The wonder-working shrine of the Abruzzi, to which they have previously made their way, is a local Lourdes, the resort from far and wide of the physically afflicted, the evocation of whose multitudinous presence, the description of whose unimaginable miseries and ecstasies, grovelling struggles and supplications, has the mark of a pictorial energy for such matters not inferior to that of Émile Zola—to the degree even that the originality of the pages in question was, if I remember rightly, rather sharply impugned in Paris. D’Annunzio’s defence, however, was easy, residing as it does in the fact that to handle any subject successfully handled by Zola (his failures are another matter) is quite inevitably to walk more or less in his footsteps, in prints so wide and deep as to leave little margin for passing round them. To which I may add that, though the judgment may appear odd, the truth and force of the young man’s few abject days at Guardiagrele, his _casa paterna_, are such as to make us wish that other such corners of life were more frequent in the author’s pages. He has the supremely interesting quality in the novelist that he _fixes_, as it were, the tone of every cluster of objects he approaches, fixes it by the consistency and intensity of his reproduction. In “The Virgins of the Rocks” we have also a _casa paterna_, and a thing, as I have indicated, of exquisite and wonderful tone; but the tone here is of poetry, the truth and the force are less measurable and less familiar, and the whole question, after all, in its refined and attenuated form, is still that of sexual pursuit, which keeps it within the writer’s too frequent limits. Giorgio Aurispa, in “Il Trionfo,” lives in communion with the spirit of an amiable and melancholy uncle who had committed suicide and made him the heir of his fortune, and one of the nephew’s most frequent and faithful loyalties is to hark back, in thought, to the horror of his first knowledge of the dead man’s act, put before us always with its accompaniment of loud southern resonance and confusion. He is in the place again, he is in the room, at Guardiagrele, of the original appalled vision.