There is unhappily, in all his works, an absolute absence of wit, of mirth, of humour. There is not a laugh, scarcely even a smile, in any of his pages; if we except the cruel laughter of a lover at his mistress's physical defects. Over all his genius there broods that 'green melancholy,' which is the too-common hue of modern thought, that dull greyness of death which has spread from the laboratories of science over all the worlds of literature. Not only is no joyous laugh ever heard, there is not even the indulgent smile which relieves melancholy and bitterness in many writers whose views of life are gloomy. Nowhere is this more seen than in the almost savage cruelty with which the poor old _dévote_, Gioconda Aurispa, is drawn; the merciless description of her senile love of sweetmeats, of her disappointment when her nephew forgets to bring them, of her expectant eyes, 'almost impudent in their entreaty,' of her short breath with its foetid odour, of her tottering steps amongst her flowers; all is cruel, merciless, without a grain of pity or of sympathy to redeem its biting satire of so feeble and harmless a creature. Compare with such treatment the exquisite tenderness of Pierre Loti's Tante Claire, think with how gentle a respect Thackeray drew the death of an old man, remember the touch with which Maupassant makes us akin even to poor Boule de Suiffe. Tragedy is not necessarily cruelty, nor accuracy necessarily brutality. Shakespeare makes us indignant for Lear and sharers in his sorrows; but D'Annunzio would concentrate our thoughts only on his ridiculous thin hair blown by the winter winds, the tremor of his toothless jaws, and palsy of his bent, unsteady limbs. In the highest art there is always pity because there is always comprehension. D'Annunzio has as yet no more pity than the demonstrator in a physiological amphitheatre. But it is not impossible that such pity may come to him later on, for pity is rarely a passion of youth; it is usually the fruit of reflection, comparison, realisation of what is alien and impersonal. That sense which he already feels of the inner life of all things cannot leave him for ever insensible to the sufferings of that life. At present he is absorbed in the sensual ecstasies of early manhood, and the fumes of voluptuous delights obscure his sight to much else which surrounds him, and which finds him callous and negligent of it. De Vogüé sees in him the leader of a new school, but there is as yet little that is new in his manner of judging life. It is the manner of _Le Disciple_, though touched with warmer tones, and placed in richer landscapes, and vibrating with stronger passions, because Italian in scene and in temper.