This tendency of redundancy is not his fault alone; it is that of his time. The enormous canvases and numerous figures of modern paintings, the crowded groups and tortured attitudes of modern sculpture, the elaborate scenic effects, and mechanical appliances, and endless acts, of modern opera and drama, are all forms of the same malady of repetition; of ignorance of how, and when, to break the laurel bough before it withers; of lack of skill to master the subtleties of concentration and suggestion. The descriptions of the modern writer are frequently mere inventories; they are painfully minute; they are like a mosaic, in which millions of little cubes are grouped to make a whole. As before a modern painting we are often unimpressed by the whole, but struck by the dexterity of the brush-work, so in modern literature we are little interested in the conception, but allured by the dexterity of the treatment. Too frequently, unappily, this multiplicity of words covers a sad poverty of ideas. But in D'Annunzio's works there is not a page without ideas; ideas which may displease or may disgust the reader at times, but which are, nevertheless, always worthy to arrest attention, even when they are only studies of depravity. D'Annunzio is a greater writer than Zola, not because he has emulated or surpassed Zola's indecencies, but because he is what Zola never was--a scholar and a poet. His culture is of the most varied and classical kind, profound as well as brilliant; and his poetic powers were shown in his sonnets and lyrics before he wrote his romances. Zola is no scholar, and is not, either in temperament or expression, a poet. It would be impossible to conceive him creating such a poem as the _Villa Chigi_ or the _Riccordi di Ripetta_ of D'Annunzio. There are passages in Zola's works, notably in _La Terre_, which are, I think, as great as it is possible for prose to be, but they are never touched by any poetry of phrase or feeling. Also, when De Vogüé states that the indecency of D'Annunzio is not indecency because the Italian language is never indecent, and alleges that what would be insupportable in any other tongue is possible in Italian, because Italian enjoys the privilege which pertained to its mother, Latin, _i.e._, to say with grace and impunity what in any other tongue would disgust the hearer, he says what is absolutely untrue; and one can only wonder if he knows anything of the Italian of the streets, of the fields, of the wine-houses, of the popular theatres. In this affirmation, as in others, he has imagined what he says to be the fact, and founded on the fabrications of his imagination a positive statement. It is a frequent habit with him, and makes the weakness of his arguments in many instances, on other themes than this.