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GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO AND HIS NATIVE VILLAGE

BY VINCENZO MENGHI

From La Tribuna, February 8
(ROME LIBERAL DAILY)

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO had been hurt in an accident and lay unconscious. The confirmation of this news came from the municipality of Chieti, and caused a general explosion of sympathetic exclamations and a rush for more information. Amusements dragged at the fashionable seashore resort of Francavilla, and a cloud hung over the place.

The next morning I sped by motor to Pescara, D'Annunzio's native village, where I soon found Signor Nicola D'Annunzio, a cousin of the poet's and a close friend.

'Don't worry,' he said to me, 'D'Annunzio will survive this as he has his other accidents. I always said that. I said it to him again this time. Gabriele was born under a lucky star, and I do not doubt that he will recover. Think of that accident when his automobile rushed dizzily right into the midstream of the Arno. And that fall from an airplane which would surely have killed anyone else. When we were together at the University of Rome, I heard him call to me one day: one day: "What luck! What luck! My horse and I fell together when jumping a three-metre handicap. It landed safely, and I stayed in the saddle!"'

'But, then, you must know a good deal about D'Annunzio's early life!' 'I do. We used to raise the devil together. At the University, he was always absent from classes, and I was the one to secure the professors' marks for his presence. What do you expect? He always used to say that he did

not care to be branded with a diploma, and at the end of two years he- how should I express myself? - he paid no more attention to his courses. After all, he did not need them. Giosuè Carducci even informed him that he did not need to write a thesis on the Byzantine Chronicles of Sommaruga in order to emerge with a degree. He was going to make a name for himself on his own account. . . .

Here the poet's friend was interrupted by a group of workmen, tools in hand, who wanted to be informed about Gabriele D'Annunzio's condition. Finally, Signor Nicola had to use a wall as an improvised bulletin-board giving the contents of the telegrams from Gardone, where the poet lay. His physicians were quite hopeful.

To the people of Pescara, his native village, Gabriele D'Annunzio is the symbol of harmony and pacification. In his presence, party strife subsides and men feel as brethren toward each other. This spirit is invariably manifest every time the poet comes home, to breathe again the atmosphere of his childhood and to visit his mother's tomb.

He is everywhere during these visits. He is present at a contest of Abruzzesi folk-songs, at an aviation contest, at an exhibition of paintings. Even now, as he lay ill in another town, the local newspapers were spreading abroad his offer of a prize for the best poem in the Abruzzi dialect. Was this a bold defiance of his misfortune at Gardone? Was it a happy sign of imminent recovery? Neither, I think. He was

merely conscious that every movement in his native land needed him as its leader. On all public occasions his name, printed in huge characters, is a magic symbol. Once when this name, whether intentionally or not, was omitted from the announcement of some public function, the result was total failure.

When Italian Bolshevism began to show its head even in the mountain regions of the Abruzzi, when it denied homage to the fatherland, then just emerging from a deadly war, the people of Pescara revolted and the foreign Red orators were driven away. In the land of freedom for all, Red tyranny could not be tolerated. Again it was the little town of Pescara that gave the signal for a spiritual regeneration in the Abruzzi at least.

Often the town of Pescara appeals to Gabriele D'Annunzio in vain to come and share in some festivity; but he will come unfailingly, though unexpectedly, some other time, led by his longing to see his mother's resting-place.

What an object of tenderness and of sublime veneration the memory of his mother is to Gabriele D'Annunzio! Some time ago the municipality of Pescara decided to name a school of music after Luisa D'Annunzio, and informed her son about it. Here is his answer:

"You know how profound my love is for my native city, my stream, my native coast, my hills, and the sacred soil where my mother is waiting for me. "To this love a deep gratitude has been added to-day gratitude for the tribute my Pescara has paid to the memory of her whom the people justly call "blessed among women. "Please assure the Council that I shall give all assistance to the noble work. Gabriele D'Annunzio.'

