Chapter XI: Guarino, Marino, Chiabrera, Tassoni (2)

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 ignoble 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 passion 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 pass 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 passages 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 Tasso 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 Tasso'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 passion, 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 passages 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 Tasso, 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 pass for a parody:

Ardo, lassa, o non ardo! ahi 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 Tasso 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 antitheses, 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 substituted 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 Titian 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 repetition 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.

* * * * *

Godiamci, amiamei. Amor d'amor mercede,
Degno cambio d'amore e solo amore.

This play on a word sometimes passes 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 Parnassus. So true it is that poetry cannot be estimated apart from intellectual and moral contents. Had Marino written:

Prick love for pricking, 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 prick 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 impassioned descants upon love and death which he poured from the lips of Romeo, they pass condoned and unperceived.

Only poverty of matter and insincerity of fancy damn 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, Tasso, 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 ignoble range of imagination which constitutes 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, bastards 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 titles which abound in every petty city, the fulsome promises on which those miserable vassals 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 passing 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 Tasso. 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 assailant. 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 nobody 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 document is precious for the light it casts upon contemporary custom. As a writer, Chiabrera was distinguished by sobriety of judgment, rectitude, 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 principal 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 Hellas, 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 Panhellenic 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 god's bidding upward from the waves.

One example will serve as well as many to illustrate the false attitude assumed by Chiabrera when he posed as a new Pindar in the midst of seventeenth-century Italians. I will select the Ode to Don Cesare d'Este. There is something pathetically ridiculous, in this would-be swan of the Dircean fount, this apostle of pagan virtues, admonishing the heir of Alfonso II to prove himself an obedient son of the Church by relinquishing his Duchy of Ferrara to the Holy See. The poet asks him, in fine classic phrases, whether he could bear to look on desecrated altars, confessionals without absolving priests, chapels without choristers, a people barred with bolt and lock from Paradise. How trivial are earthly compared with heavenly crowns! How vulgar is the love of power and gold! The exhortation, exquisite enough in chastened style, closes with this hypocritical appeal to Cesare's aristocratic prejudices:

Parli la plebe a suo volere, e pensi--
Non con la plebe hanno da gir gli Estensi.

That is to say, nobility demands that the House of Este should desert its subjects, sacrifice its throne, crawl at a Pontiff's feet, and starve among a crowd of disthroned princes, wrapping the ragged purple of its misery around it till it, too, mixes with the people it contemns.

Hopeless as the venture was, Chiabrera made it the one preoccupation of his life, in these untoward circumstances, to remodel Italian poetry upon the Greek pattern. It was a merit of the Sei Cento, a sign of grace, that the Italians now at last threw orthodox aesthetic precepts to the winds, and avowed their inability to carry the Petrarchistic tradition further. The best of them, Campanella and Bruno, molded vulgar language like metal in the furnace of a vehement imagination, making it the vehicle of fantastic passion and enthusiastic philosophy. From their crucible the Sonnet and the Ode emerged with no resemblance to academical standards. Grotesque, angular, gnarled, contorted, Gothic even, these antiquated forms beneath their wayward touch were scarcely recognizable. They had become the receptacles of burning, scalding, trenchant realities. Salvator Rosa, next below the best, forced indignation to lend him wings, and scaled Parnassus with brass-bound feet and fury. Marino, bent on riveting attention by surprises, fervid with his own reality of lust, employed the octave stanza as a Turkish Bey might use an odalisque. 'The only rule worth thinking of,' he said, 'is to know how and when and where to break all rules, adapting ourselves to current taste and the fashions of the age.' His epic represents a successful, because a vivid, reaction against conventionality. The life that throbs in it is incontestable, even though that life may be nothing better than ephemeral. With like brutality of instinct, healthy because natural, the barocco architects embraced ugliness, discord, deformity, spasm, as an escape from harmony and regularity with which the times were satiated. Prose-writers burst the bonds of Bembo, trampled on Boccaccio, reveled in the stylistic debaucheries of Bartolo. Painters, rendered academic in vain by those Fabii of Bologna who had striven to restore the commonwealth of art by temporizing, launched themselves upon a sea of massacre and murder, blood and entrails, horrors of dark woods and Bacchanalia of chubby Cupids. The popular Muse of Italy meanwhile emerged with furtive grace and inexhaustible vivacity in dialectic poems, dances, Pulcinello, Bergamasque Pantaloon, and what of parody and satire, Harlequinades, and carnival diversions, any local soil might cherish.[198] All this revolt against precedent, this resurrection of primeval instinct, crude and grinning, took place, let us remember, under the eyes of the Jesuits, within the shadow of the Inquisition, in an age reformed and ordered by the Council of Trent. Art was following Aretino, the reprobate and rebel. He first amid the languors of the golden age--and this is Aretino's merit--discerned that the only escape from its inevitable exhaustion was by passing over into crudest naturalism.

