Since "Wilhelm Meister" no book has been
written more valuable as an intellectual ladder to the higher levels
of aesthetic thought and feeling.
Massive and dramatic, powerful and suggestive, it magnetizes us into
an acceptance of its daring and optimistic hopes for the world; of its
noble suggestions of a spiritual synthesis of the opposing
race-traditions of Europe. Of all the books mentioned in this list it
is the one which the compiler would most strongly recommend to the
notice of those anxious to win a firmer intellectual standing-ground.
40. GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO. THE FLAME OF LIFE. THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH.
_Translated by Arthur Hornblow_.
D'Annunzio is the most truly Italian, the most inveterately Latin, of
all recent writers. Without light and shade, without "nuance,"
without humor or irony, he compels our attention by the clear-cut,
monumental images he projects, by the purple and scarlet splendor of
his imperial dreams.
His philosophy, though lacking in the deep and tragic imagination of
Nietzsche, has something of the Nietzschean intellectual fury. He
teaches a shameless and antinomian hedonism, narrower, less humane,
but more fervid and emotional, than that taught by Remy de Gourmont.
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