental superficiality. The true poet is not over-anxious to flaunt the colours of his soul: his soul is too sensitive to bear a naked public exhibition - it is only to a few he undrapes himself and then too the undraping takes place almost unconsciously as if the secret form of his being caught fire with its own intensity and all the veils and coverings got burnt up. Or his genius and beauty reveal themselves by a mysterious movement which renders the veil concealing them vibrant with a dumb ecstasy, as it were - a warm darkness proclaiming most naturally the living light behind. No show, no unnecessary eclat but a wonderfully revelatory reticence - that is the mark of the poet in life. Or if the reticence is not always there, a spontaneous bubbling as of a crystal-clear spring is felt - a white laughter and luminosity held out by a nature that has the simple calm and unpretentious firmness of rock. In any case, a quiet strength and authenticity surrounds and frames all that shimmer and flow. No matter how keen the rush, how bright the rapture, there is invariably a quality of inspired sleep accompanying them: that is to say, a kind of unconscious naturalness and inevitability with nothing cheap and vulgar and theatrical about it, though this does not preclude the grand pride or godlike confidence that inspiration has in itself through a Dante or a Milton or a Shakespeare sonneteering about his "powerful rhyme" and its ability to outlast monuments of brass and marble. Sometimes the sterling artist and the gaudy actor co-exist: but we must never mix them up and even when we cherish the former we must realise how the latter flaws and diminishes him.

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