[Footnote 198: See Scherillo's two books on the _Commedia dell'Arte_ and the _Opera Buffa_.]

But for Chiabrera, the excellent gentleman, the patronized of princes, scrupulous upon the point of honor, pupil of Jesuits, pious, twisted back on humanism by his Roman tutors, what escape was left for him? Obey the genius of his times he must. Innovate he must. He chose the least indecorous sphere at hand for innovation; and felt therewith most innocently happy. Without being precisely conscious of it, he had discovered a way of adhering to time-honored precedent while following the general impulse to discard precedent. He threw Petrarch overboard, but he took on Pindar for his pilot. 'When I see anything eminently beautiful, or hear something, or taste something that is excellent, I say: It is Greek Poetry.' In this self-revealing sentence lies the ruling instinct of the man as scholar. The highest praise he can confer upon Italian matters, is to call them Greek Poetry. 'When I have to express my aims in verse, I compare myself to Columbus, who said that he would discover a new world or drown.' Again, in this self-revealing sentence, Chiabrera betrays the instinct which in common with his period he obeyed. He was bound to startle society by a discovery or to drown. For this, be it remembered, was the time in which Pallavicino, like Marino, declared that poetry must make men raise their eyebrows in astonishment. For Chiabrera, educated as he had been, that new world toward which he navigated was a new Hellenic style of Italian poetry; and the Theban was to guide him toward its shores. But on the voyage Chiabrera drowned: drowned for eternity in hyper-atlantic whirlpools of oblivion. Some critics, pitying so lofty, so respectable an ambition, have whispered that he found a little Island of the Blest and there planted modest myrtles of mediocre immortality. Yet this is not the truth. On such a quest there was only failure or success. He did not succeed. His cold mincemeat from Diocean tables, tepid historic parallels, artificially concocted legends, could not create Greek poetry again beneath the ribs of death. The age was destined to be saved by music. License was its only liberty, as the _Adone_ taught. Unmusical Chiabrera, buckram'd up by old mythologies and sterling precepts, left its life untouched. His antique virtues stood, like stucco gods and goddesses, on pedestals in garden groves, and moldered. His Pindaric flights were such as a sparrow, gazing upward at a hawk, might venture on. Those abrupt transitions, whereby he sought to simulate the lordly _sprezzatura_ of the Theban eagle, 'soaring with supreme dominion in the azure depths of air,' remind us mainly of the hoppings of a frog. Chiabrera failed: failed all the more lamentably because he was so scholarly, so estimable. He is chiefly interesting now as the example of a man devoted to the Church, a pupil of Jesuits, a moralist, and a humanist, in some sense also a patriot, who felt the temper of his time, and strove to innovate in literature. Devoid of sincere sympathy with his academically chosen models, thinking he had discovered a safe path for innovation, he fell flat in the slime and perished.

Marino had human life and vulgar nature, the sensualities and frivolities of the century, to help him. Chiabrera claimed none of these advantages. What had Tassoni for his outfit? Sound common sense, critical acumen, the irony of humor, hatred of tyrants and humbug, an acrid temper mollified by genial love of letters, a manly spirit of independence. Last, but not least, he inherited something of the old Elysian smile which played upon the lips of Ariosto, from which Tasso's melancholy shrank discomfited, which Marino smothered in the kisses of his courtesans, and Chiabrera banned as too ignoble for Dircean bards. This smile it was that cheered Tassoni's leisure when, fallen on evil days, he penned the _Socchia Rapita_.

