ual pleasure in this book. As Arthur Symons so
well says, "Gabriele d'Annunzio comes to remind us, very definitely, as
only an Italian can, of the reality and the beauty of sensation, of the
primary sensations; the sensations of pain and pleasure as these come to
us from our actual physical conditions; the sensation of beauty as it
comes to us from the sight of our eyes and the tasting of our several
senses; the sensation of love, which, to the Italian, comes up from a
root in Boccaccio, through the stem of Petrarch, to the very flower of
Dante. And so he becomes the idealist of material things, while seeming
to materialize spiritual things. He accepts, as no one else of our time
does, the whole physical basis of life, the spirit which can be known
only through the body."

D'Annunzio has declared that the central male character in all three
novels, Andrea Sperelli in "The Child of Pleasure," Tullio Hermil in
"The Intruder" and Giorgio Aurispa in "The Triumph of Death," are
projections of himself. They are as autobiographical as Stelio Effrena
in "The Fire of Life," which is generally accepted as an elaboration of
the poet's life with Eleonora Duse. His attitude, therefore, is clearly
defined in the passage where he says: "In the tumult of contradictory
impulses Sperelli had lost all sense of will power and all sense of
morality. In abdicating, his will had surrendered the sceptre to his
instincts; the aesthetic was substituted for the moral sense. This
aesthetic sense, which was very subtle, very powerful and always active,
maintained a certain equilibrium in the mind of Sperelli. Intellectuals
such as he, brought up in the religion of Beauty, always preserve a
certain kind of order, even in their worst depravities. The conception
of Beauty is the axis of their inmost being: all their passions turn
upon that axis." He is, in other words, the re-incarnation of Don Juan,
pursuing in woman an elusive and impossible ideal.

If d'Annunzio had not gone into the adventure of the war, with its
sequel at Fiume, we might have continued to enjoy the spectacle of the
adventures of this restless soul amongst feminine masterpieces. As a
soldier and a statesman his prestige in the English-speaking world is
low, and we are apt to forget while reading the political bombast of the
years of the war and the period after the Armistice that it differs in
no respect from all other patriotic claptrap, except that it is the work
of the greates