No enumeration of the handicaps under which an Italian writer must struggle would be complete without mention of the prolonged baneful influence on both prose and verse, but especially on prose, of D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio himself is what he is, and I have no intention of discussing here the merits and defects of his own important achievement; I am only glancing at the influence his work has for thirty years exerted on minor writers--an influence bad almost without qualification. It has led scores of writers away from simplicity, away from life (by which I do not mean only away from realism), into a deliberate tortured complexity, beneath which was nothing, a blank emptiness. Even to-day Italian prose has not shaken itself quite free from that appalling influence. It corrupts the work of Virgilio Brocchi oddly, since there is at bottom nothing ‘Dannunziano’ in its spirit, and it pervades that of Antonio Beltramelli, to mention only two contemporary novelists of some talent. It is greatly to the credit of Panzini that there is no trace of it in his work, though he has been subjected to it all his life, being of precisely D’Annunzio’s age. (One firm exception must be made to all that I have said about the thinness and flaccidity of Italian prose. Side by side with literary prose, there has always existed in Italy a polemical prose which has never lacked vitality. To-day it is stronger than ever. It is, in fact, terrific in its vigour, insolence and scurrility. This is probably because it is not considered a form of art; so that in it people let themselves go, and express with unrestrained violence their fiercely partisan hatreds. At any rate, to find really living, breathing, Italian prose you must turn to-day to the polemical editorials of the press--the bitter stinging attacks on political adversaries that you will find in the _Popolo d’Italia_, the _Giustizia_, _Cremona Nuova_, and the Genoa _Lavoro_).[1] Although I have enumerated a good many obstacles to the achievement of anything really significant in contemporary Italian fiction, I am still dissatisfied. Given sufficient strength, sufficient vitality, writers should have surmounted even these difficulties. Given sufficient strength. Perhaps that is the real point. The men striving are not strong enough. Poets come from wherever God put them, but, almost without exception, the prose writers of Italy spring from the bourgeoisie. From the ‘popolo,’ none; from the aristocracy, ‘Black’ and provincial (even when residing in Rome itself), occupied only with religion, the retention of its rights and the adequate marriage of its children, or from the cosmopolitan aristocracy, occupied only with diversions, there have come but one or two names. No, the writers come from the bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie, in England far stronger than any other class, is in Italy the weakest, the least full-blooded.