Granted his own conditions, granted the emptiness of moral and intellectual substance in the man and in his age, we are compelled to acknowledge that his literary powers were rich and various. Few writers, at the same time, ill.u.s.trate the vices of decadence more luminously than this Protean poet of vacuity. Few display more clearly the "expense of spirit in a waste of shame." None teach the dependence of art upon moralized and humane motives more significantly than this drunken Helot of genius. His indifference to truth, his defiance of sobriety, his conviction that the sole end of art is astonishment, have doomed him to oblivion not wholly merited. The critic, whose duty forces him to read through the _Adone_, will be left bewildered by the spectacle of such profuse wealth so wantonly squandered.[195] In spite of fatigue, in spite of disgust, he will probably be constrained to record his opinion that, while Ta.s.so represented the last effort of n.o.ble poetry struggling after modern expression under out-worn forms of the Cla.s.sical Revival, it was left for Marino in his levity and license to evoke a real and novel though _rococo_ form, which nicely corresponded to the temper of his times, and determined the immediate future of art. For this reason he requires the attention which has here been paid him.
[Footnote 195: In support of this opinion upon Marino"s merit as a poet, I will cite the episode of Clizio (canto i. p. 17); the tale of Psyche (iv. 65); the tale of the nightingale and the boy--which occurs both in Ford and Crashaw, by the way (vii. 112); the hymn to pleasure (vii.
116); the pa.s.sage of Venus and Adonis to the bath (viii. 133); the picture of the nymph and satyr (viii. 135); the personification of the Court (x. 167); the Cave of Jealousy (xii. 204-206); the jewel-garden of Falserina (xii. 218); Falserina watching Adonis asleep (xii. 225); Falserina"s incantations (xiii. 233); Mars in the lap of Venus surrounded by the loves (xiii. 245); Venus disguised as a gypsy (xv.
290); the game of chess (xv. 297); the leave-taking of Venus and Adonis (xvii. 332); the phantom of dead Adonis (xviii. 357); the grief of Venus (xviii. 358-362); the tales of Hyacinth and Pampinus (xix. 372-378). The references are to ed. Napoli, Boutteaux, 1861.]
But how, it may be asked, was it possible to expand the story of Venus and Adonis into an epic of 45,000 lines? The answer to this question could best be given by an a.n.a.lysis of the twenty cantos: and since few living students have perused them, such a display of erudition would be pardonable. Marini does not, however, deserve so many pages in a work devoted to the close of the Italian Renaissance. It will suffice to say that the slender narrative of the amour of Venus and her boyish idol, his coronation as king of Cyprus, and his death by the boar"s tusk, is ingeniously interwoven with a great variety of episodes. The poet finds occasion to relate the princ.i.p.al myths of h.e.l.lenic pa.s.sion treating these in a style which frequently reminds us of Ovid"s Metamorphoses; he borrows tales from Apuleius, Lucian, and the pastoral novelists; he develops the theme of jealousy in Mars and Vulcan, introduces his own autobiography, digresses into romantic adventures by sea and land, creates a rival to Venus in the sorceress Falserina, sketches the progress of poetry in one canto and devotes another to a panegyric of Italian princes, extols the House of France and adulates Marie de Medicis, surveys the science of the century, describes fantastic palaces and magic gardens, enters with curious minuteness into the several delights of the five senses, discourses upon Courts, ambition, avarice and honor, journeys over the Mediterranean, conducts a game of chess through fifty brilliant stanzas; in brief, while keeping his main theme in view, is careful to excite and sustain the attention of his readers by a succession of varied and ingeniously suggested novelties.
Prolixity, indefatigable straining after sensational effect, interminable description, are the defects of the _Adone_; but they are defects related to great qualities possessed by the author, to inexhaustible resources, curious knowledge, the improvisatore"s facility, the trained rhetorician"s dexterity in the use of language, the artist"s fervid delight in the exercise of his craft.
Allowing for Marino"s peculiar method, his _Adone_ has the excellence of unity which was so highly prized by the poets of his age and nation.
