Now, in this passage there is much truth, but it is not equally true that D'Annunzio is at no time to be placed in the lower class. There is too frequently in his indecency a strain, an effort, a mannerism, an extravagance, sought, and unnecessary. The reader, if he desires to understand what I mean by this, can turn to page 320 in the _Trionfo_, or to Chapter X., in the _Piacere_ (Italian version), in which there are ingenuities of indecency introduced which have no relation whatever to the narrative, nor any obligation to appear. What is, I think, more offensive to taste, and more injurious to art than any sensual excess in description, is mere nastiness, mere filth; and of this D'Annunzio is as guilty as Zola is, and as Zola has been, always. De Vogüé may pour out his scorn as he will on the _industriel_ who composed _La Bête Humaine_, and may cover with the roses and lilies of his exquisite garlands of praise the creator of the _Trionfo_, the fact remains that the Satyr shows his cloven hoof as much in one as in the other; and the motives which move either of the writers we have no right to condemn or to appraise, for the entrance into personal motive is surely an intrusion which should never be attempted. We may, nevertheless, suggest as probable that, however dissimilar be their atmosphere and circumstances, both Zola and D'Annunzio have been moved to study chiefly what is called immoral, and prurient, by a sincere desire to reach to the very depths of human nature, to shrink from no investigation, to deny no evidence, and to protest against the hypocrisy with which literary art has so frequently covered its eyes and turned away from the truth. 'Let us study life alone,' says D'Annunzio, as Zola said it; and if he seek life in its corruption, coming upon the corpse of putrid pleasure as the gay riders in the Campo Santo of Pisa check their startled steeds before the open biers, he does no more, and no less, offend art than Zola offends it in _Nana_. Indeed, so little is De Vogüé's statement in this matter justified, that almost every Italian who has read D'Annunzio's works will, in speaking of him, regret his incessant recurrence to obscenity. Not from prudery, for Italians are never prudes, but from an artistic sense, that this perpetually intruded indecency is an error in taste, and becomes quite as tiresome as any other form of perpetual repetition. The most conspicuous error of modern literature is, beyond doubt, its verbiage. It has completely forgotten the great canon of 'Ars est celare artem'; the supreme ability of conveying immeasurable suggestion in a mere word, in concentrating all the music of the soul in one brief note. All the arts err at this epoch in the same manner; literature has the common malady; it is prolix. The indecencies of D'Annunzio, like his other descriptions, are prolix; and the prolixity is not redeemed by the indecency, nor the indecency by the prolixity.