extent, inherited the instincts of the author of that stupendous composition.

Mr Strong, in his preface to Mr Lister's book, says that the French gift to the art of the world is taste. That the best French art has shown distinguished power of selection is certain; but taste is so largely a matter of personal temperament that it is difficult to attribute it to the art of any one country. In any other sense taste is apt to degenerate into pedantry, a vice from which the French are not entirely free, and one which is possibly more injurious to the development of art than the most callous indifference. Moreover, even French taste is not impeccable. That very quality which, to M. Dimier, seems so admirable, the painter-like quality of some of her sculpture and architecture, may seem to others to be precisely the point in which French taste is most at fault. The exuberant outline of the Palais d'Industrie, the aggressive and rather vulgar realism of the monument to Guy de Maupassant, even the 'La Haulmière' of Rodin in the Luxembourg, are a few modern instances which hardly testify to an unerring taste and a complete appreciation of beauty. Possibly M. Dimier may find the aesthetic anarchy which his soul desires in the confections of wood and ivory, bronze and precious stones, which yearly adorn the Paris salons. We should prefer to look elsewhere for the lesson of modern French art; and it is safer to find it in its distinction, its extraordinary technical accomplishment, its unfailing instinct for scale, and, not least of all, in its power of combining and co-ordinating all the arts, painting, sculpture, and architecture, so that they cooperate successfully without loss of balance, without ignoring and so far stultifying each other's labours. It is in this architectonic treatment of the arts that the French conspicuously excel; and, in spite of M. Dimier, we maintain that, as compared with other nations, the art in which France has always rendered her most brilliant service to the world is the art of architecture. REGINALD BLOMFIELD.

GE

Art. III.-GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO.

1. The Triumph of Death. Translated by Georgina Harding. London: Heinemann, 1898.

2. Le Triomphe de la Mort. Traduit de l'italien par G. Hérelle. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1899.

3. The Virgins of the Rocks. Translated by Agatha Hughes. London: Heinemann, 1899.

4. The Flame of Life. Translated by Kassandra Vivaria. London: Heinemann, 1900.

5. Gioconda. Translated by Arthur Symons. London: Heinemann, 1901.

6. Francesca da Rimini.

Translated by Arthur Symons.

London: Heinemann, 1902.

And other works.

THE great feast-days of all, for the restless critic, are those much interspaced occasions of his really meeting a 'case,' as he soon enough learns to call, for his convenience and assistance, any supremely contributive or determinant party to the critical question. These are recognitions that make up for many dull hours and dry contacts, many a thankless, a disconcerted gaze into faces that have proved expressionless. Always looking, always hoping, for his happiest chance, the inquirer into the reasons of things-by which I mean especially into the reasons of books-so often misses it, so often wastes his steps and withdraws his confidence, that he inevitably works out for himself, sooner or later, some handy principle of recognition. It may be a rough thing, a mere home-made tool of his trade, but it serves his purpose if it keeps him from beginning with mistakes. He becomes able to note, in its light, the signs and marks of the possible precious identity, able to weigh with some exactitude the appearances that make for its reality. He ends, through much expenditure of patience, by seeing when, how, why, the 'case 'announces and presents itself, and he perhaps even feels that failure and felicity have worked together to produce in him a sense for it that may at last be trusted as an instinct. He thus arrives at a view of all the candidates, frequently interesting enough, who fall short of the effective title, because he has, at need, perhaps even from afar, scented along the

wind the strongest member of the herd. He may perhaps not always be able to give us the grounds of his certainty, but he is at least never without knowing it in presence of one of the full-blown products that are the joy of the analyst. He recognises, as well, how the state of being full-blown comes above all from the achievement of consistency, of that last consistency which springs from the full enjoyment of freedom.

