If d'Annunzio had not gone into the adventure of the war, with its
sequel at Fiume, we might have continued to enjoy the spectacle of the
adventures of this restless soul amongst feminine masterpieces. As a
soldier and a statesman his prestige in the English-speaking world is
low, and we are apt to forget while reading the political bombast of the
years of the war and the period after the Armistice that it differs in
no respect from all other patriotic claptrap, except that it is the work
of the greatest living master of Italian prose. Of this fact his early
novels are a needed reminder to a generation which is making its
acquaintance with Italian writers of to-day through the intermediary of
a converted anti-clerical, who cannot even retell the story of Christ
without branding himself a vulgarian. In the prim days when young
d'Annunzio first flaunted his carnal delights and sorrows before a world
not yet released from Victorian stuffiness, the word "vulgar" was a
polite English epithet for "fleshly," an adjective much beloved by
indignant gentlemen who were permitting their wrath to triumph over
their desire to be respectable. It is a word which we apply nowadays to
the writings of a vulgarian like Papini, whose name is now as familiar
to the general public as d'Annunzio's was when "The Child of Pleasure"
was first translated.
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