Alessandro Tassoni was born in 1565 of a noble Modenese family. Before completing his nineteenth year he won the degree of Doctor of Laws, and afterwards spent twelve years in studying at the chief universities of Lombardy. Between 1599 and 1603 he served the Cardinal Ascanio Colonna both in Spain and Rome, as secretary. The insight he then gained into the working of Spanish despotism made him a relentless enemy of that already decadent monarchy. When Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, sent back his Collar of the Golden Fleece in 1613 and drew the sword of resistance against Philip III., Tassoni penned two philippics against Spaniards, which are the firmest, most embittered expression of patriotism as it then existed. He had the acuteness to perceive that the Spanish state was no longer in its prime of vigor, and the noble ingenuousness to dream that Italian princes might be roused to sink their rancors in a common effort after independence. As a matter of fact, Estensi, Medici, Farnesi, Gonzaghi, all the reigning houses as yet unabsorbed by Church or Spain, preferred the predominance of a power which sanctioned their local tyrannies, irksome and degrading as that overlordship was, to the hegemony of Piedmontese Macedon. And like all Italian patriots, strong in mind, feeble in muscle, he failed to reckon with the actual soldierly superiority of Spaniards. Italy could give generals at this epoch to her masters; but she could not count on levying privates for her own defense. Carlo Emmanuele rewarded the generous ardor of Tassoni by grants of pensions which were never paid, and by offices at Court which involved the poet-student in perilous intrigue. 'My service with the princes of the House of Savoy,' so he wrote at a later period, 'did not take its origin in benefits or favors received or expected. It sprang from a pure spontaneous motion of the soul, which inspired me with love for the noble character of Duke Charles.' When he finally withdrew from that service, he had his portrait painted. In his hands he held a fig, and beneath the picture ran a couplet ending with the words, 'this the Court gave me.' Throughout his life Tassoni showed an independence rare in that century. His principal works were published without dedications to patrons. In the preface to his _Remarks on Petrarch_ he expressed his opinion thus: 'I leave to those who like them the fruitless dedications, not to say flatteries, which are customary nowadays. I seek no protection; for a lie does not deserve it, and truth is indifferent to it. Let such as opine that the shadow of great personages can conceal the ineptitude of authors, make the most of this advantage.' Believing firmly in astrology, he judged that his own horoscope condemned him to ill-success. It appears that he was born under the influence of Saturn, when the sun and moon were in conjunction; and he held that this combination of the heavenly bodies boded 'things noteworthy, yet not felicitous.' It was, however, difficult for a man of Tassoni's condition in that state of society to draw breath outside the circle of a Court. Accordingly, in 1626, he entered the service of the Pope's nephew, Cardinal Lodovisio. He did not find this much to his liking: 'I may compare myself to P. Emilius Metellus, when he was shod with those elegant boots which pinched his feet. Everybody said, Oh what fine boots, how well they fit! But the wretch was unable to walk in them.' On the Cardinal's death in 1632 Tassoni removed to the Court of Francesco I. of Modena, and died there in 1635.

