If Nietzsche provoked into antagonism the sounder elements in Dehmel, he was largely responsible for destroying such sanity as the amazing genius of Gabriele D'Annunzio had ever possessed. In D'Annunzio the sensuality of a Sybarite and the eroticism of a Faun go along with a Roman tenacity and hardness of nerve. The author of novels which, with all their luxurious splendour, can only be called hothouses of morbid sentiment, has become the apostle of Italian imperialism, and more than any other single man provoked Italy to throw herself into the great adventure of the War. Unapproached in popularity by any other Italian man of letters, D'Annunzio discovered Nietzsche, and hailed him--a great concession--as an equal. When Nietzsche died, in 1900, D'Annunzio indicted a lofty memorial ode to the Titanic Barbarian who set up once more the serene gods of Hellas over the vast portals of the Future. Nietzsche indeed let loose all the Titan, and all consequently that was least Hellenic, in the fertile genius of the Italian; his wonderful instinct for beauty, his inexhaustible resources of style are employed in creating orgies of superhuman valour, lust, and cruelty like some of his later dramas, and hymns intoxicated with the passion for Power, like the splendid Ode in which the City of the Seven Hills is prophetically seen once more the mistress of the world, loosing the knot of all the problems of humanity. His poetic autobiography, the first _Laude_ (1901)--counterpart of Wordsworth's _Prelude_ and its very antipodes--culminates in a prayer 900 lines long to Hermes, god of the energy which precipitates itself on life and makes it pregnant with invention and discovery, of the iron will 'which chews care as a laurel leaf'--the god of the Superman. And so he discovers the muse of the Superman, the Muse of Energy, a tenth Muse whose first poet he modestly disclaims to be, if he may only be, as he would have us interpret his name, her Announcer. If D'Annunzio emulates Nietzsche, the two great militant poets of Catholic France would have scorned the comparison. Charles Peguy's brief career was shaped from his first entrance, poor and of peasant birth, at a Paris Lycee, to his heroic death in the field, September 1914, by a daemonic force of character. His heroine, glorified in his first book, was Jeanne d'Arc, who attempted the impossible, and achieved it. In writing, his principle--shocking to French literary tradition--was to speak the brutal truth _brutalement_. As a poet he stood in the direct lineage of Corneille, whose _Polyeucte_ he thought the greatest of the world's tragedies. As a man, he embodied with naive intensity the unsurpassed inborn heroism of the French race.