Marietta, the servant who spent nearly all her life in the D'Annunzio

home, still lives there like a vestal priestess, keeping the flames at the altar of filial affection. Every day she adorns the dead mother's bed with flowers. Twice a week she brings flowers to the grave, which lies near the cemetery wall, where the sea can be seen with a pine grove as its frame. In the house itself, it is impossible to enter the room where the Saint by this name D'Annunzio remembers his motherspent her last days; to see the juvenile photographs of the poet, inscribed A mamma cara; to see the pictures Maria at the Temple, and the Vespers of Saint Gregory; to hear the subdued voice of Marietta describing the last hours of Donna Luisa, who kept calling her son from the far-away tumult of the raging war, without being deeply moved. It is not a tourist's curiosity or avidity for traveling impressions that you feel in this darkened room so much like a temple. It is rather a religious feeling; your lips involuntarily move in a prayer. Although I was invited to take as a souvenir one of the wilting violets of which there was an armful left since D'Annunzio's last visit, I could not do so. It would have been a sacrilege.

The son has many times expressed his wish to be buried next to his mother, and has even elaborated a project for his tomb-something so grandiose that it will almost entirely cover one of the emerald hillocks near Pescara.

As a matter of fact, however, the more he thinks about death the closer life takes him in its grip, the more new vigor it gives him for new undertakings. He miraculously escaped the last great danger that has threatened him. But it has been the wish of Gabriele D'Annunzio to make of his last years a sacrifice of love and self-negation, an effort to realize the ideal of fraternity among Italians. He still has a great humane mission to accomplish.

(Poems from Georgian Poetry, 1920–1922)

WHEN ALL IS SAID

F. D. C. PELLOW

WHEN all is said
And all is done
Beneath the Sun,
And Man lies dead;

When all the earth
Is a cold grave,
And no more brave
Bright things have birth;

When cooling sun
And stone-cold world,
Together hurled,
Flame up as one

O Sons of Men,
When all is flame,
What of your fame
And splendor then?
When all is fire
And flaming air,
What of your rare
And high desire

To turn the clod
To a thing divine,
The earth a shrine,
And Man the God?

IN MEMORIAM D. O. M.

WILLIAM KERR

CHESTNUT candles are lit again
For the dead that died in spring:
Dead lovers walk the orchard ways,
And the dead cuckoos sing.

Is it they who live and we who are dead?
Hardly the springtime knows
For which to-day the cuckoo calls,
And the white blossom blows.

Listen and hear the happy wind
Whisper and lightly pass:

'Your love is sweet as hawthorn is, Your hope green as the grass.

"The hawthorn's faint and quickly

gone,

The grass in autumn dies;

Put by your life, and see the spring With everlasting eyes.'

LOST LOVE

ROBERT GRAVES

His eyes are quickened so with grief,
He can watch a grass or leaf
Every instant grow; he can
Clearly through a flint wall see,
Or watch the startled spirit flee
From the throat of a dead man.

Across two counties he can hear, And catch your words before you speak.

The woodlouse or the maggot's weak Clamor rings in his sad ear;

And noise so slight it would surpass Credence drinking sound of grass, Worm-talk, clashing jaws of moth Chumbling holes in cloth:

The groan of ants who undertake Gigantic loads for honor's sakeTheir sinews creak, their breath comes thin:

Whir of spiders when they spin, And minute whispering, mumbling, sighs

Of idle grubs and flies.

This man is quickened so with
grief,

He wanders godlike or like thief
Inside and out, below, above,
Without relief seeking lost love.

LIFE, LETTERS, AND THE ARTS

THE RUSSIAN THEATRICAL INVASION

THIS is the day of things Russian in European theatres and (when Europe has got through with them) for these United States as well. Earliest came Sergei de Diaghileff with his Russian ballet, the first treasure from the apparently inexhaustible mines of the • Russian theatre. That was before the revolution. The Diaghileff ballet was a natural growth of the art of the dance as it had been practised in Russia for generations, but it was not a native growth. It had reached its perfection outside of Russia, and to this day the Diaghileff ballet - as America, as America, France, and England know it has never been seen in Russia itself.

After them came Balieff's super-cabaret, which is known in Russia as the Letutchaya Muish- an imposing array of consonants and vowels which means nothing more than the 'Bat,' or, to translate exactly into Elizabethan English, the 'Flittermouse.' In the course of time Balieff moved to Paris, where Letutchaya Muish was Frenchified into the Chauve-Souris, and after the French public had been delighted for many moons, moved on to London, where it became "The Bat' pure and simple. But when Balieff was ready to come to New York, he found his title preëmpted by a play of- to put it mildly - a very different sort. And so this characteristically Russian company came to New York under its French title, Chauve-Souris. Why it could not be Letutchaya Muish in New York as well as Moscow has never been explained, but French it was and French presumably it will remain.

