force them upon the consciousness of others, he is surely justifying beyond question his right to the name of artist.

Just how his art must be classified is another thing. We wish that some competent person would write a satis factory analysis of Mr. Crane's colour system. The use that he makes of it is extraordinary, interpreting all things in colour as Maupassant interprets them through the sense of smell. He is, in this, more of a symbolist than an impressionist, and has gone far beyond Mr. Hamlin Garland, who was, if we mistake not, his literary master. When one sits down in cold blood afterward and thinks over his colour effects-his splotches of crimson and blobs of blue-it becomes rather absurd, though at the first reading it is wonderfully effective. We are inclined to think that it is not, however, exactly Turneresque, but more closely allied to the craft of the scene-painter, which is also art in its way, but does not bear an overclose examination.

We have received a good deal of friendly criticism with reference to the first sentence of the review of Mr. Howells's Stops of Various Quills, published in the last BOOKMAN. This spoke of poetry as being for Mr. Howells a new field of effort," and we are kindly informed that Mr. Howells published a number of verses early in his career as a writer. Exactly; so does pretty nearly every young author in his salad days; but that does not count. Mr. Howells's real literary career dates from his appearance as a fiction writer in 1871. It is since this date only that his sphere of work became definitely mapped out, and his theory of literary art matured. What he did before that time is not to be taken into consideration in speaking of his true career; and when he now turns to verse, this is to the Howells that the world knows to-day, quite truly "a new field of effort." Another reader objects to that review because it quotes the poem entitled "Heredity," which he severely describes as "ribald." Dear, dear! Some day we shall bring out a number of THE BOOKMAN consisting entirely of blank pages, and even then some cantankerous person will probably find. fault.

A new novel by F. Marion Crawford, entitled Adam Johnstone's Son, is nounced to appear in April from the press of the Messrs. Macmillan. The same firm will publish soon Mr. George Saintsbury's important work, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, comprising the period between 1780 and 1895. Another literary work of value which also is looked for eagerly will make its appearance shortly from the same house, namely, Georg Brandes's critical biography of William Shakespeare. Dr. Brandes's method has been to place the poet in his political and literary environment, and to study each play not as an isolated phenomenon, but as the record of a stage in Shakespeare's spiritual history. It is the most important work on Shakespeare that has been published since Professor Dowden treated of the same theme in Shakespeare -His Mind and Art.

There has come to us during the month a new volume in the Globe Library (paper covers), issued by Messrs. Rand, McNally and Company, which, though not a new book, claims some attention on its first appearance, so far as we are aware, in America. Stanhope of Chester was published by Messrs. Smith, Elder and Company in England during the autumn of 1894, and the author, Mr. Percy Andreae, was at once recognised as a new writer marked out for popularity. Stanhope of Chester is the most notable ghost story that has appeared for many years. Writers, or at least narrators, of such stories are often mere specialists with few other faculties developed; they can thrill your nerves, but they have no power to enlist the interest of the intelligence or the heart. Mr. Andreae's story exhibits various talents which give it distinction. In the first place, it is markedly original—owes nothing to tradition; and secondly, it throws an important light on the habits of ghosts; at least we can conceive a ghost of Mr. Andreae's kind. Philosophy and common sense have come in to aid him in making the weird a reality. As a narrative, too, Stanhope of Chester is brisk and vigorous. Mr. Andreae is quickly winning success as a writer of short stories of exceptional brightness, and when he follows up his first attempt at fiction with a second novel we shall have something more to say about him.

In spite of the present cosmopolitan taste in fiction, Italy receives a somewhat scanty recognition. The literary movements in Paris are watched with interest, and Loti's Galilée or Zola's Rome is awaited eagerly. The Russian, Scandinavian, and German novelists each have their votaries; Tolstoi and Dostoievski, Ibsen and Björnson, Su

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO.

