Chapter 1 of 9 · 3963 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

[Illustration: Cover art]

[Frontispiece: Gabriele d'Annunzio]

THE DAUGHTER OF JORIO

A PASTORAL TRAGEDY

BY GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY CHARLOTTE PORTER, PIETRO ISOLA AND ALICE HENRY

WITH A PORTRAIT AND PICTURES FROM THE ITALIAN PRODUCTION

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1907

Published November, 1907

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

TO THE LAND OF THE ABRUZZI, TO MY MOTHER TO MY SISTERS, TO MY BROTHERS ALSO TO MY FATHER, ENTOMBED, TO ALL MY DEAD AND TO ALL MY RACE BETWEEN THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA THIS SONG OF THE ANTIQUE BLOOD I CONSECRATE

INTRODUCTION

An elemental savor of the savage blood of the ancient race clings to the country of the Abruzzi. This elemental quality, intensely impressional and tragic, underlies the light sensitive beauty and bright artistic grace characteristic of Italy in general.

The lore and customs of the native folk, growing the vine and olive in the sunny slopes running seaward to the southern Adriatic, have been shut away from the easy touch of western Europe by the towering ridge of the Apennines, on whose rugged slopes the sheep are pastured. It is still the most archaic, the most stubbornly unmetropolitan corner of Italy. Here, even more than elsewhere in the country beloved of all other younger countries, the mediæval and the Pagan worlds linger intimately together, blending faiths and customs. It is a good soil and a fertile for growing an enduring masterpiece that shall gather Italy up into its being, and taste of the profound, immortal heart of the land.

In this land of the Abruzzi, and in the dim enchanted epoch of "once upon a time," "The Daughter of Jorio" is set. As the drama unfolds it carries with it this charmed atmosphere. Who reads or hears this "song of the antique blood" is suddenly at home, too, in the Abruzzi, and catches the life along with the music of many years ago.

As descendants from the Abruzzi stock, two friends--D'Annunzio, the poet, and Michetti, the painter, travelled throughout their fatherland together, faring up the majestic snow-cloaked Maella and the precipitous Gran Sasso, to and fro among the rocky sheepsteads and caverns of the mountains, and along the bordering stretches of sea-shore.

They heard, then, a name, spoken in a way belonging to common custom there. Grown persons in this pastoral region are still known in patriarchal manner, not by their own names but merely as son or daughter of their father. The melody of the name thus heard haunted the memories of the artist-travellers. As the gipsy refrain Browning heard while a boy thrilled his blood like a call from the Wild--"Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!" and bore poetic fruit long afterward in "The Flight of the Duchess," so, likewise, this sonorous name stirred the secret chords of artistic response in the imagination of these two friends and bore subconscious fruit in them. The fruit is different enough, yet of a kindred germ and flavor. Each has rendered it as a tribute to the mother-country in whose traditions he was cradled.

The name they heard--"La figlia di Jorio," meaning much to them, little to another,--may now be understood to be in itself eloquent of the old tribal feeling. This feeling, sinking the son in the father, places him apart from any other rule or influence than that of his own kith and kin. It admits no honorable union with one outside the clan without pang and social upheaval.

The mere name thus held within it, for the imaginative conception of genius, the seed of tragic social clash between alien castes or warring rival families. Such clash between warring Italian families Shakespeare showed in the love of a Capulet and a Montague. The imperative elemental drawing together of Juliet and her Romeo ran counter to long-established grooves of social cleavage. It was a cleavage not to be welded except through the woe and spiritual triumph of love. Such clash between the established pastoral clan and the outcast is the theme which slumbered in this name for both D'Annunzio and Michetti. D'Annunzio's development of it leads by a different path to a triumph of love as spiritually exalting and as socially significant as Shakespeare's.

For Michetti, the haunting name resulted, shortly after their journey, in some wonderful pictures,--sketches in water-color for a great painting in oil, now owned in Berlin, where it gives lustre to the Geeger collection,--later a large pastel exhibited in 1895, in the International Exposition of the Fine Arts at Venice.

