Notes on novelists, with some other notes, by Henry James.

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO

20I

twenty to thirty when he meets and becomes entangled with a
woman more infernally expert even than himself in the matters
in which he is most expert-and he is given us as a miracle of
social and intellectual accomplishment-the effect of whom is
fatally to pervert and poison his imagination. As his imagination is applied exclusively, to the employments of " love," this
means, for him, a frustration of all happiness, all comfortable
consistency, in subsequent relations of the same order. The
author's view-this is fundamental-is all of a world in which
relations of any other order whatever mainly fail to offer themselves in any attractive form. Andrea Sperelli, loving, accordingly-in the manner in which D'Annunzio's young men love
and to which we must specifically return-a woman of good
faith, a woman as different as possible from the creature of evil
communications, finds the vessel of his spirit itself so infected
and disqualified that it falsifies and dries up everything that
passes through it. The idea that has virtually determined the
situation appears in fact to be that the hero would have loved
in another manner, or would at least have wished to, but that
he had too promptly put any such fortune, so far as his capacity
is concerned, out of court. We have our reasons, presently
manifest, for doubting the possibility itself; but the theory has
nevertheless given its direction to the fable.
For the rest the author's three sharpest signs are already unmistakable: first his rare notation of states of excited sensibility; second his splendid visual sense, the quick generosity
of his response to the message, as we nowadays say, of aspects
and appearances, to the beauty of places and things; third his
ample and exquisite style, his curious, various, inquisitive,
always active employment of language as a means of communication and representation. So close is the marriage between his power of " rendering," in the light of the imagination,
and whatever he sees and feels, that we should much mislead
in speaking of.-his manner as a thing distinct from the matter
submitted to it. The fusion is complete and admirable, so that,
though his work is nothing if not " literary," we see at no
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