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 to believe what he gives us no data for believing. Even in the _Trionfo_ he constantly introduces persons and incidents having no connection with the narrative. The whole family of Giorgio, the whole action passing at Guardiagrele, so elaborately painted, lead to nothing; we neither see nor hear of them again; neither they nor Guardiagrele ever enter his pages any more; and the momentous scene with Giorgio's father leads to nothing, but ends in a blind alley. Now this is a great fault in composition, and one which disappoints and irritates the reader. Of Demetrius Aurispa, again, much is made, but nothing is explained or continued; and his long exposition of one of Tennyson's poems is as unnecessary as the long disquisition upon Wagner further on in the book.