DOI article:
Benson, Eugene: Gabriele d'Annunzio: the new poet and his work
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.38746#0296
292
Gabriele d’Annunzio
diseased and degenerate types, showing the same fervour and
interest that he does when he deals with health and beauty*
Under the pretext of science or truth, he serves a bad turn to
art; he confounds beauty and the normal life with all life; affects
to be god-like, superior to matter, and handles the unclean and
the clean, forgetting that the first business of the man and the
artist is to discriminate between good and bad. T he error of not
choosing the better part will correct, or rather it has corrected
itself, since the writer has turned from the romance of the street
to the romance of the garden.
It is in d’Annunzio’s new romance that we see his choice is
determined by a higher ideal of life than in his former prose, that
the things not nice of realism are abandoned, left buried with the
debris of their day ; their corruption dooms them to be forgotten.
Pestiferous literature has short lease of life. If one goes to
UInnocente and Giovanni Episcopo to learn more about d’Annunzio,
one is in danger of taking his exuberant fiction for fact. They
but show the rank “ dressing ” of his former days. Most readers
stop at that, unmindful of, or without seeing, the perfect flowers
of beauty grown out of it. It is true that the heroes of his earlier
romances are not only slaves to animal functions, but they are
more dangerous than animals: they are fatal to the very women
they love ; they have the taint and the action of madness. They
are not so aspiring as Milton’s lion “ pawing to get free his hinder
parts ” ; at the best they are but like dolphins showing their backs
above the element they delight in ; they have no more moral sense
than a water snake ; they have something of Borgia, of Cellini, of
Aretino, of Casanova ; they are stiffening and repugnant to our
sense of rectitude, for they illustrate not rectitude but excess.
The experiences d’Annunzio has written of, with consummate
gifts of expression, in L'Innocente and in Giovanni Episcopo, are
usually
Gabriele d’Annunzio
diseased and degenerate types, showing the same fervour and
interest that he does when he deals with health and beauty*
Under the pretext of science or truth, he serves a bad turn to
art; he confounds beauty and the normal life with all life; affects
to be god-like, superior to matter, and handles the unclean and
the clean, forgetting that the first business of the man and the
artist is to discriminate between good and bad. T he error of not
choosing the better part will correct, or rather it has corrected
itself, since the writer has turned from the romance of the street
to the romance of the garden.
It is in d’Annunzio’s new romance that we see his choice is
determined by a higher ideal of life than in his former prose, that
the things not nice of realism are abandoned, left buried with the
debris of their day ; their corruption dooms them to be forgotten.
Pestiferous literature has short lease of life. If one goes to
UInnocente and Giovanni Episcopo to learn more about d’Annunzio,
one is in danger of taking his exuberant fiction for fact. They
but show the rank “ dressing ” of his former days. Most readers
stop at that, unmindful of, or without seeing, the perfect flowers
of beauty grown out of it. It is true that the heroes of his earlier
romances are not only slaves to animal functions, but they are
more dangerous than animals: they are fatal to the very women
they love ; they have the taint and the action of madness. They
are not so aspiring as Milton’s lion “ pawing to get free his hinder
parts ” ; at the best they are but like dolphins showing their backs
above the element they delight in ; they have no more moral sense
than a water snake ; they have something of Borgia, of Cellini, of
Aretino, of Casanova ; they are stiffening and repugnant to our
sense of rectitude, for they illustrate not rectitude but excess.
The experiences d’Annunzio has written of, with consummate
gifts of expression, in L'Innocente and in Giovanni Episcopo, are
usually