His next play, "Il Trionfe d'Amore" ("The Triumph of Love"), was along the same lines: life without sorrow or strife save such as make pleasure--which bulks large in life--sweeter. Within a few years Giacosa began to depict life as it really was, is, or should be, and the first indication of it was "Il Conte rosso" ("The Red Count"), and for a decade he gave himself to the production of historical plays none of which can be used to-day as a wreath on the monument to his memory. It was not until he wrote "Resa a Discrezione" ("Surrender at Discretion"), that he came into the field which he finally tilled so profitably, holding up to the contemptuous, scornful gaze of the people the useless, iniquitous, pernicious existences of a certain class, the noble. In this he did the same thing that he had done in his masterpiece, "As the Leaves." But here he portrayed flesh and blood confronted with problems conditioned by life, called chance. Instead of desperation and whetted appetite for sensuous appeasement, we see latent character budding and flowering under the stimulus of adversity; virtue which does not lose its aroma from enforced tarry in putrid milieu; the deadly sins, rooted in ancestral emotions and nurtured by environment displayed in the conduct of human beings of our acquaintance and our intimacy; we see the exaltation and the deprecation of viciousness just as we see it and accomplish it in real life. The literary features of the lines, the crispness and naturalness of the dialogue, the fidelity with which he reflected the handling of problems likely to confront any one show the finished artist. Giacosa was a conspicuous literary figure of yesterday's Italy, friend of poets and philosopher, journalist, essayist, lecturer, man of the world, mirror of one side of its mental and emotional activity.