dermann and Paul Heyse are familiar names the world over, while Italy remains unfairly in the background. Even Max Nordau, who with great impartiality scanned the countries of Northern Europe, in his search for degenerates, stopped short at the Alps, either because his gloomy theories were incompatible with the brightness of Italian skies, or, perhaps, out of regard for his friend and master, Professor Lom broso. The Italian critics, however, seem hardly grateful to Herr Nordau for the omission, since to be a degenerate in his acceptation of the term is nowadays a mark of distinction-one finds one's self in such excellent com

pany. At any rate, there is no lack of eminent Italian novelists well deserving international consideration. A generation ago, it is true, there were few novels of lasting merit; sensational writers of the Wilkie Collins and Fortuné de Boisgobey type preponderated, and the popular taste had not yet been educated to distinguish between a George Eliot and a Miss Braddon, a Balzac, and a Gaboriau. At the present day, however, there are a number of brilliant writers of keen perception and delicate portrayal, such as De Amicis, as felicitous in his recent vein of fiction as he was formerly in his works of travel; Matilde Serao and Verga, inimitable respectively in their Neapolitan and Sicilian sketches; and Rovetta, whose La Baraonda was one of the literary events of the past year. But the writer of the greatest promise to-day in Italy, and perhaps one of the most unique figures in contemporary literature, is Gabriele D'Annunzio, the poet-novelist.

The career of this gifted young writer has been watched with growing interest in his own country, where each new work is sure to arouse a heated controversy among his critics. Until two years ago, however, he was practically unknown to the world at large, when a few of his poems, translated into the French papers, attracted instant attention, not only in Paris, but in the principal literary centres throughout Europe. It was admitted that a new star of the first magnitude had arisen in an unexpected quarter. Within a year no less than three Paris journals acquired rights of translation; his Giovanni Episcopo formed a leading attraction in the initial numbers of the new Revue de Paris, L'Innocente appeared in the Temps under the title of L'Intrus, and the Vergine delle Rocce is announced for an early issue of the Revue des Deux Mondes, which last January published a delightful study of the author by M. de Vogüé, under the flattering heading of "La Renaissance Latine.

Gabriele D'Annunzio is fortunate in having made his mark so early in life, being barely thirty two years of age. He is a native of the Abruzzi, the "land of the genista," whose picturesque

beauties he never wearies of extolling. His birthplace is the little village of Pescara, on the Adriatic coast, which he still prefers to make his home, and whose simple-minded, honest, and somewhat fanatical inhabitants have figured in more than one of his shorter sketches. At the age of fifteen, while still a student at Prato, he published his first volume of verses, so daringly erotic in tone, that in spite of their obvious merits his readers were not a little scandalised, but the precocious young poet stoutly defended them, maintaining that the versification at least was unassailable. These were followed at intervals by other poems, which left no doubt of his position in the front rank of modern Italian poets. Many of his verses, such as the ode "O Rus," or the dedication to his old nurse in the "Poema Paradisiaco," are veritable gems of lyric poetry.

But it is chiefly as a novelist that D'Annunzio appeals to the general public. The novel is at present his chosen vehicle of expression, and is best adapted to reveal his curious personality. He has often frankly admitted what his readers would probably have found out for themselves, that his heroes are largely portraits of himself, endowed with his personal views and characteristics. In these portraits, which resemble one another like brothers, D'Annunzio cannot be said to have flattered himself. They are all essentially of one type, somewhat egotistical, somewhat weak, yet undeniably attractive. Like his Andrea Sperelli, in Piacere, they all have "a taste for works of art, a passionate cult of beauty, a paradoxical contempt for prejudices, and an avidity for pleasure," and like him they all contain "something of a Don Juan and a Cherubini," with the Don Juan element usually preponderating. It is evident that D'Annunzio is essentially a votary of pleasure, not merely sensual pleasure, as some hostile critics have claimed, but of all forms of enjoyment which can be received through the agency of the five senses. "Praise be to my ancestors,' he exclaims in his latest work, the Vergine delle Rocce, "who from the remote centuries have transmitted to me their rich and fervid blood. Praise to them now and forever, for the grand wounds they opened, for the grand conflagrations they kindled, for the fair goblets they drained, for the fair garments they

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he can be said to have one, is an ardent worship of the beautiful, and his books are a constant apotheosis of art. Art," he says in Piacere, there the faithful mistress, immortal and forever young; there the fountain of unadulterated joy, forbidden to the multitude, conceded to the elect; there the precious nutriment, which makes man equal to the gods." Of all forms of artistic expression, poetry is his predilection. "Verse is everything," he says. perfect verse is absolute, immutable, immortal. It holds the words within itself with the coherence of a diamond; it shuts in a thought as in a perfect circle which no force will avail to break; it becomes independent of all ties and all dominion; it belongs no longer to its creator, but to every one, and to no one, like space, like light, like all things measureless and perpetual."