Michetti's imagination presented the daughter of Jorio as a wanderer, with a cloak covering her head and held shieldingly over the breast by the right hand, while she passes a group of staring rustics. Her long rushing strides, as of one who "knows well the pathways," have a strangely alluring motion, like that of a majestic hunted fugitive. One of the five men whose gaze she attracts is riveted by her look. To the others she means less than nothing. She is an outcast or a laughing-stock. To this one she means a mystic appeal thrown into his life to stamp it forever.

Not until many years after the journey through the Abruzzi, in 1903, at Mettuno, the haunting name, fused with some germinal impression flowing from Michetti's pictures, resulted for D'Annunzio in his "La Figlia di Jorio." The plot is of his own pure imagination all compact. It rests upon no legend, he says. The creative idea came in a compelling influence that gripped him while busied in other absorbing poetic work belonging to a series he has had in mind, and involving historic research in the past of Italy. These annals of the Malatesta this sudden influence bade him put aside. It called him, instead, to pour himself out, with an ardor imperious and self-assured, in a glowing flood of strongly-stressed rhythmic poetry. The flood of fire took molten shape in this tragedy. It embodied not the historic life of warring nobles, but the obscure, toiling, pastoral life of antique Italy.

The result is a tragedy vividly spectacular, dramatically strong and simple. The picturesque loveliness belonging to the opening of each act is cut sharply across with the ruthless inrush of direct vital action. Into the graceful beauty of the lyrical espousal scene of the first Act is thrust the pitiless hunting down of Mila, the daughter of Jorio, by the brutal barking band of reapers. In the midst of the serene idealism of the uplifted group in Aligi's meagre mountain cave, where, in the second Act, love and art and insight reinforce and befriend each other, close, even, upon the sanctity of the kiss of the kneeling lovers, is thrust the crass bestial domination of the lusty Lazaro, equipped and privileged to do his evil will. This, perforce, leads to the lightning stroke of the murder. Finally, in the third Act, the poetic veil of meandering lament and tender commiseration of the kindred for the stricken family is rent away by the brusque entrance, the swift direct speech, and decisive help of the daughter of Jorio. The self-sacrifice of her ripened transcendent love is then the opportunity for concentrating against her the blind clamor of their crude social justice. The final climax of contrasts is attained by these tumultuous voices of the surging mob on the one side crying, "To the fire, to the flames with the daughter of Jorio!" and, on the other side, by the voice of the clear-sighted Ornella calling in majesty, "Mila, Mila! My sister in Jesus, I kiss your two feet that bear you away! Heaven is for thee!" and the soaring, rapturous voice of Mila, the outcast, who has taken all their sins upon herself, and who cries, "The flame is beautiful! The flame is beautiful!"

These clear-cut contrasts are masterly for the stage either of the theatre or the human breast. They strike to the quick of each character, to the core of the meaning of every situation. Throwing open each particular heart in its degree to comprehension, they reveal it also to sympathy. At the same time they cast upon the social sanction of the evil domination of Lazaro and upon the separate woes of all those "who suffer and know not wherefore," the larger light insensibly illumining the plot as a whole and disclosing its typical relation to the plot of life in general. Thus, in the emotionalized manner possible only to genius at mountain-peak moments, the play illumines the perennial relations of a predestined love to art and aspiration and of all three to social life, which sacrifices all three when it wists not what it does.

The vivid picturesqueness of such scenes as those of the espousal rites, in the first Act; the mourning of the kindred, and the folk-judgment of the third Act; the interesting figures of Malde, the treasure-seeker, the herb gatherer, and the wise old saint of the mountain of the second Act; in fact, the homely episodes of pastoral life throughout the drama rest upon traditional customs and rooted beliefs of the Abruzzi.