Critics have maintained that the whole epic is but a development of the episode of Rinaldo in Armida"s garden. But it is more than this. It contains all the main ingredients of the Italian Romance, with the exception of chivalry and war. There is a pastoral episode corresponding to that of Erminia among the shepherds, a magnificent enchantress in the manner of Alcina, an imprisonment of the hero which reminds us of Ruggiero in Atlante"s magic castle, a journey like Astolfo"s to the moon, a conflict between good and evil supernatural powers, a thread of allegory more or less apparent, a side glance at contemporary history; and these elements are so combined as to render the _Adone_ one of the many poems in the long romantic tradition. It differs mainly from its predecessors in the strict unity of subject, which subordinates each episode and each digression to the personal adventures of the heroine and hero; while the death and obsequies of Adonis afford a tragic close that is lacking to previous poems detached from the Carolingian cycle.
Contemporary writers praised it as a poem of peace. But it is the poem of ign.o.ble peace, of such peace as Italy enjoyed in servitude, when a nation of _cicisbei_ had naught to occupy their energies but sensual pleasure. Ingenious as Marino truly was in conducting his romance upon so vast a scheme through all its windings to one issue, we feel that the slender tale of a boy"s pa.s.sion for the queen of courtesans and his metamorphosis into the scarlet windflower of the forest supplied no worthy motive for this intricate machinery. The metaphor of an alum basket crystallized upon a petty frame of wire occurs to us when we contemplate its glittering ornaments, and reflect upon the poverty of the sustaining theme. It might in fact stand for a symbol of the intellectual vacancy of the age which welcomed it with rapture, and of the society which formed a century of taste upon its pattern.
In another and higher literary quality the _Adone_ represents that moment of Italian development. A foreigner may hardly pa.s.s magisterial judgment on its diction. Yet I venture to remark that Marino only at rare intervals attains to purity of poetic style; even his best pa.s.sages are deformed, not merely by conceits to which the name of _Marinism_ has been given, but also by gross vulgarities and lapses into trivial prose.
Notwithstanding this want of distinction, however, he has a melody that never fails. The undulating, evenly on-flowing _cantilena_ of his verbal music sustains the reader on a tide of song. That element of poetry, which, as I have observed, was developed with remarkable success by Ta.s.so in some parts of the _Gerusalemme_ is the main strength of the _Adone_. With Marino the _Chant d"Amour_ never rises so high, thrills so subtly, touches the soul so sweetly and so sadly, as it does in Ta.s.so"s verse. But in all those five thousand octave stanzas it is rarely altogether absent. The singing faculty of the Neapolitan was given to this poet of voluptuousness; and if the song is neither deep nor stirring, neither stately nor sublime, it is because his soul held nothing in its vast vacuity but sensuous joy.[196] A musical Casanova, an unmalignant Aretino, he sang as vulgar nature prompted; but he always kept on singing. His partiality for detonating dissonances, squibs and crackers of pyrotechnical rhetoric, braying trumpets and exploding popguns, which deafen and distract our ears attuned to the suave cadence of the _cantilena_, is no less characteristic of the Neapolitan. Marino had the improvisatory exuberance, the impudence, the superficial pa.s.sion, the luxurious delight in life, and the noisiness of his birthplace. He also shared its love of the grotesque as complement and contrast to pervading beauty.
[Footnote 196: There are pa.s.sages of pure _cantilena_ in this poem, where sense is absolutely swallowed up in sound, and words become the mere vehicle for rhythmic melody. Of this verbal music the dirge of the nymphs for Adonis and the threnos of Venus afford excellent examples (xix. pp. 358-361). Note especially the stanza beginning:
Adone, Adone, o bell"Adon, tu giaci, Ne senti i miei sospir, ne miri il pianto!
O bell"Adone, o caro Adon, tu taci, Ne rispondi a colei che amasti tanto!
There is nothing more similar to this in literature than Fra Jacopone"s delirium of mystic love:
Amor amor Jesu, son giunto a porto; Amor amor Jesu, tu m"hai menato; Amor amor Jesu, dammi conforto; Amor amor Jesu, si m"hai enfiamato.
Only the one is written in a Mixo-Lydian, the other in a Hyper-Phrygian mood.
A serious fault to be found with Marino"s style is its involved exaggeration in description. Who, for instance, can tolerate this picture of a young man"s foot shod with a blue buskin?
L"animato del pie molle alabastro Che oscura il latte del sentier celeste Stretto alla gamba con purpureo nastro Di cuoio azzurro un borsacchin gli veste.
Again he carries to the point of lunacy that casuistical rhetoric, introduced by Ariosto and refined upon by Ta.s.so, with which luckless heroines or heroes announce their doubts and difficulties to the world in long soliloquies. The ten stanzas which set forth Falserina"s feelings after she has felt the pangs of love for Adonis, might pa.s.s for a parody:
Ardo, la.s.sa, o non ardo! ah qual io sento Stranio nel cor non conosciuto affetto!
