And they would have to be acknowledged partly in the right. In that inevitable unity of form there is indeed a necessary element of the perfect moment; but it is not a perfect unity. For the matter of their art should be, in the last analysis, life itself; and the unity of life itself, the one basic unity of all, they have missed. It is a hollow sphere they present, and nothing solid. Henry James has spent the whole of a remarkable essay on D'Annunzio's creations in determining the meaning of "the fact that their total beauty somehow extraordinarily fails to march with their beauty of parts, and that something is all the while at work undermining that bulwark against ugliness which it is their obvious theory of their own office to throw up." The secret is, he avers, that the themes, the "anecdotes," could find their extension and consummation only in the rest of life. Shut out, as they are, from the rest of life, shut out from all fruition and assimilation, and so from all hope of dignity, they lose absolutely their power to sway us. It might be simpler to say that these works lack the first beauty which literature as the dialect of life can have--they lack the repose of centrality; they have no identity with the meaning of life as a whole. It could not be said of them, as Bagehot said of Shakespeare: "He puts things together, he refers things to a principle; rather, they group themselves in his intelligence insensibly around a principle;...a cool oneness, a poised personality, pervades him." But in these men there is no cool oneness, no reasonable soul, and so they miss the central unity of life, which can give unity to literature. Even the apparent structural unity fails when looked at closely; the actions of the characters are seen to be mechanical--their meaning is not inevitable. The second answer to our assertion that the "sense of life" is not the beauty of literature might call attention to the fact that SENSE of life may be taken as understanding of life. A complete sense of life must include the conditions of life, and the conditions of life involve this very "energetic identity" on which we have insisted. And this contention we must admit. So long as the sense of life is taken as the illusion of life, our words hold good. But if to that is added understanding of life, the door is open to the profoundest excellences of literature. Henry James has glimpsed this truth in saying that no good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind. Stevenson has gone further. "But the truth is when books are conceived under a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine time heated and electrified by effort, the conditions of our being seized with such an ample grasp, that even should the main design be trivial or base, some truth and beauty cannot fail to be expressed." V