At Pratola, Peligna, and other places in the Abruzzi the mother-in-law receives her son's bride into her house with a nuptial ritual full of poetic symbolism,--a ritual independent of that of the Church. According to Antonio de Nino,--whose work on the "Habits and Customs of the Abruzzi" scientifically verifies the folk-lore D'Annunzio puts alive before us,--the mother breaks the bread, the symbol of fertility, over the son and the daughter. And as she touches the forehead, breast, and shoulders, she says: "May we live together like Christians and not like cats and dogs." She initiates her new daughter to her fireside by calling to her notice home-objects to which special virtue was attributed: the andiron-chain that could lull storms; the mortar that, if placed on the window-sill, lured back the stray pigeon; the salt, which if hung in a pouch around the baby's neck could keep it safe from the vampire.

The bride's kindred came to share in the ceremonial of espousal, as in the play, first gathering at the house of the mother, whom they always brought with them with honor at the close of their procession. To the new home they advanced in single file, bearing on their heads the _donora_, gifts of baskets of grain, with fluttering ribbons, and on top a loaf and a flower. There was always some play of chaffering at the door, barred, as in this drama, with a ribbon or scarf stretched between a distaff and a bident, the implements emblematic of woman and man. The exchange of a piece of money always closed the bargain and gained them entrance. Then, every woman, passing on in turn to the bridal pair, before lowering her basket, took from it a handful of grain and scattered it over each head, saying: "This is the bread God and our Lady send you. May you grow old together!"

The folk-ritual for burial and the improvisation of the laments by the wailers were so elaborate that the ecclesiastical authorities kept a jealous eye over their excesses. A decree of 1734 is peculiarly interesting on account of the recognition it supplies that these customs were bequests from a Pagan age. It declares that if the women who indulge in the abuse of mourning at funerals "continue to disturb the churchly office with lamentation and wailing and other such practices of paganism," the clergy shall cease all ministration and leave them with the body until they go home and "let the body alone, so that the service can be followed according to the usage of the Roman ritual."

Greater poetic interest belongs to the _laudi_ in the Abruzzi dialect, examples of which are given in De Nino's fourth volume (_Usi e costumi abbruzzesi par_ Antonio de Nino. 5 vols. Barbera, Florence. 1879-1891). From the text of one of these, several verses are employed by D'Annunzio in the third Act. He greatly enhances their dramatic effect by putting them in the mouth of Candia, when with wandering, benumbed wits she repeats bits of the dialogue between the Sacred Mother and her suffering Son, half confusing her own sorrows over her son Aligi with those of the Mater Dolorosa.

In all such instances heightened beauty and significance are given to the Abruzzi usages with the surest and most delicate art. The throb of life animates it. Yet the homely truth to reality behind the adroit touches of art gifts the play with vigor and concreteness.

Even the passing reference of Splendore to the petticoat "of a dozen breadths' fulness" is true, for example, to the dress of the women of Scanno. The bridal raiment of green, also, "Of gold and silver the yoke is fashioned But all the rest like the quiet verdure," is true to the preference for green of the brides of Canzano.

Such games of rivalry for the straightest furrow, as that of which Candia reminds her son, were held at Sora. In presence of the old men the youths ran the plough from the crest of the hill to the foot of the valley, when the prize, a hat or a scarf, was adjudged.

The "barking" of the reapers "like dogs at each passer" was an ancient license of disorder at harvest time, called _fare l'incanata_. So, the call for the wine-jug was a custom belonging to the serenade of the bridal pair on the marriage night. The song over, the singers expected wine, cheese, and a loaf to be handed them outside the door.