E forse ardore? ardor non e, che spento L"avrei col pianto; e ben d"ardor sospetto!
Sospetto no, piuttosto egli e tormento.
Come tormento fia, se da diletto?
And so forth through eighty lines in which every conceivable change is rung upon _Amo o non amo?... Io vivo e moro pur.... Io non ho core e lo mio cor n"ha dui.... With all this effort no one is convinced of Falserina"s emotion, and her long-winded oration reads like a schoolboy"s exercise upon some line of the fourth Aeneid. Yet if we allow the sense of rhythmical melody to intervene between our intellectual perception and Marino"s language, we shall still be able to translate these outpourings into something which upon the operatic stage would keep its value. False rhetoric and the inability to stop when enough and more than enough has been said upon any theme to be developed, are the incurable defects of Marino. His profuse _fioriture_ compared with the simpler descant of Ariosto or Ta.s.so remind us of Rossini"s florid roulades beside the grace of Pergolese"s or the majesty of Marcello"s song.
The peculiar quality of bad taste which is known in Italy as _Marinismo_, consisted in a perpetual straining after effect by ant.i.theses, conceits, plans on words degenerating into equivocation, and such-like rhetorical grimaces. Marino"s _ars poetica_ was summed up in this sentence: "Chi non sa far stupir, vada alia striglia." Therefore, he finds periphrases for the simplest expressions. He calls the nightingale _sirena de"boschi_, gunpowder _l"irreparabil fulmine terreno_, Columbus _il ligure Argonauta_, Galileo _il novello Endimione_. In these instances, what might have been expanded into a simile, is subst.i.tuted for the proper word in order to surprise the reader. When he alludes to Dante, he poses a conundrum on that poet"s surname: _Ben sull"ali liggier tre mondi canta_. The younger Palma is complimented on wresting the _palm_ from t.i.tian and Veronese. Guido Reni is apostrophized as: _Reni onde il maggior Reno all"altro cede_[197] We are never safe in reading his pages from the whirr and whistle of such verbal fireworks. And yet it must be allowed that Marino"s style is on the whole freer from literary affectations than that of our own Euphuists. It is only at intervals that the temptation to make a point by clever trickery seems irresistible. When he is seriously engaged upon a topic that stirs his nature to the depth, as in the eighth canto, description flows on for stanza after stanza with limpid swiftness.
Another kind of artifice to which he has resort, is the repet.i.tion of a dominant word:
[Footnote 197: There is a streamlet called Reno near Bologna.]
Con tai lusinghe il lusinghiero amante La lusinghiera Dea lusinga e prega.
G.o.diamci, amiamei. Amor d"amor mercede, Degno cambio d"amore e solo amore.
This play on a word sometimes pa.s.ses over into a palpable pun, as in the following pretty phrase:
O mia dorata ed adorata Dea.
Still we feel that Shakespeare was guilty of precisely the same verbal impertinences. It is only intensity of feeling which prevents such lines as:
Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all; What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou may"st true love call: All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more:
from being Marinistic. But it must be added that this intensity of feeling renders the artifice employed sublimely natural. Here we lay our finger on the crucial point at issue in any estimate of literary mannerism. What is the force of thought, the fervor of emotion, the acute perception of truth in nature and in man, which lies behind that manneristic screen? If, as in the case of Shakespeare, sufficiency or superabundance of these essential elements is palpable, we pardon, we ignore, the euphuism. But should the quality of substance fail, then we repudiate it and despise it. Therefore Marino, who is certainly not more euphuistic than Shakespeare, but who has immeasurably less of potent stuff in him, wears the motley of his barocco style in limbo bordering upon oblivion, while the Swan of Avon parades the same literary livery upon both summits of Parna.s.sus. So true it is that poetry cannot be estimated apart from intellectual and moral contents. Had Marino written:
p.r.i.c.k love for p.r.i.c.king, and you beat love down:
or:
"twould anger him To raise a spirit in his mistress" circle Of some strange nature, letting it there stand Till she had laid it and conjured it down:
or:
The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon The p.r.i.c.k of noon:
he would have furnished his accusers with far stronger diatribes against words of double meaning and licentious conceits than his own pages offer. But since it was out of the fullness of world-wisdom that Shakespeare penned those phrases for Mercutio, and set them as pendants to the impa.s.sioned descants upon love and death which he poured from the lips of Romeo, they pa.s.s condoned and unperceived.
