If he is utterly oblivious to the two last, his writings may be as immoral or unrighteous as he wishes to make them. If the public does not wish to read them it need not, and if it considers them injurious to others whose mental capacity does not enable them to judge whether they are proper or injurious they can be suppressed. If, however, the writer is animated to production by either of the latter two motives, he must be reconciled to having an estimate made of his work not only from the point of view of literary criticism, but also from the point of view of the fitness of his works for literary consumption. That is, he must be reconciled to attempts at estimating whether or not the world would not have been better off without his writings. There are few writers to whom these remarks apply with greater force than Gabriele D'Annunzio. It is generally admitted that he is the most consummate master of Italian verse now living. Though his prose writings show that he is not a literary craftsman of the first order, he has understood that art rises out of our primal nature and that it is instinctive. He has sung the praises of sensualism as they never have been sung in modern times, and he has panoplied the preliminaries to love's embrace with garlands made of flowers of forced blooming, artificially perfumed and colored so that the average human being does not recognize them as products of nature. He has preached and practised a moral code the antithesis of Christianity, and yet no one has sought seriously to save his soul. In truth, D'Annunzio had tired the world of him. The people of it were tired of him as they might have been of a radiantly beautiful woman who had become a gorgeously decorated strumpet constantly walking up and down in the world seeking praise and admiration. When he went to Paris the world seemed to be satisfied that he should disappear in that maelstrom, as it was willing that a contemporary sensuous egocentrist should disappear when he left Reading Gaol, but D'Annunzio must enter upon the final stage of his mission from the gods, and the Great War gave him the opportunity.