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قراءة كتاب Critical Studies

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Critical Studies

Critical Studies

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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classical kind, profound as well as brilliant; and his poetic powers were shown in his sonnets and lyrics before he wrote his romances. Zola is no scholar, and is not, either in temperament or expression, a poet. It would be impossible to conceive him creating such a poem as the Villa Chigi or the Riccordi di Ripetta of D'Annunzio. There are passages in Zola's works, notably in La Terre, which are, I think, as great as it is possible for prose to be, but they are never touched by any poetry of phrase or feeling.

Also, when De Vogüé states that the indecency of D'Annunzio is not indecency because the Italian language is never indecent, and alleges that what would be insupportable in any other tongue is possible in Italian, because Italian enjoys the privilege which pertained to its mother, Latin, i.e., to say with grace and impunity what in any other tongue would disgust the hearer, he says what is absolutely untrue; and one can only wonder if he knows anything of the Italian of the streets, of the fields, of the wine-houses, of the popular theatres. In this affirmation, as in others, he has imagined what he says to be the fact, and founded on the fabrications of his imagination a positive statement. It is a frequent habit with him, and makes the weakness of his arguments in many instances, on other themes than this.

We know that Italian is heard only occasionally by him during his visits to Italy, and is then heard by him only in its polished speech. To those by whom it is heard every day, as spoken by all classes, it certainly possesses nothing of this privilege which he claims for it. It can be, on the contrary, very coarse and crude; it has none of the subtleties and graces, and delicate gradations of French: it calls a spade a spade with the rudest frankness; and its curses are of an appalling ferocity and filthiness.

Nor can it be said that D'Annunzio ever tries to give it delicacy or veiled suggestion; his language is as broad and as gross as that of Ovid or Catullus. He never allows the smallest doubt about his meaning to exist at any time; and he is most especially explicit when treating of those subjects which in modern literature are generally considered forbidden. Indeed, this anxiety to paint the brothel and the madhouse as carefully and minutely as the miniaturist paints on the ivory, leads to his great defect, over-elaboration. He does not trust enough to the power of suggestion, which is so strong in a great writer over the mind of a reader. He does not remember that half a chord may fill the ear with melody, and that a hint may rouse the senses to nausea or to desire.

Paradoxical as it may appear to say so, I think his wide culture has injured his style. I think he would have been a greater Italian writer if he had known no language save Italian and, of course, Latin and Greek.

The extreme culture and over-variety of modern education tends to destroy, or at least disturb, originality; it encumbers the mind under too vast a load of riches, it enlightens, but it also obstructs; if Shakespeare had been less ignorant he might, perhaps, have been also less great.

Foreign influence is not beneficial to the Italian. It makes him unreal; it makes him lose his charming natural grace and abandonment, it renders him artificial; he never really becomes what is implied by the word cosmopolitan (such a cosmopolitan as Lord Dufferin or the late Prince Lobanoff), and he does lose much of his own national qualities. It is very rarely that an Italian can, like the late lamented scholar Enrico Nencioni, steep his mind deeply in all the riches of foreign literature without in the least losing his own Italian individuality. D'Annunzio, on the contrary, allows himself to be absorbed and assimilated by foreign influences, to be dominated by them, to so great an extent indeed that his style is frequently bastardised by them, and many of his sentences read as though they were translations from foreign sources. He claims to have greatly embellished and amplified the Italian language; he has certainly rendered it more colloquial and more copious; but he has often grafted foreign idioms upon it, and he has perhaps robbed it of some of its dignity and grace. He considers that the artist should always remodel the instrument he uses; but the figure will not hold good in other arts, for Sarasate does not carve the shell of his violin, Clausen does not weave the canvas he uses, Bartolomé does not blast the marble out of the hill-side. The writer should use the language he writes in as it comes pure from its natural springs; he will but contaminate it if he pour into it alien streams.

D'Annunzio would probably protest that the patchwork effects of the foreign languages he introduces, do but correctly represent the mixture of tongues common in our days in those phases of life which pass under the generic name of society. In such protest there would, no doubt, be truth; but it could only apply to certain social scenes in the Piacere, and my objection is less to the introduction of foreign phrases directly than it is to the foreign complexion and contour which he so frequently gives to his own language; a fault never before him known in an Italian writer. Many of his phrases are of foreign construction. But he is not on that account a plagiarist, as has been said of him; he is never a plagiarist, but is a too highly educated, and a too sensitively susceptible, mental organisation. The mean charge of plagiarism is one so easy to bring and so difficult to refute, that it is cast by envy and inferiority at all those whose genius, like that of D'Annunzio, is proud, passionate, and defiant of criticism. That which has in it the elements of true greatness has always these pellets of mud thrown at it. In some ways, on the contrary, he seems to seek an exaggeration of original idiosyncrasies, and to no writer would conscious imitation be more odious or impossible.

There is unhappily, in all his works, an absolute absence of wit, of mirth, of humour. There is not a laugh, scarcely even a smile, in any of his pages; if we except the cruel laughter of a lover at his mistress's physical defects. Over all his genius there broods that 'green melancholy,' which is the too-common hue of modern thought, that dull greyness of death which has spread from the laboratories of science over all the worlds of literature. Not only is no joyous laugh ever heard, there is not even the indulgent smile which relieves melancholy and bitterness in many writers whose views of life are gloomy. Nowhere is this more seen than in the almost savage cruelty with which the poor old dévote, Gioconda Aurispa, is drawn; the merciless description of her senile love of sweetmeats, of her disappointment when her nephew forgets to bring them, of her expectant eyes, 'almost impudent in their entreaty,' of her short breath with its fœtid odour, of her tottering steps amongst her flowers; all is cruel, merciless, without a grain of pity or of sympathy to redeem its biting satire of so feeble and harmless a creature.

Compare with such treatment the exquisite tenderness of Pierre Loti's Tante Claire, think with how gentle a respect Thackeray drew the death of an old man, remember the touch with which Maupassant makes us akin even to poor Boule de Suiffe. Tragedy is not necessarily cruelty, nor accuracy necessarily brutality. Shakespeare makes us indignant for Lear and sharers in his sorrows; but D'Annunzio would concentrate our thoughts only on his ridiculous thin hair blown by the winter winds, the tremor of his toothless jaws, and palsy of his bent, unsteady limbs. In the highest art there is always pity because there is always comprehension. D'Annunzio has as yet no more pity than the demonstrator

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