It was a strange awakement that D'Annunzio had when he went to Rome in the early '90's. Perhaps it was before that time that he encountered "L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable," and later "La Sagesse et la Destinée," and he absorbed some of its æsthetic mysticism. He realized that it was another variety of search for wisdom because it is happiness, and he began to portray it in his poetry and tragedies. From the day he began to write he accustomed himself to take as it pleased him from others' writings, and not only lines and paragraphs but subjects, movements, cadences, thoughts, and images which determined the character and decided the nature of the production. Italian critics have taken the trouble to return to the original creators the borrowed constituents of some of his productions, "L'Asiatico," for instance; and that which then remained was the caressing modulation of the verses. When his romances appeared in French many of the passages taken bodily from Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, de Maupassant, Pêladan, de Goncourt, Huysmans, and many others were prudently suppressed. But no one can fail to recognize that he read these authors with a keen eye, a note-book by his side. But he has known how to use what he borrowed. The day came when the conduct of a corrupt people in a decadent fictitious world no longer sufficed to divert him; having drunk from the poisoned springs of lust not only to satiety but to disgust, he, like his prototype of Huysmans's creation, "Des Esseintes," the Thebaide raffinée of "A Rebours," must hide himself away far from the world, in some retreat where he might deaden the discordant sounds of the rumblings of inflexible life, as one deadens the street with straw where an important or beloved one is sick. This retreat was Paris and there we must leave him making scenic plays and erudite verse for a Russian ballerina, and working out his destiny in contemplation of death and in planning the selection of warriors for Valhalla. We are not concerned with his conduct or with his morals. We are concerned with his activities to divert and instruct us, and the influence that his efforts had upon the people of his time. He wrote artistically perfect novels; his poetry is the highest form of lyric expression; he made his dramas the revivification of the elements of Greek tragedy; and he strove to prove that Eros was unconquerable by priest, sage, or warrior. Now, with the world in ferment, they are the only earnest for our acceptation of his assurance that he can shape the fate of Italy more acceptably than its statesmen. Before the Great War he had practically passed from the stage of letters. That epochal occurrence resurrected him. We can wait to hear what posterity will say of him. CHAPTER IV THE FUTURIST SCHOOL OF ITALIAN WRITERS