Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/422

404 In many respects D'Annunzio presents a strong affinity to Keats; but to the innocent sensuousness which rejoices in the reproduction of sumptuous beauty, he adds that which purposely ministers to voluptuousness. This might be forgiven as the failing of a youthful and ardent poet, and becomes, indeed, much less obtrusive in his later poetical writings. The misfortune is that nothing seems to be taking its place. Had years brought D'Annunzio "the philosophic mind," had his third volume compared with its predecessors as Locksley Hall and In Memoriam compare with the Lotus Eaters, he would be at the head, not merely of Italian, but of European poets. His most recent productions, while indicating, as must almost inevitably be the case, an impoverishment of the merely sensuous opulence of his youth, manifest but slight advance in power of thought, in dignity of utterance, in human or national sympathies, in anything that discriminates the noon of poetical power from its morning. The Canto Novo (1881) and the Intermezzo (1883) were a splendid dawn; and L'Isotteo (1885) and La Chimera (1888) revealed further development, not indeed in power of thought, but in objectivity and in mastery of form. Much of all these volumes is mere voluptuous dreaming, but the pictures of nature are marvellously vivid; such pieces as the little unrhymed lyric of twelve lines, O falce di luna calante, reveal the natural magic which is perhaps the rarest endowment of genius; and the melody is such as is only granted to a true poet. In the Poema Paradisiaco, the joy of life is evidently on the wane, and, except in a few pieces of exquisite pathos, such as Consolazione, seems in danger of being replaced, not by a nobler and more serious theory of life, but by the worst kind of pessimism, that born of mere satiety. The most