As Aligi's cavern, the scene of the second Act, has its prototype in an actual cavern on the mountain in Abruzzia, from which Michetti made sketches for stage use in the Milan production, so also the shepherd life, as it is presented especially in this Act, has its model in reality. Their quiet existence, aloft among the peaks, leaves the shepherds time to carve their sheep-hooks, as Aligi did, and to achieve such other artistry in wood as Aligi masters. Their neighbor, the sky, makes dreamers of them, too, like Aligi, and not infrequently poets. The mountain affords them such comrades as Aligi had in Malde, the treasure-diviner, the herb-woman, wise in efficacious simples, and the lofty, serene-minded Cosmo. Perhaps Cosmo is not meant to differ greatly in nature from the distinguished saint of the Morrone mentioned by Aligi, Pietro Celestino, who was made Pope Celestin V. in 1294, but who, only a few months afterwards, abjured the stateliness of Rome for the hermit's retired life upon the mountain-side. The habit of life, indicated by Aligi, is that of the shepherds described by Finamore (_Il pastore e la pastorizia in Abruzzo_ in _Archivo per lo studio della tradizioni popolari_, IV. 190). They select a sheepstead in the spring and collect their flocks, living near them in caves or huts during the summer, but going down to the village fortnightly for a three days' rest; and in the autumn coming down with their flocks, and going on with them either toward Rome or Puglia. Through the valleys and across the mountains they hear the singing Pilgrims passing continually, as they so effectively come and go in the stage directions of the second Act, faring to and fro on the way to such shrines as Splendore mentions in her reassuring words to Mila,--Santa Maria della Potenza, and the Incoronata.

On the eve of the Celebration of St. John's Beheading (August 29) the Plaia or the Virgine is climbed, according to custom, toward midnight, so that the red disk of the August sun may be seen at dawn from the hilltop. To the beholder of the apparition of the saint's bleeding head in the disk it was accounted, as Aligi deemed it, a miraculous sign of God's favor.

D'Annunzio himself maintains as to one of the superstitions he has known how to weave predominatingly into the plot, namely, the sanctity of the fireplace as a refuge from violence, that it is Jewish rather than Italian. It may be so. In any case he has exercised the right of a poet to use for his higher verities what he needs and has the art to employ vitally and well. It may be, too, that he has been peculiarly happy in grafting so distinctly Jewish a belief on the rest of his more peculiarly Christian and Latin beliefs, because there is an inner link of association between Mila's fireside and such a sanctuary from their pursuers as the Adonijahs and Joabs claimed when they "laid hold upon the horns of the altar." Feasts were held and burnt offerings were devoted to Jehovah on such altars. And similarly sacred to the gods of the hearthstone of the ancient race--the Lares and Penates--was the fireside of the Romans. The antique usage that marks the fireplace and sets it apart as the altar or temple of the homestead is architecturally preserved in ancient Italian buildings by the monumental setting of the hearthstone above the level of the floor and the prominent hood to the chimney. The utility of this arrangement, as usual with folk-myths, has not hindered, but rather attracted, a religious explanation.

Such a fireplace is an important trait of the stage directions in the first Act for the scene-setting of the home of the Di Roio family. It is in accord, like all the rest of the furnishings of the house, with the record De Nino supplies of the typical Abruzzi homestead.

When the daughter of the alien, of the sorcerer Jorio, claims sanctuary at the hearth, she claims it not alone because she is Christian and therefore can justly make appeal to the God of this hearth and this household. It is significant that she also makes her appeal by virtue of the old laws of the hearthstone, to gods of the Pagan race and the ancient kinsfolk. The sacredness of the fireplace as the altar of each home is, in fact, not confined to any race. The North American Indian, as well as the Roman, regards it religiously. Such faiths grow from a human root.

In the play, the hearth, like the Jewish altar, becomes a mercy-seat, to be held inviolate from violence and also from profanation. Mila seeks it as a shrine and shield from violence. The kindred declare that she profanes it.

The dependence of the second and third Acts upon the Roman law of the absolute dominion of the father over the son, and the extreme penalty for parricide of the sack and the mastiff and the deep sea is justified by the ancient Latin code, as given in the digest of Modestinus (xlviii, tit. 9, § 9). The persistence in the bucolic mind of such grim ancestral morality causes such a code to outlive its natural decay.

