His divinity was the phallic divinity. The other male divinity, which is
the spirit that fulfils in the world the new germ of an idea, this was
denied and obscured in him, unused. And it was this spirit which cried
out helplessly in him through the insistent, inflammable flesh. Even
this play-acting was a form of physical gratification for him, it had in
it neither real mind nor spirit.
It was so different from Ibsen, and so much more moving. Ibsen is
exciting, nervously sensational. But this was really moving, a real
crying in the night. One loved the Italian nation, and wanted to help it
with all one's soul. But when one sees the perfect Ibsen, how one hates
the Norwegian and Swedish nations! They are detestable.
They seem to be fingering with the mind the secret places and sources of
the blood, impertinent, irreverent, nasty. There is a certain
intolerable nastiness about the real Ibsen: the same thing is in
Strindberg and in most of the Norwegian and Swedish writings. It is with
them a sort of phallic worship also, but now the worship is mental and
perverted: the phallus is the real fetish, but it is the source of
uncleanliness and corruption and death, it is the Moloch, worshipped in
obscenity.
Which is unbearable. The phallus is a symbol of creative divinity. But
it represents only part of creative divinity. The Italian has made it
represent the whole. Which is now his misery, for he has to destroy his
symbol in himself.
Which is why the Italian men have the enthusiasm for war, unashamed.
Partly it is the true phallic worship, for the phallic principle is to
absorb and dominate all life. But also it is a desire to expose
themselves to death, to know death, that death may destroy in them this
too strong dominion of the blood, may once more liberate the spirit of
outgoing, of uniting, of making order out of chaos, in the outer world,
as the flesh makes a new order from chaos in begetting a new life, set
them free to know and serve a greater idea.
The peasants below sat and listened intently, like children who hear and
do not understand, yet who are spellbound. The children themselves sit
spellbound on the benches till the play is over. They do not fidget or
lose interest. They watch with wide, absorbed eyes at the mystery, held
in thrall by the sound of emotion.
But the villagers do not really care for Ibsen. They let it go. On the
feast of Epiphany, as a special treat, was given a poetic drama by
D'Annunzio, _La Fiaccola sotto il Moggio_--_The Light under the Bushel_.
It is a foolish romantic play of no real significance. There are several
murders and a good deal of artificial horror. But it is all a very nice
and romantic piece of make-believe, like a charade.
So the audience loved it. After the performance of _Ghosts_ I saw the
barber, and he had the curious grey clayey look of an Italian who is
cold and depressed. The sterile cold inertia, which the so-called
passionate nations know so well, had settled on him, and he went
obliterating himself in the street, as if he were cold, dead.
But after the D'Annunzio play he was like a man who has drunk sweet wine
and is warm.
'_Ah, bellissimo, bellissimo_!' he said, in tones of intoxicated
reverence, when he saw me.
'Better than _I Spettri_?' I said.
He half-raised his hands, as if to imply the fatuity of the question.
'Ah, but--' he said, 'it was D'Annunzio. The other....'
'That was Ibsen--a great Norwegian,' I said, 'famous all over the
world.'
'But you know--D'Annunzio is a poet--oh, beautiful, beautiful!' There
was no going beyond this '_bello--bellissimo_'.
It was the language which did it. It was the Italian passion for
rhetoric, for the speech which appeals to the senses and makes no demand
on the mind. When an Englishman listens to a speech he wants at least to
imagine that he understands thoroughly and impersonally what is meant.
But an Italian only cares about the emotion. It is the movement, the
physical effect of the language upon the blood which gives him supreme
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