The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (11.1896)

294

Gabriele d’Annunzio

fastidious artist. He is like a musician who writes—the melodious
element prevails ; he is like a painter who paints—colour prevails;
he is like a worker in marble or metal—form prevails. He is a
writer who, like George Sand, like Gautier, like Swinburne, has
measureless power and a supreme sense of beauty to express his
sense of life and art. Individual and intense, he looked isolated,
like Baudelaire, with questionable tendencies and preferences. He
seems to have escaped the abasement of the unclean, stained, but
not transformed by the thing he worked in when dealing with the
baser experiences of life.
While Baudelaire is close, severe, terse, d’Annunzio is open,
pliant, and abundant. Now and again you get from his poetry a
note, not disavowed, from Shakespeare, from Shelley, from
Baudelaire, from Walt Whitman, from Tennyson. The Northern
novelists have led him to treat of crime and punishment. With
all these elements from the ferment of our modern moral and
intellectual life, he has remained himself, a new talent, a personal
talent, enriched, not dominated by others, maker and master of his
own expression, renewing for us purely Italian types of life and art.
Finally the poet has triumphed over the realist. It is in his later
prose, and in his later verse, that he shows the inevitable change
brought about by time and suffering. It holds a mystic element.
He uses the Natural as the symbol of the Spiritual.
The poet is triumphant.

II
The poet has manifested himself more varied in style than the
prose writer. He began with a sense of clean-cut classic form,
objective, Pagan, unacquainted with the maladies of the intro-
spective mind, and he produced masterpieces of Greek-like beauty
that