As a writer, Tassoni, in common with the best spirits of his time, aimed at innovation. It had become palpable to the Italians that the Renaissance was over, and that they must break with the traditions of the past. This, as I have already pointed out, was the saving virtue of the early seventeenth century; but what good fruits it might have fostered, had not the political and ecclesiastical conditions of the age been adverse, remains a matter for conjecture. 'It is my will and object to utter new opinions,' he wrote to a friend; and acting upon this principle, he attacked the chief prejudices of his age in philosophy and literature. One of his earliest publications was a miscellaneous collection of _Divers Thoughts_, in which he derided Aristotle's Physics and propounded speculations similar to those developed by Gassendi. He dared to cast scorn on Homer, as rude and barbarous, poor in the faculty of invention, taxable with at least five hundred flagrant defects. How little Tassoni really comprehended Homer may be judged from his complacent assertion that the episode of Luna and Endymion (_Secchia Rapita_, canto viii.) was composed in the Homeric manner. In truth he could estimate the Iliad and Odyssey no better than Chiabrera could the Pythians and Olympians of Pindar. A just sense of criticism failed the scholars of that age, which was too remote in its customs, too imperfect in its science of history, to understand the essence of Greek art. With equally amusing candor Tassoni passed judgments upon Dante, and thought that he had rivaled the Purgatory in his description of the Dawn (_Secchia Rapita_, viii. 15, the author's note). We must, however, be circumspect and take these criticisms with a grain of salt; for one never knows how far Tassoni may be laughing in his sleeve. There is no doubt, however, regarding the sincerity of his strictures upon the Della Cruscan Vocabulary of 1612, or the more famous inquiry into Petrarch's style. The _Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca_ were composed in 1602-3 during a sea voyage from Genoa to Spain. They told what now must be considered the plain truth of common sense about the affectations into which a servile study of the _Canzoniere_ had betrayed generations of Italian rhymesters. Tassoni had in view Petrarch's pedantic imitators rather than their master; and when the storm of literary fury, stirred up by his work, was raging round him, he thus established his position: 'Surely it is allowable to censure Petrarch's poems, if a man does this, not from malignant envy, but from a wish to remove the superstitions and abuses which beget such evil effects, and to confound the sects of the Rabbins hardened in their perfidy of obsolete opinion, and in particular of such as think they cannot write straight without the _falsariga_ of their model.' I may observe in passing that the points in this paragraph are borrowed from a sympathizing letter which Marino addressed to the author on his essay. In another place Tassoni stated, 'It was never my intention to speak evil of this poet [Petrarch], whom I have always admired above any lyrist of ancient or modern times.'

So independent in his conduct and so bold in his opinions was the author of the _Secchia Rapita_. The composition of this poem grew out of the disputes which followed Tassoni's _Remarks on Petrarch_. He found himself assailed by two scurrilous libels, which were traced to the Count Alessandro Brusantini, feudal lord of Culagna and Bismozza. Justice could not be obtained upon the person of so eminent a noble. Tassoni, with true Italian refinement, resolved to give himself the unique pleasure of ingenious vengeance. The name of the Count's fief supplied him with a standing dish of sarcasm. He would write a satiric poem, of which the Conte Culagna should be the burlesque hero. After ten months' labor, probably in the year 1615, the _Secchia Rapita_ already went abroad in MS.[199] Tassoni sought to pass it off as a product of his youth; but both the style and the personalities which it contained rendered this impossible. Privately issued, the poem had a great success. 'In less than a year,' writes the author, 'more MS. copies were in circulation than are usually sent forth from the press in ten years of the most famous works.' One professional scribe made 200 ducats in the course of a few months by reproducing it; and the price paid for each copy was eight crowns. It became necessary to publish the _Secchia Rapita_. But now arose innumerable difficulties. The printers of Modena and Padua refused; Giuliano Cassiani had been sent to prison in 1617 for publishing some verses of Testi against Spain. The Inquisition withheld its _imprimatur_. Attempts were made to have it printed on the sly at Padua; but the craftsman who engaged to execute this job was imprisoned. At last, in 1622, Tassoni contrived to have the poem published in Paris. The edition soon reached Italy. In Rome it was prohibited, but freely sold; and at last Gregory XV. allowed it to be reprinted with some canceled passages. There is, in truth, nothing prejudicial either to the Catholic creed or to general morality in the _Secchia Rapita_. We note, meanwhile, with interest, that it first saw the light at Paris, sharing thus the fortunes of the _Adone_, which it preceded by one year. If the greatest living Italians at this time were exiles, it appears that the two most eminent poems of their literature first saw the light on foreign shores.

[Footnote 199: For the date 1615 see Carducci's learned essay prefixed to his edition of the _Secchia Rapita_ (Barbera, 1861).]

