in a physiological amphitheatre. But it is not impossible that such pity may come to him later on, for pity is rarely a passion of youth; it is usually the fruit of reflection, comparison, realisation of what is alien and impersonal. That sense which he already feels of the inner life of all things cannot leave him for ever insensible to the sufferings of that life.

At present he is absorbed in the sensual ecstasies of early manhood, and the fumes of voluptuous delights obscure his sight to much else which surrounds him, and which finds him callous and negligent of it. De Vogüé sees in him the leader of a new school, but there is as yet little that is new in his manner of judging life. It is the manner of Le Disciple, though touched with warmer tones, and placed in richer landscapes, and vibrating with stronger passions, because Italian in scene and in temper.

If ever there be a true Latin renascence, which is scarcely to be hoped for, it will come, not from a writer who is saturated with French, Russian, German, and English influences, but one who has the Latin genius, the Latin temper, unalloyed. But does this now exist anywhere? If it do, it is in remote mountain sides and by lonely lake waters, not in clubhouses and on racecourses. Such a writer will more probably come, if he come at all, from the extreme south than from the north, perhaps even from the great and almost virgin island of the west. In the dense cork woods and on the desolate shores of Sardinia, a Salvator Rosa of literature might well be begotten, for there is also there a companion whom the Muses fear not—Misery.

I imagine that De Vogüé does not know much of the popular songs of the south and the west of Italy. I venture to think that in those stornelli, cantileni rispetti, and the rest, there is more of the genuine spirit of the Italian soil than in any of the works hitherto written by D'Annunzio, because, despite their intensity of passion, they are full of a pure poetical beauty and an idealised tenderness, which in his pictures of love are absent.

Even in the views which De Vogüé holds of the characters of these romances, there seems frequently a curious misconstruction of their salient points. For instance, he sees in the tragedy, with which the Trionfo closes, the fact that Aurispa loved so intensely that he felt impelled to destroy what he possessed, as the only absolute means of fully possessing it. But I do not see this. I see in Aurispa a young man habitually self-indulgent and constitutionally feeble; who gradually passes from frantic adoration of a woman possessed, to the nausea which so frequently follows on such possession. The proof of this lies in the cruel cynical criticism with which he discovers and enumerates her physical and mental defects, with which he views the deformity of her feet as they push the warm sand of the beach to and fro, and with which he realises the growing disgust which she awakes in him physically and morally. He feels that he can neither live with her, nor live without her; that she will be his destroyer in one way or the other; it is in a frenzy of hatred and of impotence that he seizes her in his last embrace, and plunges with her over the cliff, into the starlit depths of the sea below. To ignore this is to miss the whole meaning of the final act, and the absolute veracity of the whole work.

I have seen such physical jealousy in the man of feeble health of the vigorous strength of the woman whom he loved, and there is no form of jealousy more cruel or more incurable, and it is likely to become frequent in modern life, which develops the physical strength and social liberties of the female to so vast an extent. This is a painful fact, but it is one which cannot be disputed. Go wherever a crowd of both sexes congregate, and there you will see an Ippolita in all her splendid vitality and magnificent growth, and beside her, nine times out of ten, there will be a Giorgio Aurispa, small, frail, half-blind, pallid, bloodless, beardless, sickly, and prematurely decrepit.

I should myself have preferred to trace the destroying influence of sensual passion eating its way gradually into the health and strength of a complete masculine sanity, and of a robust masculine health, like aquafortis biting into a copper plate. Aurispa is already mentally diseased before the fateful day on which he sees Ippolita in the dusk of the chapel in Rome. He views all things animate and inanimate, human and animal, real and ideal, through that distorted medium which the mentally deformed habitually see through as through a convex and smoked glass. He is more than feeble, he is not sane. If he had not sought death on account of his mistress, he would have done so because Demetrius Aurispa had died before by his own hand; or for some other reason which in his cerebral condition would have seemed to him imperative and irresistible, as imaginary conditions do seem to those not sane.

We are told throughout the book to realise this extreme weakness, physical and moral, which ultimately drives him to destroy himself and her.

'"You love life?" he murmured, with a veiled bitterness.

'"Yes, life delights me," she answered, almost with vehemence.

'She had, in her voice, in her attitude, in all her person, a brightness of unusual joy and pleasure. She had in her whole aspect that satisfaction which the living creature only feels in those hours when life runs harmoniously in all its currents, in which there is a perfect balance in all the vital forces in accord with the favour and fairness of all surrounding circumstances. As in other similar moments, her whole being seemed to unclose in the freshness of the sea air, in the coolness of the summer evening, like one of those magnificent night-blooming flowers which only open the heart of their petals as the sun passes and sets.'

This is one of the innumerable beautiful images in which D'Annunzio excels, and nothing can surely be finer of its kind than the whole passage which I have quoted. But it clearly proves, especially if compared with its context, that the passion which Aurispa once felt for her had now become a furious envy of her more abounding life, of her perennial and indestructible capacity of enjoyment.

And that night, indeed, he kills her, not from excess of love, but from envy of her exultant and exuberant vitality and hatred of its contrast to his own impotence; from the sense, as I have said, that he could neither live with her nor without her. In this, D'Annunzio has linked cause and effect with excellent precision. Every minutia of feeling described is correctly described, and such feeling is made to arise from a natural source, precisely as dislike follows on satiety in real life. But very frequently there is no such natural connection in his treatment of circumstance and character.

The Trionfo is admirably balanced from its opening to its closing pages; and the tragedy on the Pincio, with which the work opens, fittingly and perfectly strikes the keynote of the whole, and the motif of the opera is suggested in the overture. But in the other romances there is too often a want of unison between the action described and its motives or sources. There is, at times, even an absolute lack of any rational cause at all; so that, in some degree, all his characters have in them more or less of the irresponsibility and unconnectedness of the insane. He leaves too much unexplained; too many actions motiveless; too many portraits floating indistinct like the night and river studies of Whistler. It is curious that this vagueness, this uncertainty and obscurity, should exist in one who is on the other hand so frequently and wearisomely minute in microscopic details. He constantly calls on us