D'Annunzio's romances are a mixture of materialism, sensualism, and pessimism reduced in a pagan mortar to a homogeneous consistency, and then skilfully admixed with honey so that it is acceptable to the Christian palate, but, once it has got beyond the taste-buds of the tongue, once it is taken into the system, its poisonous, corroding, and destructive qualities become operative. I doubt if D'Annunzio ever wrote a word or line in his plays or romances that any one was the better for having read or heard, and by better I mean that he added to his spiritual possessions, to his inherent nobility, or to his aspirations for a moral perfection, one iota. I doubt if any normal human being, normal physically, mentally, and spiritually, can read "Il Piacere" without feeling ill and humiliated, not because of the picture that the author draws of himself in the guise of Andrea Sperelli, this finished expert in the employments of love, nor of Donna Maria, nor of the woman more infernally expert in those matters, nor the score of other characters which he paints with a master-hand, but because of the way in which he draws his bow across the overtaut strings of sensuousness until they scream and wail in frenzied fashion and then finally burst asunder. The way in which he makes an appeal to his perverted sensuality through vicarious overstimulation of the senses with which he was endowed for self-conservation and self-preservation, the senses of smell and sight and touch and hearing, is in itself a perversion. He stimulates them until they shriek for mercy or for immersion in some benumbing balm. The true pervert is he who puts out of proportion and out of perspective the sources of æsthetic emanation, and who concentrates them upon the percipient apparatus of one or other of the senses so that it may be excited to a frenzied activity. The description of Andrea's room, in which he awaits Donna Maria, with its perfumes, lights, and colors, and the description of his toilet articles and his bedroom is one of the most nauseating things in all literature. Like Nietzsche, D'Annunzio looks upon women as creatures of an inferior race, instruments of pleasure and procreation who were created to serve. When they no longer are amusing, useful, or serviceable they are to be brushed aside and with the same _sang froid_ as one would put aside an automobile that had broken down, worn out, or because it's "corpo non è più giovane," as he kept saying of Foscarina in "Il Fuoco," who belonged to him, "like the thing one holds in his fist, like the ring on one's finger, like a glove, like a garment, like a word that may be spoken or not, like a draft that may be drunk or poured on the ground."