and the one which gives fullest scope to his rich and versatile genius.  His first long story, ‘Il Piacere’ (Pleasure), appeared in 1889.  As the title implies, it was pervaded with a frank, almost complacent sensuality, which its author has since been inclined to deprecate.  Nevertheless, the book received merited praise for its subtle portrayal of character and incident, and its exuberance of phraseology; and more than all, for the promise which it suggested.  With the publication of ‘L’Innocente,’ the author for the first time showed a real seriousness of purpose.  His views of life had meanwhile essentially altered:—­“As was just,” he confessed, “I began to pay for my errors, my disorders, my excesses:  I began to suffer with the same intensity with which I had formerly enjoyed myself; sorrow had made of me a new man.”  Accordingly his later books, while still emphatically realistic, are chastened by an underlying tone of pessimism.  Passion is no longer the keynote of life, but rather, as exemplified in ‘Il Trionfo della Morte,’ the prelude of death.  Leaving Rome, where, “like the outpouring of the sewers, a flood of base desires invaded every square and cross-road, ever more putrid and more swollen,” D’Annunzio retired to Francovilla-al-Mare, a few miles from his birthplace.  There he lives in seclusion, esteemed by the simple-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.