Only poverty of matter and insincerity of fancy d.a.m.n in Marino those literary affectations which he held in common with a host of writers--with Gorgias, Aeschylus, Chaeremon, Philostratus, among Greeks; with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bembo, Aretino, Ta.s.so, Guarini, among Italians; with Calderon and Cervantes, not to mention Gongora, among Spaniards; with the foremost French and English writers of the Renaissance; with all verbal artists in any age, who have sought unduly to refine upon their material of language. In a word, Marino is not condemned by his so-called Marinism. His true stigma is the inadequacy to conceive of human nature except under a twofold mask of sensuous voluptuousness and sensuous ferocity. It is this narrow and ign.o.ble range of imagination which const.i.tutes his real inferiority, far more than any poetical extravagance in diction. The same mean conception of humanity brands with ignominy the four generations over which he dominated--that brood of eunuchs and courtiers, churchmen and _Cavalieri serventi_, barocco architects and brigands, casuists and bravi, grimacers, hypocrites, confessors, impostors, b.a.s.t.a.r.ds of the spirit, who controlled Italian culture for a hundred years.
At a first glance we shall be astonished to find that this poet, who may justly be regarded as the corypheus of Circean orgies in the seventeenth century, left in MS. a grave lament upon the woes of Italy. Marino"s _Pianto d"Italia_ has no trace of Marinism. It is composed with sobriety in a pedestrian style of plainness, and it tells the truth without reserve. Italy traces her wretchedness to one sole cause, subjection under Spanish rule.
Lascio ch"un re che di real non tiene Altro che il nome effemminato e vile A sua voglia mi reggi, e di catene Barbare mi circondi il pie servile.
This tyrant foments jealousy and sows seeds of discord between the Italian states. His viceroys are elected from the cruelest, the most unjust, the most rapacious, and the most luxurious of the courtiers crawling round his throne. The College of Cardinals is bought and sold.
No prince dares move a finger in his family or state without consulting the Iberian senate; still less can he levy troops for self-defense. Yet throughout Europe Spanish victories have been obtained by Italian generals; the bravest soldiers in foreign armies are Italian exiles.
Perhaps it may be argued that the empty t.i.tles which abound in every petty city, the fulsome promises on which those miserable va.s.sals found their hopes, are makeweights for such miseries. Call them rather chains to bind the nation, lures and birdlime such as snarers use. There is but one quarter to which the widowed and discrowned Queen of Nations can appeal for succor. She turns to Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, to the hills whence cometh help. It was not, however, until two centuries after Marino penned these patriotic stanzas, that her prayer was answered. And the reflection forced upon us when we read the _Pianto d"Italia_, is that Marino composed it to flatter a patron who at that moment entertained visionary schemes of attacking the Spanish hegemony.
To make any but an abrupt transition from Marino to Chiabrera would be impossible. It is like pa.s.sing from some luxurious grove of oranges and roses to a barren hill-top without prospect over sea or champaign. We are fortunate in possessing a few pages of autobiography, from which all that is needful to remember of Gabriello Chiabrera"s personal history may be extracted. He was born in 1552 at Savona, fifteen days after his father"s death. His mother made a second marriage, and left him to the care of an uncle, with whom at the age of nine he went to reside in Rome. In the house of this bachelor uncle the poor little orphan pined away. Fever succeeded fever, until his guardian felt that companionship with boys in play and study was the only chance of saving so frail a life as Gabriello"s. Accordingly he placed the invalid under the care of the Jesuits in their Collegio Romano. Here the child"s health revived, and his education till the age of twenty throve apace.
The Jesuits seem to have been liberal in their course of training; for young Chiabrera benefited by private conversation with Paolo Manuzio and Sperone Speroni, while he attended the lectures of Muretus in the university.
How different was this adolescence from that of Marino! Both youths grew to manhood without domestic influences; and both were conspicuous in after life for the want of that affection which abounds in Ta.s.so. But here the parallel between them ends. Marino, running wild upon the streets of Naples, taking his fill of pleasure and adventure, picking up ill-digested information at hap-hazard, and forming his poetic style as nature prompted; Chiabrera, disciplined in piety and morals by Jesuit directors, imbued with erudition by an arid scholar, a formal pedant and an accomplished rhetorician, the three chief representatives of decadent Italian humanism: no contrast can be imagined greater than that which marked these two lads out for diverse paths in literature. The one was formed to be the poet of caprice and license, openly ranking with those
Che la ragion sommettono al talento,
and making _s"ei piace ei lice_ his rule of conduct and of art. The other received a rigid bent toward decorum, in religious observances, in ethical severity, and in literature of a strictly scholastic type.