The _Secchia Rapita_ is the first example of heroico-comic poetry. Tassoni claims in print the honor of inventing this new species, and tells his friends that 'though he will not pique himself on being a poet, still he sets some store on having discovered a new kind of poem and occupied a vacant seat.' The seat--and it was no Siege Perilous--stood indeed empty and ready to be won by any free-lance of letters. Folengo had burlesqued romance. But no one as yet had made a parody of that which still existed mainly as the unaccomplished hope of literature. Trissino with his _Italia Liberata_, Tasso with his _Gerusalemme Liberata_, tried to persuade themselves and the world that they had succeeded in delivering Italy in labor of an epic. But their maieutic ingenuity was vain. The nation carried no epic in her womb. Trissino's _Italia_ was a weazened changeling of erudition, and Tasso's _Gerusalemme_ a florid bastard of romance. Tassoni, noticing the imposition of these two eminent and worthy writers, determined to give his century an epic or heroic poem in the only form which then was possible. Briefly, he produced a caricature, modeled upon no existing work of modern art, but corresponding to the lineaments of that Desired of the Nation which pedants had prophesied. Unity of action celestial machinery, races in conflict, contrasted heroes, the wavering chance of war, episodes, bards, heroines, and love subordinated to the martial motive--all these features of the epic he viewed through the distorting medium of his comic art.

In the days of the second Lombard League, when Frederick II. was fighting a losing battle with the Church, Guelf Bologna came into grim conflict with her Ghibelline neighbor Modena. The territory of these two cities formed the _champ clos_ of a duel in which the forces of Germany and nearly all Italy took part; and in one engagement, at Fossalta, the Emperor's heir, King Enzo of Sardinia, was taken captive. How he passed the rest of his days, a prisoner of the Bolognese, and how he begat the semi-royal brood of Bentivogli, is matter of history and legend. During this conflict memorable among the many municipal wars of Italy in the middle ages, it happened that some Modenese soldiers, who had pushed their way into the suburbs of Bologna, carried off a bucket and suspended it as a trophy in the bell-tower of the cathedral, where it may still be seen. One of the peculiarities of those mediaeval struggles which roused the rivalry of towns separated from each other by a few miles of fertile country, and which raged through generations till the real interests at issue were confounded in blind animosity of neighbor against neighbor--was the sense of humor and of sarcasm they encouraged. To hurl dead donkey against your enemy's town-wall passed for a good joke, and discredited his honor more than the loss of a hundred fighting men in a pitched battle. Frontier fortresses received insulting names, like the Perugian _Becca di questo_, or like the Bolognese _Grevalcore_. There was much, in fact, in these Italian wars which reminds one of the hostilities between rival houses in a public school.

Such being the element of humor ready to hand in the annals of his country, Tassoni chose the episode of the Bolognese bucket for the theme of a mock-heroic epic. He made what had been an insignificant incident the real occasion of the war, and grouped the facts of history around it by ingenious distortions of the truth. The bucket is the Helen of his Iliad:[200]

Vedrai s'al cantar mio porgi l'orecchia,
Elena trasformarsi in una secchia.

[Footnote 200: Canto i. 2.]

A mere trifle thus becomes a point of dispute capable of bringing gods, popes, emperors, kings, princes, cities, and whole nations into conflict. At the same time the satirist betrays his malice by departing as little as possible from the main current of actual events. History lends verisimilitude to the preposterous assumption that heaven and earth were drawn into a squabble about a bucket: and if there is any moral to be derived from the _Secchia Rapita_ we have it here. At the end of the contention, when both parties are exhausted, it is found that the person of a king weighs in the scale of nations no more than an empty bucket:[201]

Riserbando ne' patti a i Modanesi
La secchia, e 'l re de'Sardi ai Bolognesi.

Such is the main subject of the _Secchia Rapita_; and such is Tassoni's irony, an irony worthy of Aristophanes in its far-reaching indulgent contempt for human circumstance. But the poem has another object. It was written to punish Count Alessandro Brusantini. The leading episode, which occupies about three cantos of the twelve, is an elaborate vilification of this personal enemy travestied as the contemptible Conte di Culagna.

