They are amateurs with a skill undreamed of in Nana's philosophy; they believe in love for art's sake.

Consequently, the French critic was right in insisting that Zola and d'Annunzio are two very different persons, although confounded in an identical obloquy by the moralists.

He is, however, not quite so subtle when he tries to argue from this that, in the conventional sense, d'Annunzio is more moral.
At this point I will cite an unexpectedly intelligent witness, one of the early admirers of d'Annunzio in English, and the author of an essay on him which is assuredly the best which has appeared in that language.
This is what Henry James has to say of "The Child of Pleasure" in his "Notes on Novelists": "Count Andrea Sperelli is a young man who pays, pays heavily, as we take it we are to understand, for an unbridled surrender to the life of the senses; whereby it is primarily a picture of that life that the story gives us.

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.