ple-minded, honest, and somewhat fanatical
peasantry, to whose quaint and primitive manners his books owe much of
their distinctive atmosphere.

In Italy, D'Annunzio's career has been watched with growing interest.
Until recently, however, he was scarcely known to the world at large,
when a few poems, translated into French, brought his name into
immediate prominence. Within a year three Paris journals acquired rights
of translation from him, and he has since occupied the attention of such
authoritative French critics as Henri Rabusson, Rene Doumic, Edouard
Rod, Eugene-Melchior de Voguee, and, most recently, Ferdinand Brunetiere,
all of whom seem to have a clearer appreciation of his quality than even
his critics at home. At the same time there is a small but hostile
minority among the French novelists, whose literary feelings are voiced
by Leon Daudet in a vehement protest under the title 'Assez d'Etrangers'
(Enough of Foreigners).

It is too soon to pass final judgment on D'Annunzio's style, which has
been undergoing an obvious transition, not yet accomplished. Realist and
psychologist, symbolist and mystic by turns, and first and always a
poet, he has been compared successively to Bourget and Maupassant,
Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, Theophile Gautier and Catulle Mendes, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and Baudelaire. Such complexity of style is the outcome
of his cosmopolitan taste in literature, and his tendency to assimilate
for future use whatever pleases him in each successive author.
Shakespeare and Goethe, Keats and Heine, Plato and Zoroaster, figure
among the names which throng his pages; while his unacknowledged and
often unconscious indebtedness to writers of lesser magnitude,--notably
the self-styled 'Sar' Joseph Peladan--has lately raised an outcry of
plagiarism. Yet whatever leaves his pen, borrowed or original, has
received the unmistakable imprint of his powerful individuality.

It is easy to trace the influences under which, successively, D'Annunzio
has come. They are essentially French. He is a French writer in an
Italian medium. His early short sketches, noteworthy chiefly for their
morbid intensity, were modeled largely on Maupassant, whose frank,
unblushing realism left a permanent imprint upon the style of his
admirer, and whose later analytic tendency probably had an important
share in turning his attention to the psychological school.

'Il Piacere,' though largely inspired by Paul Bourget, contains as lar