It is easy to trace the influences under which, successively, D’Annunzio has come.  They are essentially French.  He is a French writer in an Italian medium.  His early short sketches, noteworthy chiefly for their morbid intensity, were modeled largely on Maupassant, whose frank, unblushing realism left a permanent imprint upon the style of his admirer, and whose later analytic tendency probably had an important share in turning his attention to the psychological school.

‘Il Piacere,’ though largely inspired by Paul Bourget, contains as large 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 keep the thought of death continually before him.  They finally goad him on to fling himself from a cliff into the sea, dragging with him the woman he loves.