In "Vergini delle Rocce" he expounds the theory that inequality is the essence of the state, and in this book as well as in "Il Trionfo della Morte" we find all the passion of language and of sentiment that one finds in Nietzsche. It is no longer to be doubted that he had kept his word "noi tendiamo l'orecchio alla voce del magnanimo Zarathustra e prepariamo nell' arte con sicura fede l'avvento del Uebermensch del superuomo"--we listen to the voicing of the magnanimous Zarathustra and we prepare with unfaltering faith for the coming of the superman to the arts. In his life of Cola di Rienzo D'Annunzio again took occasion to lampoon and traduce the common people, describing them as the great beast which must be crushed and annihilated. "Il Trionfo della Morte" is the very essence of Heraclitan philosophy and Dionysan ethics. The hero, who is a paragon of knowledge which he displays for the reader's edification, meets the young and pretty wife of a business man who bores her. He is successful finally in permitting her to pass a few weeks with him in his villa by the sea. During these weeks they run the gamut of every conceivable sensation and the reader gets a description of them and of the gradual hatred that develops in him for his subjection of her. "Every human soul carries in it for love a definite quality of sensitive force. This quality is used up with time and when it is used up no effort can prevent love from ceasing." But, unlike the animal when his concupiscence is satiated and he is still urged to greater display, the hero is not content with driving her from him; he must needs mete out the same fate to her that he did to the infant in "Il Piacere," so he lures her to the edge of a sea cliff and hurls her into space. "She would in death become for me matter of thought, pure ideality; from a precarious and imperfect existence she would enter into an existence complete and definite, forsaking forever the infirmities of her weak, luxurious flesh. Destroy to possess. There is no other way for him who seeks the absolute in love." The reader yields to the enchantment of his style, to the seductiveness of his lyrism, to the intoxications of his descriptions of beauty; and the critic and fellow writer to his mastery of technic and consummate mastery of behavioristic psychology. From the critics' point of view "The Triumph of Death" and "The Fire" are the high-water marks of D'Annunzio as a stylist, and they mark his completest moral dissolution.