"A

D'Annunzio is an artist, not only by instinct, but by cultivation. He possesses practical acquaintance not merely with the recognised masters in the separate fields of art, but with many of obscurer fame, and has evidently given them all much careful consideration. One is often surprised at the maturity and conciseness of his judgment. He is fond of drawing illustrations from the works of his favourite masters. Thus one of his female characters suggests a priestess of Alma Tadema ; another recalls "certain feminine profiles in the designs of the young Moreau, or the vignettes of Gravelot;" a third "seemed a creation of Sir Thomas Lawrence, she had in her all those minute feminine graces which are dear to that painter of furbelows, laces and velvets, of gleaming eyes and half-parted lips.' He has a special fondness for the early Italian painters, "the simple, noble, grand Primitives," thus Andrea Sperelli's ideal in etching is "to illumine with Rembrandt's light effects the elegance of design of the fourteenth century Florentines of the second generation, such as Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandajo and Filipino Lippi." The same ten

dency is shown in his preference for the early Florentine poets, Lapo Gianni, Cavalcanti, and Lorenzo de Medici, so that he has sometimes been called the Pre-Raphaelite of poetry. Similarly he is fond of recalling half-forgotten composers, like Paisiello, Antonio Salieri, and Jean Rameau. Among modern poets his favourites include Keats, Shelley, and the Italian Carducci, while in music he is an ardent Wagnerian.

It has been necessary to emphasise the artistic side of D'Annunzio's character, since it forms the keynote of his individuality. He seems to have made a religion of his cult of beauty; in Andrea Sperelli" the æsthetic sense had replaced the moral sense," and in the Vergine delle Rocce Socrates' assertion that he obeyed no one but God is interpreted, "I yield obedience to naught save those rules of conduct to which I have submitted my free nature, in order to attain my own conception of order and of beauty;" similarly Georgio Aurispa poses, in the Trionfo della Morte, as "an ascetic without a god,... kneeling before an altar abandoned by the deity.' The maxim which the elder Sperelli preaches to his son is that " a man must form his own life as he would form a work of art; the life of a man of intellect must be his own creation; in this lies all true superiority," and similarly Claudio Cantelmo speaks of his own life as "that hidden world of which I am the indefatigable artificer." The isolation of the individual is a favourite thought of D'Annunzio's, and underlies the vein of pessimism which is one of his characteristics. "You are unknown to me," says Georgio to Ippolita, in the Trionfo; "like every other human being, you enclose within you a world which is impenetrable for me; and the most ardent passion will never aid me to penetrate it." "Love,” he says at another time, "is the greatest of human sorrows, because it is the supreme effort which man makes to issue from the solitude of his own inmost self; an effort useless, like all the rest." The literary style of D'Annunzio is somewhat hard to analyse. He has the reputation of being the most cosmopolitan of writers, and has been compared in turn with Flaubert and Du Maupassant, Théophile Gautier and Catulle Mendès, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Baudelaire, while his debt to the Rus

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sian novelists is undeniable. His quotations are drawn from the most diverse sources; Shakespeare and Goethe, Shelley and Heine, Plato and Zoroaster follow one another in a profusion which would be ostentatious if they were not so apt. But while he borrows from every age and country whatever serves for the moment to elucidate a thought, and while he is broad-minded enough to appreciate and acknowledge the achievements of other nations, D'Annunzio is heart and soul an Italian, with an imperishable faith in the destiny of his race. Andrea Sperelli's highest ambition was to be a Roman prince : Rome was his great love; not the Rome of the Cæsars, but the Rome of the popes; not the Rome of arches, baths and forums, but the Rome of villas, fountains and churches. He would have given the whole Colosseum for the Villa Medici, the Campo Vaccino for the Piazza di Spagna, the Arch of Titus for the Fountain of the Tortoises." In his latest book D'Annunzio reiterates his faith in the Eternal City: "She alone-whose rocky bosom has been for centuries the pillow of death-she alone is destined to generate sufficient life to impregnate the world a second time ;"' and again, "Who can ever despair of the fate of the world while Rome is beneath the sky? . . . I believe firmly that the greatest height of future dominion will be that which shall have its base and its apex in Rome." It is obvious that whatever debt D'Annunzio may owe to France or Russia for plot, incident or method, his point of view and local colouring, his vivid and impetuous style of delineation, are all eminently Italian; and no one can appreciate him at his best who is not in sympathy with the Italian temperament.

