He is an aesthete, but his aestheticism has never expressed itself in barren theory, but has always turned to life itself.

He realized at the outset of his career that life is a physical thing, which we must compel to surrender all that it can offer us, which the artist must bend and shape to his own creative purposes.

It has been said that d'Annunzio had a philosophy and Nietzsche and Tolstoy were invoked as influences, but there is as little of Tolstoy's moralizing in "The Intruder" as of Nietzsche's pessimistic idealism in "The Child of Pleasure" or "The Triumph of Death." Whatever conclusions may be drawn from the problem of the Eternal Feminine as postulated in all his novels--and that is the only problem which he confronts--it is hardly to be dignified by the name of a philosophy.

One gathers that men can be exalted and destroyed by the attraction of women, but the author remains to the end--as late certainly as 1910, when the last of the novels in the first mood, _Forse che si, forse che no_, appeared--of the opinion that they are the one legitimate preoccupation of the artist in living.

Elena Muti in "The Child of Pleasure," Foscarina in "The Flame of Life," Ippolita in "The Triumph of Death" are superb incarnations of the one and ever varied problem which troubles the world in which d'Annunzio lives.
An American critic, Mr.Henry Dwight Sedgwick, once demanded in tones of passionate scorn that d'Annunzio be tried before a jury of "English-speaking men," and he called the tale: "Colonel Newcome! Adam Bede! Bailie Jarvie! Tom Brown! Sam Weller!"-- notes of exclamation included, from which one was to conclude that the creator of Sperelli, Hermil and Aurispa would slink away discomfited at the very sound of those names.