re alike in their complacent preoccupation with
mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for
while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean--in the
literal, not the moral sense--scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude
about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in
"Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole
life is given up to love, and then, as we know, he chose a singularly
crude and professional person, using her career as a symbol of the
Second Empire. D'Annunzio has never described women with any other
reason for existence but love, yet none of his heroines has poor Nana's
uninspiring motives. They are amateurs with a skill undreamed of in
Nana's philosophy; they believe in love for art's sake. Consequently,
the French critic was right in insisting that Zola and d'Annunzio are
two very different persons, although confounded in an identical obloquy
by the moralists. He is, however, not quite so subtle when he tries to
argue from this that, in the conventional sense, d'Annunzio is more
moral.

At this point I will cite an unexpectedly intelligent witness, one of
the early admirers of d'Annunzio in English, and the author of an essay
on him which is assuredly the best which has appeared in that language.
This is what Henry James has to say of "The Child of Pleasure" in his
"Notes on Novelists": "Count Andrea Sperelli is a young man who pays,
pays heavily, as we take it we are to understand, for an unbridled
surrender to the life of the senses; whereby it is primarily a picture
of that life that the story gives us. He is represented as inordinately,
as quite monstrously, endowed for the career that from the first absorbs
and that finally is to be held, we suppose to engulf him; and it is a
tribute to the truth with which his endowment is presented that we
should scarce know where else to look for so complete and convincing an
account of such adventures. Casanova de Seingalt is of course infinitely
more copious, but his autobiography is cheap loose journalism compared
with the directed, finely-condensed iridescent epic of Count Andrea."

It would be difficult to find, couched in such euphemistically
appreciative language, so accurate a summary of the intention and
quality of this book. Casanova is pale, diffuse, and unconvincing,
indeed, beside the d'Annunzio who so early gave his full measure as the
supreme novelist of sens