Many of us will, doubtless, not have forgotten how we were witnesses, a certain number of years since, to a season and a society that had found themselves of a sudden roused, as from some deep, drugged sleep, to the conception of the 'æsthetic' law of life; in consequence of which this happy thought had begun to receive the honours of a lively appetite and an eager curiosity, but was at the same time surrounded and manipulated by as many different kinds of inexpertness as probably ever huddled together on a single pretext. The spectacle was strange and finally was wearisome, for the simple reason that the principle in question, once it was proclaimeda principle not easily formulated, but which we may conveniently speak of as that of beauty at any price, beauty appealing alike to the senses and to the mindwas never felt to fall into its place as really adopted and efficient. It remained for us a queer high-flavoured fruit from overseas, grown under another sun than ours, passed round and solemnly partaken of at banquets organised to try it, but not found, on the whole, really to agree with us, not proving thoroughly digestible. It brought with it no repose, brought with it only agitation. We were not really, not fully, convinced; for the state of conviction is quiet. This was to have been the state itself that is the state of mind achieved and established -in which we were to know ugliness no more, to make the aesthetic consciousness feel at home with us, or learn ourselves, at any rate, to feel at home with it. That would have been the reign of peace, the supreme beatitude; but stability continued to elude us. We had mustered a hundred good reasons for it, yet the reasons but lighted up our desert. They failed to flower into a single concrete æsthetic 'type.' One authentic, one masterful, specimen would have done wonders for us, would at least have assuaged our curiosity. But we

were to be left, till lately, with our curiosity on our hands.

This is a yearning, however, that Signor D'Annunzio may at last strike us as supremely formed to gratify; so promptly we find in him, as a literary figure, the highest expression of the reality that our own conditions were to fail of making possible. He has immediately the value of giving us, by his mere logical unfolding, the measure of our shortcomings in the same direction, that of our timidities and penuries and failures. He throws a straighter and more inevitable light on the æsthetic consciousness than has, to my sense, in our time, reached it from any other quarter; and there is many a mystery that, properly interrogated, he may help to clear up for us, many an explanation of our misadventure that-as I have glanced at it—he may give. He starts with the immense advantage of enjoying the invoked boon by grace and not by effort, of claiming it under another title than the sweat of his brow and the aspiration of his culture. He testifies to the influence of things that have had time to get themselves taken for granted. Beauty at any price is an old story to him; art and form and style as the aim of the superior life are a matter of course; and it may be said of him, I think, that, thanks to these transmitted and implanted instincts and aptitudes, his individual development begins where the struggle of the mere earnest questioner ends. Signor D'Annunzio is earnest in his way, quite extraordinarily-which is a feature of his physiognomy that we shall presently come to and about which there will be something to say; but we feel him all the while in such secure possession of his heritage of favouring circumstance that his sense of intellectual responsibility is almost out of proportion. This is one of his interesting special marks, the manner in which the play of the æsthetic instinct in him takes on, for positive extravagance and as a last refinement of freedom, the crown of solicitude and anxiety. Such things but make, with him, for ornament and parade; they are his tribute to civility; the essence of the matter is meanwhile in his blood and his bones. No mistake was possible, from the first, as to his being of the inner literary camp-a new form, altogether, of perceptive and expressive energy; the question was settled by the intensity and variety,

to say nothing of the precocity, of his early poetic production.

.

Born at Pescara, in the Regno, the old kingdom of Naples, toward' 1863, as I find noted by a cautious biographer, he had, while scarce out of his teens, allowed his lyric genius full opportunity of scandalising even the moderately austere. He defined himself betimes very much as he was to remain, a rare imagination, a poetic, an artistic intelligence of extraordinary range and fineness concentrated almost wholly on the life of the senses. For the critic who simplifies a little to state clearly, the only ideas he urges upon us are the erotic and the plastic, which have for him about an equal intensity, or of which it would be doubtless more correct to say that he makes them interchangeable faces of the same figure. He began his career by playing with them together, in verse, to innumerable light tunes, and with an extraordinary general effect of curiosity and brilliancy. He has continued still more strikingly to play with them in prose; they have remained the substance of his intellectual furniture. It is of his prose only, however, that, leaving aside the Intermezzo,' 'L'Isottèo,' 'La Chimera,' 'Odi Navali,' and other such matters, I propose to speak, the subject being of itself ample for one occasion. His five novels and his four plays have extended his fame; they suggest by themselves as many observations as we shall have space for. The group of productions, as the literary industry proceeds among us to-day, is not large, but we may doubt if a talent and a temperament, if indeed, a whole view of life,' ever built themselves up as vividly, for the reader, out of so few blocks. The writer is even yet enviably young; but this solidity of his literary image, as of something already seated on time and accumulation, makes of him a rare example. Precocity is somehow an inadequate name for it, as precocity seldom gets away from the element of promise, and it is not exactly promise that blooms in the hard maturity of such a performance as 'The Triumph of Death.' There are certain expressions of experience, of the experience of the whole man, that are like final milestones, milestones for his possible fertility if not for his possible dexterity; a truth that has not indeed prevented 'Il Fuoco,' with its doubtless still ampler finality, from

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