He is represented as inordinately,
as quite monstrously, endowed for the career that from the first absorbs
and that finally is to be held, we suppose to engulf him; and it is a
tribute to the truth with which his endowment is presented that we
should scarce know where else to look for so complete and convincing an
account of such adventures. Casanova de Seingalt is of course infinitely
more copious, but his autobiography is cheap loose journalism compared
with the directed, finely-condensed iridescent epic of Count Andrea."
It would be difficult to find, couched in such euphemistically
appreciative language, so accurate a summary of the intention and
quality of this book. Casanova is pale, diffuse, and unconvincing,
indeed, beside the d'Annunzio who so early gave his full measure as the
supreme novelist of sensual pleasure in this book. As Arthur Symons so
well says, "Gabriele d'Annunzio comes to remind us, very definitely, as
only an Italian can, of the reality and the beauty of sensation, of the
primary sensations; the sensations of pain and pleasure as these come to
us from our actual physical conditions; the sensation of beauty as it
comes to us from the sight of our eyes and the tasting of our several
senses; the sensation of love, which, to the Italian, comes up from a
root in Boccaccio, through the stem of Petrarch, to the very flower of
Dante.
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