ge
an element of 'Notre Coeur' and 'Bel-Ami' as of 'Le Disciple' and 'Coeur
de Femme.' In this novel, Andrea Sperelli affords us the type of
D'Annunzio's heroes, who, aside from differences due to age and
environment, are all essentially the same,--somewhat weak, yet
undeniably attractive; containing, all of them, "something of a Don Juan
and a Cherubini," with the Don Juan element preponderating. The plot of
'Il Piacere' is not remarkable either for depth or for novelty, being
the needlessly detailed record of Sperelli's relations with two married
women, of totally opposite types.

'Giovanni Episcopo' is a brief, painful tragedy of low life, written
under the influence of Russian evangelism, and full of reminiscences of
Dostoievsky's 'Crime and Punishment.' Giovanni is a poor clerk, of a
weak, pusillanimous nature, completely dominated by a coarse, brutal
companion, Giulio Wanzer, who makes him an abject slave, until a
detected forgery compels Wanzer to flee the country. Episcopo then
marries Ginevra, the pretty but unprincipled waitress at his _pension_,
who speedily drags him down to the lowest depths of degradation, making
him a mere nonentity in his own household, willing to live on the
proceeds of her infamy. They have one child, a boy, Ciro, on whom
Giovanni lavishes all his suppressed tenderness. After ten years of this
martyrdom, the hated Wanzer reappears and installs himself as husband in
the Episcopo household. Giovanni submits in helpless fury, till one day
Wanzer beats Ginevra, and little Ciro intervenes to protect his mother.
Wanzer turns on the child, and a spark of manhood is at last kindled in
Giovanni's breast. He springs upon Wanzer, and with the pent-up rage of
years stabs him.

'L'Innocente,' D'Annunzio's second long novel, also bears the stamp of
Russian influence. It is a gruesome, repulsive story of domestic
infidelity, in which he has handled the theory of pardon, the motive of
numerous recent French novels, like Daudet's 'La Petite Paroisse' and
Paul Marguerite's 'La Tourmente.'

In another extended work, 'Il Trionfo della Morte' (The Triumph of
Death), D'Annunzio appears as a convert to Nietzsche's philosophy and to
Wagnerianism. Ferdinand Brunetiere has pronounced it unsurpassed by the
naturalistic schools of England, France, or Russia. In brief, the hero,
Giorgio Aurispa, a morbid sensualist, with an inherited tendency to
suicide, is led by fate through a series of circumstances which ke