'They both looked at me, somewhat confused, faintly smiling, as if they had been brought unexpectedly before some extraordinary sight which stupefied them, yet filled them with delicious sensations. They had shown me their malady, had revealed to me their suffering, had spoken to me of that melancholy prison whence they had come and whither they would return; and I, on the common highway open to all, had invited them to recognise and celebrate the spring--the spring which they had both forgotten, which they seemed to see now for the first time after many years, which they gazed at with a mingling of fear and joy as at a miracle.'
Is not this delicate in expression as the sprays of the almond blossoms themselves?
An Italian scholar, in writing to me to-day, does indeed say with considerable accuracy that the affectation in the style of D'Annunzio takes from it its freedom and sincerity, that when he is writing of almond boughs and nightingales he does not give us the impression that these things are dear to him, but rather that he is endeavouring to say the most beautiful things he can think of about them. 'His style,' says my Italian correspondent, 'is the one occupation of his life, the one absorbing interest of his work; he cares but little for nature or for human nature, except as these are strings to his lyre.' This is in a great measure a correct, if a too severe, censure. There is in him nothing of that genuine emotion which wells up in the heart of Pierre Loti as he writes; D'Annunzio is always outside that which he describes; there is in him much of the virtuoso; he reminds me of a friend of mine, a London celebrity, who once invited a party of artists to see a fine work of art in his London house. When the curtain was drawn aside, the work of art was found to be a young nude woman, of singularly beautiful proportions, extended on a rug of black bear-skins to set off the ambers and ivories and blue-vein traceries of her skin. D'Annunzio stretches his subject thus bare before him in a well-adjusted light, and calls the world to see: for the subject he has no compassion. This _preciosità_ (Anglicè, affectation) is still more apparent in his prefaces than in his works which they precede. These prefaces are long, elaborate, ornate disquisitions, with much of the euphuism of pedantic scholarship; and when in the preface to the _Trionfo_ the author claims that this licentious romance is intended to hasten and welcome the coming of the Uebermensch, it is impossible not to smile at such a pretension, and, as even De Vogüé admits, at this point we are driven to sigh for the return of the _mandolinata_. He confirms the justice of a charge of _preciosità_ himself in his introduction to _Il Piacere_, in which he speaks of 'the long and grave fatigue, the disgust which follows the painful and capricious artifices of style.' This is not the language of a true artist, for in the beauties and intricacies of style which should all have one aim--simplicity--the writer who is a true artist finds the same intimate satisfaction as the musician, the painter, the sculptor, each finds in the pursuit of his art. In style is the _sfogo_ of the writer's procreative passion. It should bring with it neither fatigue nor disgust, but the serene joys of a satisfied desire.