t living master of Italian prose. Of this fact his early
novels are a needed reminder to a generation which is making its
acquaintance with Italian writers of to-day through the intermediary of
a converted anti-clerical, who cannot even retell the story of Christ
without branding himself a vulgarian. In the prim days when young
d'Annunzio first flaunted his carnal delights and sorrows before a world
not yet released from Victorian stuffiness, the word "vulgar" was a
polite English epithet for "fleshly," an adjective much beloved by
indignant gentlemen who were permitting their wrath to triumph over
their desire to be respectable. It is a word which we apply nowadays to
the writings of a vulgarian like Papini, whose name is now as familiar
to the general public as d'Annunzio's was when "The Child of Pleasure"
was first translated. That is a measure of progress in this connection
which justifies the hope that the "idealist of material things" will
find again an audience which can understand and appreciate his quest.

D'Annunzio has nothing to offer the sterile theorists of the new
illiterate literature, who are as incapable of appreciating his refined
and subtle perversities as they are of admiring the beautiful form in
which his full-blooded and exuberant imagination clothes his
conceptions. He is an aesthete, but his aestheticism has never expressed
itself in barren theory, but has always turned to life itself. He
realized at the outset of his career that life is a physical thing,
which we must compel to surrender all that it can offer us, which the
artist must bend and shape to his own creative purposes. It has been
said that d'Annunzio had a philosophy and Nietzsche and Tolstoy were
invoked as influences, but there is as little of Tolstoy's moralizing in
"The Intruder" as of Nietzsche's pessimistic idealism in "The Child of
Pleasure" or "The Triumph of Death." Whatever conclusions may be drawn
from the problem of the Eternal Feminine as postulated in all his
novels--and that is the only problem which he confronts--it is hardly to
be dignified by the name of a philosophy. One gathers that men can be
exalted and destroyed by the attraction of women, but the author
remains to the end--as late certainly as 1910, when the last of the
novels in the first mood, _Forse che si, forse che no_, appeared--of the
opinion that they are the one legitimate preoccupation of the artist in
living. Elena Muti in "The Child of Pleasure," F