Yet Chiabrera was not without the hot blood of Italian youth. His uncle died, and he found himself alone in the world. After spending a few years in the service of Cardinal Cornaro, he quarreled with a Roman gentleman, vindicated his honor by some act of violence, and was outlawed from the city. Upon this he retired to Savona; and here again he met with similar adventures. Wounded in a brawl, he took the law into his own hands, and revenged himself upon his a.s.sailant. This punctilio proved him to be a true child of his age; and if we may credit his own account of both incidents, he behaved himself as became a gentleman of the period. It involved him, however, in serious annoyances both at Rome and Savona, from which he only extricated himself with difficulty and which impaired his fortune. Up to the age of fifty he remained unmarried, and then took a wife by whom he had no children. He lived to the ripe age of eighty-four, always at Savona, excepting occasional visits to friends in Italian cities, and he died unmolested by serious illness after his first entrance into the Collegio Romano. How he occupied the leisure of that lengthy solitude may be gathered from his published works--two or three thick volumes of lyrics; four bulky poems of heroic narrative; twelve dramas, including two tragedies; thirty satires or epistles; and about forty miscellaneous poems in divers meters. In a word, he devoted his whole life to the art of poetry, for which he was not naturally gifted, and which he pursued in a gravely methodical spirit. It may be said at once that the body of his work, with the exception of some simple pieces of occasion, and a few chastely written epistles, is such as n.o.body can read without weariness.
Before investigating Chiabrera"s claim to rank among Italian poets, it may be well to examine his autobiography in those points which touch upon the temper of society. Short as it is, this doc.u.ment is precious for the light it casts upon contemporary custom. As a writer, Chiabrera was distinguished by sobriety of judgment, rect.i.tude, piety, purity of feeling, justice toward his fellow-workers in literature, and an earnest desire to revive the antique virtues among his countrymen. There is no reason to suppose that these estimable qualities did not distinguish him in private life. Yet eight out of the eighteen pages of his biography are devoted to comically solemn details regarding the honors paid him by Italian princes. The Grand Duke of Florence, Ferdinand I., noticed him standing with uncovered head at a theatrical representation in the Pitti Palace. He bade the poet put his cap on and sit down. Cosimo, the heir apparent, showed the same condescending courtesy. When he was at Turin, Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, placed a coach and pair at his disposal, and allowed him 300 lire for traveling expenses to and from Savona. But this prince omitted to appoint him lodgings in the palace, nor did he invite him to cover in the presence. This perhaps is one reason why Chiabrera refused the duke"s offer of a secretaryship at Court. Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, on the contrary, allotted him rooms and always suffered him to keep his hat on. The Pope, who was an old college friend of Chiabrera, made him handsome presents, and on one delightful occasion allowed him to hear a sermon in the Papal pew. The Doge of Genoa, officially particular in points of etiquette, always took care to bid him cover, although he was a subject born of the Republic.
Basely insignificant as are these details, they serve to show what value was then ascribed even by men of real respectability to trifling princely favors. The unction with which Chiabrera relates them, warming his cold style into a glow of satisfaction, is a practical satire upon his endeavor to resuscitate the virtues of antique republics in that Italy. To do this was his princ.i.p.al aim as a moralist; to revive the grand style of Pindar was his object as an artist. Each attempt involved impossibility, and argued a visionary ambition dimly conscious of its scope. Without freedom, without the living mythology of h.e.l.las, without a triumphant national cause, in the very death of independence, at the end of a long age of glorious but artificial culture, how could Chiabrera dare to pose as Pindar? Instead of the youth of Greece ascending with free flight and all the future of the world before it, decrepit Italy, the Italy so rightly drawn by Marino in his _Pianto_, lay groveling in the dust of decaying thrones. Her lyrist had to sing of pallone-matches instead of Panh.e.l.lenic games; to celebrate the heroic conquest of two Turkish galleys by a Tuscan fleet, instead of Marathon and Salamis; to praise S. Lucy and S. Paul with tepid fervor, instead of telling how Rhodes swam at her G.o.d"s bidding upward from the waves.