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

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO

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tension. There is according to him an immense amenity that
can be saved-saved by style-from the general wreck and
welter of what is most precious, from the bankruptcy determined more and more by our basely democratic conditions. As
we watch the actual process, however it is only to see the
lifeboat itself founder. The vulgarity into which he so incongruously drops is, I will not say the space he allots to
love-affairs, but the weakness of his sense of "values" in
depicting them.
We begin to ask ourselves at an early stage what this queer
passion may be in the representation of which the sense of
beauty ostensibly finds its richest expression and which is yet
attended by nothing else at all-neither duration, nor propagation, nor common kindness, nor common consistency with
other relations, common congruity with the rest of life-to
make its importance good. If beauty is the supreme need so
let it be; nothing is more certain than that we can never get
too much of it if only we get it of the right sort. It is therefore
on this very ground-the ground of its own sufficiency-that
Signor D'Annunzio's invocation of it collapses at our challenge.
The vulgarity comes from the disorder really introduced into
values, as I have called them; from the vitiation sufferedthat we should have to record so mean an accident-by taste,
impeccable taste, itself. The truth of this would come out fully
in copious examples, now impossible; but it is not too much
to say, I think, that in every principal situation presented the
fundamental weakness causes the particular interest to be
inordinately compromised.
I must not, I know, make too much of " II Piacere "-one of
those works of promising youth with which criticism is always
easy-and I should indeed say nothing of it if it were also a
work of less ability. It really, however, to my mind, quite gives
us the key, all in the morning early, to our author's general
misadventure. Andrea Sperelli is the key; Donna Maria is
another key of a slightly different shape. They have neither of