D'ANNUNZIO'S "LA FIGLIA DI JORIO.'

BY HELEN ZIMMERN.

Ir is generally admitted, despite the success that attended the revival of "Every Man," that the Old World dramatic form, known as Miracle or Morality plays, are spent as a dramatic factor, both as regards their substance and the spirit that animates them. And, certainly, re-reading some of these plays in cold blood, we rise from their perusal with the sensation that we have been for the moment face to face with an artistic manifestation which we no longer comprehend, a form whose essence seems to us irrational; that we have been bidden to fix our attention on events, persons and things that have no part in the life of our soul. These glorifications, these synthetic treatments of the great mediæval religious soul are seen by us as though looking across the broad, flowing waters of a mighty rushing river, on whose further bank objects pass in confused vision beyond the grasp of our clear ken. The rushing river is our modern life, tumultuous and varicolored, which, in its relentless onsweep, destroys many æsthetic and fantastic erections of the past, basing its action upon destructive rationalism, and on that spirit of analysis that undermines the fairest edifices. Only to a few of those profound spirits, to whom it is given to listen to the voices of the Ages, but who can also at the same time hear that of the present, both so dense with hidden harmonies, is the faculty accorded of recreating for us a vanished world, of guiding us mentally through the mazes of feelings and sentiments, unfelt and unfamiliar, that have become forgotten, that have been overwhelmed by the lapse of time. These men, and these only, can make it possible for us to realize these mental states with the color of the age to which they belong, to deal with them in a spirit which for want of a better definition we might call a "contemporary equilibrium."

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The true and intimate meaning of the Morality plays was, curiously enough, borne in upon me when reading and hearing the 'Figlia di Jorio," by Gabrielo D'Annunzio, his latest poetic play, hot with the turbulent blood of his native province, the Abruzzi. The epoch in which the action is supposed to occur is not stated. The poet only says that "it was many years ago." But we, studying its informing spirit, a curious medley of Christian and Pagan sentiments, would feel inclined to locate it in the fifteenth century, in that age of the world's culture when the Morality plays still flourished. And this because we seem to see in the manners, the acts of the personages, in their processes of thought and reasoning, that strangely beautiful blending, that confusion, which lasted beyond the Middle Ages down into the full-blown Renaissance, a mental state that resulted from the Christian reconsecration of antique Pagan rites, customs and thoughts. Here, in this play, live again the vanished patriarchal world, at least such as we love to imagine it, wearied of our febrile, collective and complex life.

The determining forces which animate the action are all simple; they are the natural forces which developed and took permanent shape in ancient human society, the logical offspring of Nature and the Earth. The rites of Love and of Sorrow that always accompanied these peoples in their life and in their death are still served on their venerable altars, and the primitive sentiments of the heart gush forth from the life-springs of this reanimated family of the older time. It is given to us to follow them into their remotest origin, to lay bare their deepest roots. The primitive family, a minute and autonomous human society, is thus reconstructed, and from out its bosom springs all the poetry of home, that had its origin in the Latin race. From the home again is born a human religion, the "Pietas" of our elders, and Christianity has reinforced this conception, sanctifying the family by causing its Redeemer to be born in a lowly human home. To reconstruct the pure and simple poetry of the home is to reconstruct the poetry of religion, which in its essence is also pure and simple. And to rouse and revivify by a tragedy this gentle poetry is equivalent to rousing the soul of humanity, deeply implanted in the ground of home.

In the Middle Ages, religion and art were always conjoined, because a work of art was also a work of religion, blending all the

elements that contributed to form the moral substratum of the life and soul of the populace. Now D'Annunzio has given in this tragedy, in which religion continually crops up and is a determining factor, a renewed life to the rites, customs, sentiments and language of an ancient tribe, investing them with a new lustre, and blending them in a harmony that resembles in its unity the Greek art on which it is fundamentally based, for D'Annunzio always turns to Hellas for inspiration. Thus Mila di Codra, the daughter of Jorio, the witch doctor of Farne, held accursed by the populace, who sacrifices herself so tragically, seems the reflexion and the medieval version of "The Suppliants."

Although by no means enamored of critical comparisons, which like all comparisons are odious, and often only an excuse for a display of useless erudition, it may not be useless to confront briefly D'Annunzio's latest tragedy with the work of Maeterlinck. In the latter, occult forces are ever at work, of whose nature it is only possible to catch fleeting glimpses through the mists of our unstable human life, and our intelligence wearies itself in striving to comprehend the ultimate purpose of this synthetic symbolism. Instead, in the "Figlia di Jorio," all is plain and simple, everything is comprehensible, there is nothing occult, and the wrappings of the human beings seem of crystal, so transparent are they, and so easy is it to scrutinize their very souls.

