'It was a marvellous and terrible spectacle, unexpected, unlike any other assemblage of men and things, composed of mixtures so diverse, cruel and strange, that it eclipsed the most dreadful visions of a nightmare. All the hideousness of the eternal idiot, all the filthiness of vice and its stupidities, all the spasms and deformities of baptized flesh, all the tears of penitence, all the laughter of license; the mania, the cupidity, the craft, the lust, the fraud, the imbecility, the silent desperation, the sacred choruses, the howls of the possessed, the shouts of the ambulatory vendors, the clanging of the bells, the squeal of the trumpets, the lowing, the neighing, the bleating; the fires crackling under the cauldrons, the heaps of fruits and sweetmeats, the display of utensils, of stuffs, of arms, of jewels, of rosaries; the obscene capers of the dancers, the convulsions of the epileptic, the blows of the quarrelsome, the rush of flying, frightened thieves through the crowd; the supreme froth of corruption poured forth from the filthy lanes of remote cities, and showered out on to an ignorant and astounded multitude, like horseflies on the flanks of beasts, shoals of parasites descended on a compact mass incapable of defending itself, all the base temptations of brutal appetites, all the treacheries playing on simplicity and stupidity, all the charlatanisms and the effronteries bared in full daylight; all the opposing contrasts were there, boiling and effervescing, around the House of the Virgin.' What strength is here? What admirable choice of descriptive phrase, and truth of design, as in a Callot or Hogarth! what sense conveyed of press, of haste, of noise, of confusion, of stench, of uproar! We live in this crowd as we read. De Vogüé asserts that the indecency of D'Annunzio is never 'polisonne ou grivoise'; that it is never vulgar, although it is unbridled. He admits the preference for the unclean, which almost amounts, indeed, to an hallucination, but he urges that in D'Annunzio it is always redeemed by art. 'A Rabelais, a Boccaccio, a Loti, or a D'Annunzio, give expression to a certain temperament, with the artistic resources which that temperament imposes on them,' writes De Vogüé, in his celebrated criticism,[1] 'they have nothing in common with tradesmen, who painfully produce the filth demanded by a publisher and a certain public. An abyss separates the former from the latter writers. This difference between them which our judgment perceives, we do not show by critical demonstration; our taste is conscious of it as our eyes distinguish a flower, venomous perhaps, but natural, from an artificial flower coloured by poisonous dyes.' [Footnote 1: _Révue des Deux Mondes_, 1^re janvier 1895.]