One of the allusions to the ancient credulities of the Abruzzi which is most essential to the plot is Aligi's vision in the first Act of Mila's guardian angel standing behind her weeping, and thus in silence revealing the innocency of her wronged soul. The common faith in the judgment of God upon the deeds of men being made clear in a flash by the sudden sight of the angel in tears finds expression in the proverbial sayings: "If you would measure the offence, look behind the right shoulder of him whom you have offended." "If you make your sister weep, you make the silent angel weep." "If you forget to be just, the angel weeps."

Curious and interesting as all these veritable traces of folk-lore may seem, they are but the dry bones to which the poet has given flesh and breath. Not alone the rich deep soil of primitive custom and religion in which he has rooted the play, but the spirit of mystery primeval--older than Christianity or any one religious influence--in which the play is wrapped, as in the atmosphere necessary to its life, is indicated by D'Annunzio himself in his "Triumph of Death":

"Rites of religions dead and forgotten survive there; incomprehensible symbols of potencies long fallen into decay remain intact there; habits of primitive peoples forever passed away persist there, handed down without change from generation to generation; rich customs, foreign and useless, retained there are the witnesses to the nobility and beauty of an anterior life.... In all pomps and ceremonies, work and play, in births and love, nuptials and, funerals,--everywhere present and visible, there is a georgic symbolism; everywhere the Titanic generating Mother Earth is represented and reverenced as the bosom whence sprang the founts of all good and all happiness."

When Mila is left in the cave, in the second Act, alone with the ecstasy and anguish of her love for Aligi, and while she kneels before the Christian symbol of motherhood, she turns also to this hoary Earth, the mother of all motherhood, as the child in trouble to the all-embracing mother-heart.

The love which she and Aligi feel within them is profoundly rooted in that elemental mystery to which it has newly opened their consciousness. It is more ancient far than any of the ties of habit and family to which Aligi has been the embodiment of faithful allegiance all his life before. Older than allegiance to the family or the clan is the allegiance of lover and beloved, as the individual man is prior to the tribal man.

As the play opens, the divine trouble of allegiance to this more fundamental power has come upon Aligi dimly. Forebodings of the woe of his attempted reconciliation of the two allegiances are sapping his energy. In the depths of his soul is divined the fatal approach of supreme love, the predestined child of this secret power of the older time. The shadow of this approach girds him about in slumber as in a shield by the side of the bride whose soul is no mate for his soul. It holds him aloof until Mila comes. Then it plunges his old allegiance, his most religiously dutiful subordination to the life of kindred and family, into vital conflict with the inward sense of the mystical power claiming a higher allegiance, a deeper, all-embracing reverence.

The situation is a dramatic bodying forth of further words of D'Annunzio upon the mystery brooding in the land of the antique blood:

"Mystery intervenes in all events, envelops and constrains every existence; and supernatural life dominates, overwhelms, and absorbs ordinary life."

Put into action, this is the clash of the ordinary fealty with a fealty older, more personal, and through the art and the sacrifice begotten of love, more rewarding to spiritual life. The hand of the tribe has been ever against an overlordship of this spiritual kind, knitting together the clansman and the alien, and substituting for the child recruiting the solidarity of the clan, the Angel of Art recruiting the very soul of the clan. To burn as an Apostate Angel this Angel of Art along with the witch whose charm has awakened in the lover's soul the capacity to show it forth--this is the usual course of the clan. Only the Ornellas, the youngest and littlest of its generation, are as prompt to see and to save as its privileged heads, the Lazaros, are to desecrate and embrutalize.

Like Heinrich in Hauptmann's "Sunken Bell," Aligi is a dreamer. But unlike Heinrich, he is no waverer. His dream is true. To the divination it bestows he is true. As long as his soul and his senses are intact to repel the benumbing influence of the potion he disclaims Mila's sacrifice.