This is how the play develops itself. With the first act we find ourselves in the house of the peasant, Lazzaro di Roio, where the traditional nuptial rites are being celebrated for the marriage of his son Aligi, the shepherd, with the blonde and silent Vienda di Giave. As the relations arrive from different hamlets, bearing wedding gifts, there bursts in upon the assembly, terrified and breathless, Mila di Codra, the daughter of Jorio, a sinner and a wanderer, a sorceress and a witch, at least such is her popular reputation. She is pursued by a crowd of reapers, whose brains wine and the fierce summer sun combined have clouded, arousing all their most bestial instincts. The intruder implores protection by advancing towards the hearthstone, craving hospitality and shelter in the name of the gods of home. The assembly, filled with superstitious fears concerning the maledictions of sorcery that may descend upon the house owing to the woman's presence, revile her and call upon Aligi to thrust her out. This she resists; and, as Aligi raises his hand to strike her, it seems to him that he

sees standing behind the woman a weeping angel. A holy horror shakes his being; and, falling on his knees, he craves pardon for having violated the laws of the hearth. Meanwhile, the libidinous crew has come nearer, and stands outside the house, shouting obscene menaces and demanding in angry tones the restitution of the woman who has escaped them. Aligi, hearing them, rises from his knees and, detaching a crucifix from the wall, lays it upon the threshold and then opens wide the house door. The hideous mob, already about to enter by force, on seeing the holy symbol, are arrested in their mad career and fall on their knees, after which they slowly and silently depart. At that moment, the threshold is passed by the head of the family, the master of the house, Lazzaro di Roio, bleeding and supported by two husbandmen. He has been wounded by a rival in his ugly love for the daughter of Jorio. She herself, in the confusion, has fled from the house unseen. Thus ends the first act, so full of novel dramatic effects.

The second opens in a mountain cavern. This is Aligi's habitual home, to which he has returned, leaving his paternal abode and the bride with whom his nuptials are not consummated. Here, wholly unexpected, Mila di Codra has joined him. But their mutual love is and has ever remained chaste, as they state in sincere confession to Cosma, the hermit saint of these mountain fastnesses. Aligi has been engaged all this time in carving in wood the image of the mute angel whom he beheld weeping when he raised his stick to strike a supplicant for shelter. It is still incomplete, the feet are still hidden within the wooden trunk and the eyes are as yet but faintly outlined. It is Aligi's desire to take the image to Rome, laid on the back of his mule, and thus to bear it to the Vicar of Christ, to pray him to dissolve his marriage with Vienda and to unite him to the daughter of Jorio. Meanwhile, in his paternal home they have wept bitter tears for months in yearning for the dear absent one, and the bride is wearing to a shadow in agonized expectancy of his return. The father, Lazzaro, is still suffering from the effects of his wound, and this and illness render yet more acute his anger against his son and Mila. Seeing this, Ornella, the younger sister of Aligi, sets forth alone for the cavern, and, finding her brother absent, she implores the stranger to restore him to his family and to depart from thence. She fears her father's ire. And with reason, for, just as Ornella has extracted the promise from Mila and is about to depart, there

bursts in upon them, choking with rage and inflamed with lust, Lazzaro di Roio. He holds in his hand a lasso of rope; and with this he intends to obtain possession of Mila, as though she were a beast of the field; and it is while he is thus roping her that Aligi returns. Upon this, the father, in the conscious knowledge of the unlimited paternal authority which from all time is his over his offspring, menaces his son, insults him, strikes him, and at last commands him to depart from the spot. Aligi endeavors to resist these injunctions; upon which the two husbandmen whom the father has brought with him fall on Aligi, bind him and carry him off by force. Alone at last with Mila, Lazzaro tries to make her his by brute force. But Aligi, whom Ornella, ignorant of what had gone before, has unbound and freed, returns at this moment upon the scene, and, blind with horror, grief and rage, seizes the axe wherewith he had carved his angel, and, with a mighty stroke, fells his father to the ground.

The third and last act carries us back to the village and the paternal home. In the house, the village women-mourners are crooning the funeral lullabies of the south around the corpse of Lazzaro, while the people have seized upon the parricide and are judging him. He confesses his crime, and terrible is his doom. It is sentenced that his hands be cut off from his arms and his body be sewn in a sack, together with a fierce mastiff, after which the bag with its human and canine contents shall be thrown into the river at the point where its depths are deepest. The decree spoken, the villagers conduct Aligi fettered into the presence of his mother, in order that she may give him his extreme pardon and the cup of consolation. When Aligi is finally ready to be led to the place of execution, there arrives, running hastily, amid the shouts of malediction of the populace, Mila di Codra. She has come to save Aligi by sacrificing herself. She cries to the people, who have sought her in vain to wreak their vengeance upon her, that she had cast a spell of witchcraft over Aligi, that he is innocent, that he has confessed to a crime he never committed. It was she, Mila, she who murdered Lazzaro. Her only desire is to make full confession in the face of a just people. And the people, hearing this, fall on her and bind her, and loosen the cords that bind Aligi. But he cannot appreciate Mila's great act of selfimmolation. In the cup of consolation, brewed for him by his mother, there have been mixed certain herbs that should render