After them came Stanislavskii's wonderful company from the Moscow Art Theatre, who happily are in America

still. They, too, moved westward along the trail that Balieff had blazed. And now another is on its way. Alexander Tairoff of the Moscow Kamerny Theatre- that is, 'Chamber Theatre' has reached the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées. The Kamerny Theatre is an offshoot of the Moscow Art Theatre. It might be more accurate to say it is a rebellion against the Moscow Art Theatre by a group of enthusiasts most of whom had seceded from Stanislavskii's organization, and looked upon the methods of their master as out of date. They believed that in his hands the methods of extreme realism and ultra-naturalism had reached their limit, and they united under the leadership of Tairoff, who had already distinguished himself with the short-lived Moscow Free Theatre.

Tairoff declared war upon what he called the 'stationary' theatre. He aimed to free the stage from subjection to literature, to realism, and to the scenic artist. He pinned his hope to the actor. Not the text, not the scenery, not the setting, but the actor alone was to make the play. He put his company through a relentless course of training: gymnastics, dancing, fencing, and even purely acrobatic exercises to supple limbs and body, while the other elements of technique, such as elocution, singing, and gesture, received their share of attention. In his new book recently published in Moscow, The Notebook of a Producer, Tairoff insists that

The actor must be perfect not only in the manipulation of his stage-instrument, but he must also be endowed with a creative power which will permit him to give expression at any given moment to the

desired scale of emotions.

Tairoff does not believe in painted backgrounds in two dimensions. Apparently his admirers regard this as an extremely daring and radical view on his part, but those who are not so entirely swept away with admiration may find time to wonder who does believe in this kind of scenery any longer. Even our museums are working in three dimensions nowadays in their animal groups.

At any rate, the Kamerny Theatre discards painted canvas and erects architectonic constructions of its own, these of course being held in strict subordination to the players. It has a fondness, too, for moving appliances, such as rotating tables, swings, seesaws, and even the trapdoors beloved of Shakespeare and his fellows.

It is curious to note the rigid selection to which the Russian producers subject their repertoire as soon as they leave their native shores. This is true of the Moscow Art Theatre, which has included in its foreign repertoire only such plays as 'Tsar Feodor Ivanovitch,' the 'Lower Depths,' and plays by Chekhov, with which it made its first successes twenty-five years ago. It has produced abroad little or nothing dating after 1904. Similarly, the Kamerny Theatre is not producing Russian plays at all in Paris. Its repertoire includes 'Phèdre,' Scribe's 'Adrienne Lecouvreur,' Oscar Wilde's 'Salome,' the harlequinade 'Princess Brombilla' after Hoffmann, and Lecoq's operetta 'Giroflé-Girofla.'

It is expected that the Kamerny Theatre will go on to London sometime this spring.

WILHELM RÖNTGEN

L'Europe Nouvelle, the French Liberal weekly, thus renders justice to a celebrity of enemy birth:

'He is dead. His life was a good deal

that of the typical German professor, the professor with the long, bushy beard, but without the traditional spectacles. He was born on the twentyseventh of March, 1845, in the neighborhood of Düsseldorf, of a family in modest circumstances. He studied at various German universities and at Zurich, and was a good student. He became Privat-dozent, then assistantprofessor at Wurzburg and at Strassburg. He published many scholarly treatises on the phenomena of capillarity and other subjects in the Annalen der Physik und der Chemie. Then, in December 1895, came the discovery that made him famous, the X-rays.

'In 1899 he was called to an honorary professorship at the University of Munich. He was covered with honors and titles; became "Excellency," privy councillor, member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, commander of high orders, and so forth. Berlin could not secure him, though the Prussian Academy of Sciences also elected him to membership. In 1900 he received the Nobel Prize in physics. He had the rare honor of having a statue erected to him during his lifetime, at Berlin. Nothing further of especial interest occurred during the rest of his life, which came to a peaceful close last week at Munich at the age of seventyeight.

'And yet, two facts. After his great discovery this man continued to live his former simple life. Fame did not intoxicate him. He showed no thirst for money; he remained true to his modest apartment in the Briennerstrasse in Munich, to the old Munich Gemütlichkeit, and to his laboratory at the University. The laurels of Professor Ostwald of Leipzig, who boasted of his internationalism and indulged in German propaganda that spread even to France itself, did not seem to Röntgen worthy of imitation.

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