This last-named phenomenon takes place, I fear, but in a minor degree in such of our author’s productions as “Cuore Infermo,” “Addio Amore,” “Il Castigo” and the double series of “Gli Amanti”; and for a reason that I the more promptly indicate as it not only explains, I think, the comparative inanity of these pictures, but does more than anything else to reward our inquiry. The very first reflection suggested by Serao’s novels of “passion” is that they perfectly meet our speculation as to what might with a little time become of our own fiction were our particular convention suspended. We see so what, on its actual lines, does, what _has_, become of it, and are so sated with the vision that a little consideration of the latent other chance will surely but refresh us. The effect then, we discover, of the undertaking to give _passione_ its whole place is that by the operation of a singular law no place speedily appears to be left for anything else; and the effect of that in turn is greatly to modify, first, the truth of things, and second, with small delay, what may be left them of their beauty. We find ourselves wondering after a little whether there may not really be more truth in the world misrepresented according to our own familiar fashion than in such a world as that of Madame Serao’s exuberant victims of Venus. It is not only that if Venus herself is notoriously beautiful her altar, as happens, is by no means always proportionately august; it is also that we draw, in the long run, small comfort from the virtual suppression, by any painter, of whatever skill—and the skill of this particular one fails to rise to the height—of every relation in life but that over which Venus presides. In “Fior di Passione” and the several others of a like connection that I have named the suppression is really complete; the common humanities and sociabilities are wholly absent from the picture.