CRITICAL STUDIES

CONTENTS


I. GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO

II. GEORGES DARIEN

III. THE ITALIAN NOVELS OF MARION CRAWFORD

IV. LE SECRET DU PRÉCEPTEUR

V. L'IMPÉRIEUSE BONTÉ

VI. WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

VII. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

VIII. UNWRITTEN LITERARY LAWS

IX. AUBERON HERBERT

X. THE UGLINESS OF MODERN LIFE

XI. THE QUALITY OF MERCY

XII. THE DECADENCE OF LATIN RACES

XIII. ALMA VENIESIA




CRITICAL STUDIES




I

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO


In the world of letters the name of Gabriele d'Annunzio is now famous.
There is no cultured society which does not know something at least of
the author of the _Innocente_ and the _Trionfo_, and is not aware that,
in him, one of the ablest and most delicate of living critics believes
that he has seen the personification of a renascence of Latin genius.
Imprisoned as his novels were in the limits of a language which, however
great its beauty, is but little known except in its own land, he has
been extraordinarily fortunate in finding such sponsors in the outside
world as he has obtained in M. Herelle, in René Doumic, and in the
Vicomte de Vogüé. Never has any romance been so admirably heralded as
the _Trionfo_ in the _Révue des Deux Mondes_, and never certainly, since
lyre was strung or laurels were woven, was any praise ever heard so
dulcet and so lavish as that with which he, who has been called the
second Chateaubriand, has welcomed and introduced the new Boccaccio.

The grace and beauty of the style of the Vicomte de Vogüé, and the
culture of his intelligence, have gained him in literature this name of
the second Chateaubriand. They are both incontestable. But they are apt
to lead his readers away from the consideration of the value of his
literary judgments. He is a critic of exquisite delicacy and fineness,
but also of great enthusiasms, and these enthusiasms are at times much
stronger than his judgment and overpower it. What he admires he admires
_toto corde_, and is apt to lose in this generous ardour his power of
selection, his accuracy of appraisement.

This fact has been always conspicuous in all his writings on Pasteur,
and it has been equally conspicuous in the unmeasured idolatry with
which he has dipped his pen in all the honey of Hymettus to sing the
praises of the man he loves. But this adoption of D'Annunzio into French
literature has, with its incontestable advantages, equal penalties and
disadvantages for the author; for one reader outside Italy who will read
him in the original text, ten thousand will know him only in the French
version, and twenty thousand will accept De Vogüé's description of his
works without attempting to judge those for themselves. In the French
version the romances gain in certain points; their excessive detail is
abridged, their crudities are softened down, their wearisome analyses
and too frequent obscenities are omitted. The translations of M. Herelle
are, as all must know, admirable in grace and elegance, but, though as
perfect as translations which are guilty of continual excisions can be,
they fail to render the genius of D'Annunzio as it is to be seen and
felt by those who read the works in the original tongue. In the French
version they are much milder, much more tempered, much less unbridled,
and much less cynically nude; but they are also much less vigorous,
virile, impassioned, and furiously scornful. Many fine passages have
been esteemed _longueurs_, and have been omitted altogether, and entire
chapters have been sacrificed to the exigencies of taste or of space.

In the French edition of the _Trionfo_, nearly the whole book, entitled
_La Vita Nuova_, containing the pilgrimage to Casalbordino is omitted.
But without perusal of this marvellous reproduction of a scene of
Italian fanaticism and frenzy, and of similar portions of his works, it
is impossible to estimate fully the real D'Annunzio, and judge of his
magnificent powers of observation and description, as well as of his
incessant search for what is loathsome, his cruel exultation in his
examination of physical diseases and moral leprosies.

I know not why this pilgrimage was rejected, for it is not more indecent
than other portions of the book, and it is singularly true to certain
phases of Italian life, in which all the Paganism bred in the blood and
bone of the people is displayed, mixed with the ferocity of Christian
bigotry. Let me here translate the opening of it:--