It is somewhat anomalous to find such a delicate and complex artistic nature in an exponent of the modern naturalistic school, for this is where D'Annunzio's methods logically place him, although he is more usually classed with the psychologists. It is undeniable that the psychological method has a strong fascination for him, and he has evidently been an attentive student of Paul Bourget. His Piacere has often been compared with the latter's Le Disciple, while the curious duality of Sperelli's love forms a masculine parallel to Cœur de Femme.

In the Trionfo della

Morte he carries the analysis of motives so far as at times to become wearisome, and puts one in mind of Zola's comment upon Stendhal, "It seems as if all Stendhal's characters must have chronic headaches, he works their brains so hard." In his later works he also shows a leaning towards symbolism, in so far as it consists in attributing to words a meaning beyond their usual and normal signification. But the prevailing feature of his novels is their realism, the daring and at times somewhat brutal realism of Du Maupassant, which depicts both vice and virtue with the same impartial photographic accuracy. Even Paris, which accepts the unspeakable inventions of Catulle Mendès, and has forced Zola's La Terre beyond its hundredth edition, is fain to take her D'Annunzio expurgated; the publisher has yet to be found who will assume the responsibility of all the products of his astounding audacity. "A pagan of the time of Nero," is the comparison which M. de Vogue, the most lenient of critics, has found for him, and it is well applied; nowhere, since the time of the Cæsars, can one find the same daring crudeness side by side with the purest gems of poetic thought.

Some of his earlier sketches have much of Maupassant's morbid intensity, such as the Martyrdom of Gialluca, a poor sailor, who, while on a voyage, has a painful swelling come upon

his neck. His comrades convince him that only an operation can save his life, and when, half dead with fright, he trusts himself to their ignorant hands, they fall to work with their pocketknives with much gusto, and end by literally butchering the poor wretch. Or, again, “The Hero,' a young religious fanatic, whose right hand is crushed by the fall of the patron saint, a huge bronze statue, which he and seven companions are carrying in procession, on a religious festival. Convinced that the saint has demanded the sacrifice of the injured member, he staggers after the procession with a knife in his left hand, and in sight of the congregation, who stand mute with horror, proceeds to hack off the crushed and bleeding limb before the very altar. The description of the pilgrimage to the sanctuary at Castelbordino, in the fourth part of the Trionfo della Morte, is a hideous triumph of realism; the portrayal

of the bands of beggars, cripples, and epileptics, of "all the horrors of human flesh, passing in the light of the sun, before the shrine of the Virgin,'' rivals the most gruesome scenes which Zola has embodied in his Lourdes. A good example of D'Annunzio's morbidness is his description of the elder Aurispa's coarse and sensual nature:

"Stout, florid, powerful, the man seemed to exhale from his whole body a perpetual warmth of carnal vitality. Every gesture, every attitude, had the impetus of an effort, as if the whole muscular system of his great body was in continual struggle with the encumbering fat. His flesh, that coarse stuff, full of veins, of nerves, of tendons, of glands, of bones, full of instincts and necessities; flesh which deforms and sickens, grows sore and callous, and covered with wrinkles, pustules, warts and hairs; that coarse stuff, flesh, flourished in this man with a species of impudence."

his ability to set his characters vividly D'Annunzio is peculiarly felicitous in sketches of minor characters are always before the reader; even his lightest graphic. Compare that of the Japanese secretary in Piacere, "who sat gazing at the Duchess di Scirni with the ecstatic his divinity, and whose broad face, which expression of a bonze in the presence of seemed to have come forth from a classic page of the great humorous artist, O-kou-sai, glowed like. an August moon ;"'or the old English voluptuary, lection of erotic literature, and “followLord Heathcote, gloating over his coling the lines of the engravings with his whitish finger, strewn with coarse hairs up to the first joint, and terminating in like the claw of a monkey.' a pointed nail, polished and a trifle livid, Here is the portrait of a peasant of the Abruzzi :

"He was a one-eyed old man, bald on the top of his head, with a spare tuft of gray hair over each temple, and shaven chin. He held his whole body bent well forward, over his bowed legs. His limbs were deformed by hard labour: the toil of ploughing, which forces up the left shoulder and distorts the chest; the toil of mowing which holds the knees continually wide apart; the toil of pruning, which bends the body double; by all the slow and patient labour of cultivation."

A notable feature of D'Annunzio's realism is the prominence given to the sense of smell, notable because it forms one of the chief charges in Max Nordau's indictment of Zola and his followers. Thus, after his victory in the race, Sperelli "breathed in the hot and acrid exhalation of his horse fully, and of all the delicate perfumes which he had hitherto pre