some of the choicer passages in the original, such as Chapter X of "The Child of Pleasure," where she claimed that "ingenuities of indecency" had been gratuitously introduced. For the guidance of those interested in such matters I may explain that, by a coincidence, the "ingenuity" in question is almost identical with that which was cited in the earlier part of La Garçonne as proof that Victor Margueritte was unworthy of the Legion of Honor.

After Ouida in England came the venerable Vicomte Melchior de Vogüé in France, who is best known to readers in this country for his standard tome on the Russian novel. In the austere pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes he carefully explained to his readers that d'Annunzio's lewdness must not be confused with the obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole life is given up to love, and then, as we know, he chose a singularly crude and professional person, using her career as a symbol of the Second Empire. D'Annunzio has never described women with any other reason for existence but love, yet none of his heroines has poor Nana's uninspiring motives. They are amateurs with a skill undreamed of in Nana's philosophy; they believe in love for art's sake. Consequently, the French critic was right in insisting that Zola and d'Annunzio are two very different persons, although confounded in an identical obloquy by the moralists. He is, however, not quite so subtle when he tries to argue from this that, in the conventional sense, d'Annunzio is more moral.

At this point I will cite an unexpectedly intelligent witness, one of the early admirers of d'Annunzio in English, and the author of an essay on him which is assuredly the best which has appeared in that language. This is what Henry James has to say of "The Child of Pleasure" in his "Notes on Novelists": "Count Andrea Sperelli is a young man who pays, pays heavily, as we take it we are to understand, for an unbridled surrender to the life of the senses; whereby it is primarily a picture of that life that the story gives us. He is represented as inordinately, as quite monstrously, endowed for the career that from the first absorbs and that finally is to be held, we suppose to engulf him; and it is a tribute to the truth with which his endowment is presented that we should 

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