The most serious relation depicted—in the sense of being in some degree the least suggestive of mere zoological sociability—is that of the lovers in “Il Fuoco,” as we also take this pair for their creator’s sanest and most responsible spirits. It is a question between them of an heroic affection, and yet the affection appears to make good for itself no place worth speaking of in their lives. It holds but for a scant few weeks; the autumn already reigns when the connection begins, and the connection is played out (or if it be not the ado is about nothing) with the first flush of the early Italian spring. It suddenly, on our hands, becomes trivial, with all our own estimate of reasons and realities and congruities falsified. The Foscarina has, on professional business, to “go away,” and the young poet has to do the same; but such a separation, so easily bridged over by such great people, makes a beggarly climax for an intercourse on behalf of which all the forces of poetry and tragedy have been set in motion. Where then we ask ourselves is the weakness?—as we ask it, very much in the same way, in respect to the vulgarised aspect of the tragedy of Giorgio Aurispa. The pang of pity, the pang that springs from a conceivable community in doom, is in this latter case altogether wanting. Directly we lift a little the embroidered mantle of that gift for appearances which plays, on Signor D’Annunzio’s part, such tricks upon us, we find ourselves put off, as the phrase is, with an inferior article. The inferior article is the hero’s poverty of life, which cuts him down for pathetic interest just as the same limitation in “Il Piacere” cuts down Donna Maria. Presented each as victims of another rapacious person who has got the better of them, there is no process, no complexity, no suspense in their story; and thereby, we submit, there is no esthetic beauty. Why _shouldn’t_ Giorgio Aurispa go mad? Why shouldn’t Stelio Effrena go away? We make the inquiry as disconcerted spectators, not feeling in the former case that we have had any communication with the wretched youth’s sanity, and not seeing in the latter why the tie of all the passion that has been made so admirably vivid for us should not be able to weather change.