D'Annunzio has also a total lack of perception when the ridiculous mars the pathetic. This is a very common defect in his countrymen, and is one frequently traceable to a want of the humorous faculty. There is something ridiculous, which goes far to spoil all which is intended to be tragic in the motive or action of the _Innocente_, in the details accompanying and explaining its culminating act. The idea of this act is fine, and the hatred of the man for the child is natural, whilst the conception and carrying out of the semi-crime are subtle and original. But the filthy description of the infant (almost identical with that of the new-born babe in Zola's _Joie de Vivre_) and the perpetual references to its swaddling clothes, and the tedious profusion of details with which the subject is elaborated, destroy in the mind of the reader all sense of pity for the victim, and all blame for the act which sends it to its grave. One feels that the little squalling, dribbling, shapeless creature, with its scabby head and cat-like miawling, is much better destroyed, and this is not the sensation which the author desires to arouse; he would wish us to feel at once horror at, and compassion for, Tullio Hermil, but we can feel nothing except a vague contempt for this helpless young man. Had the semi-murder of it followed immediately on its birth, or had it been found by him after absence a fair two-year-old child, with all the rosebud loveliness of that age, this bathos would have been avoided; and the stealthy sin of its effacement would have carried in it the force of a powerful tragedy undiminished, as it actually is, by gross and comic images, which may be realism but are none the less bathos. It is perfectly natural that Tullio Hermil's abhorrence of this spurious offspring should grow with every day until the desire to destroy it becomes at last an over-mastering impulse; but to make this act tragic, and to awaken that sympathy for the victim which all true tragedy excites, the latter should be so described that the heart of the reader should bleed for it when exposed to the icy air which kills it, and that its martyred infancy should seem fitly lamented by those echoes of the distant _Novena_, which at the supreme moment float through all the silent house.