Tassoni's method of art corresponds to the irony of his inspiration. We find his originality in a peculiar blending of serious and burlesque styles, in abrupt but always well-contrived transitions from heroical magniloquence to plebeian farce and from scurrility to poetic elevation, finally in a frequent employment of the figure which the Greeks called [Greek: para prosdokian]. His poem is a parody of the Aristophanic type. 'Like a fantastically ironical magic tree, the world-subversive idea which lies at the root of it springs up with blooming ornament of thoughts, with singing nightingales and climbing chattering apes.'[202] To seek a central motive or a sober meaning in this caprice of the satirical imagination would be idle. Tassoni had no intention, as some critics have pretended, to exhibit the folly of those party wars which tore the heart of Italy three centuries before his epoch, to teach the people of his day the miseries of foreign interference, or to strike a death-blow at classical mythology. The lesson which can be drawn from his cantos, that man in warfare disquiets himself in vain for naught, that a bucket is as good a _casus belli_ as Helen, the moral which Southey pointed in his ballad of the Battle of Blenheim, emerges, not from the poet's design, but from the inevitable logic of his humor. Pique inspired the _Secchia Rapita_, and in the despicable character of Count Culagna he fully revenged the slight which had been put upon him. The revenge is savage, certainly; for the Count remains 'immortally immerded' in the long-drawn episode which brought to view the shame of his domestic life. Yet while Tassoni drew blood, he never ceased to smile; and Count Culagna remains for us a personage of comedy rather than of satire.

[Footnote 201: Canto xii. 77.]

[Footnote 202: So Heine wrote of Aristophanes. See my essay in _Studies of the Greek Poets_.]

In the next place, Tassoni meant to ridicule the poets of his time. He calls the _Secchia Rapita_ 'an absurd caprice, written to burlesque the modern poets.' His genius was nothing if not critical, and literature afforded him plenty of material for fun. Romance-writers with their jousts and duels and armed heroines, would-be epic poets with their extra-mundane machinery and pomp of phrase, Marino and his hyperbolical conceits, Tuscan purists bent on using only words of the Tre Cento, Petrarchisti spinning cobwebs of old metaphors and obsolete periphrases, all felt in turn the touch of his light lash. The homage paid to Petrarch's stuffed cat at Arqua supplied him with a truly Aristophanic gibe.[203] Society comes next beneath his ferule. There is not a city of Italy which Tassoni did not wring in the withers of its self-conceit. The dialects of Ferrara, Bologna, Bergamo, Florence, Rome, lend the satirist vulgar phrases when he quits the grand style and, taking Virgil's golden trumpet from his lips, slides off into a _canaille_ drawl or sluice of Billingsgate. Modena is burlesqued in her presiding Potta, gibbeted for her filthy streets. The Sienese discover that the world accounts them lunatics. The Florentines and Perugians are branded for notorious vice. Roman foppery, fantastical in feminine pretentiousness, serves as a foil to drag Culagna down into the ditch of ignominy. Here and there, Tassoni's satire is both venomous and pungent, as when he paints the dotage of the Empire, stabs Spanish pride of sovereignty, and menaces the Papacy with insurrection. But for the most part, like Horace in the phrase of Persius, he plays about the vitals of the victims who admit him to their confidence--_admissus circum praecordia ludit_.

[Footnote 203: Canto viii. 33, 34.]

We can but regret that so clear-sighted, so urbane and so truly Aristophanic a satirist had not a wider field to work in. Seventeenth-century Italy was all too narrow for his genius; and if the _Secchia Rapita_ has lost its savor, this is less the poet's fault than the defect of his material. He was strong enough to have brought the Athens of Cleon, the France of Henri III., or the England of James I. within the range of his distorting truth-revealing mirror. Yet, even as it was, Tassoni opened several paths for modern humorists. Rabelais might have owned that caricature of Mars and Bacchus rioting in a tavern bed with Venus travestied as a boy, and in the morning, after breakfasting divinely on two hundred restorative eggs, escaping with the fear of a scandalized host and the police-court before their eyes. Yet Rabelais would hardly have brought this cynical picture of crude debauchery into so fine a contrast with the celestial environment of gods and goddesses. True to his principle of effect by alternation, Tassoni sometimes sketches the deities whom he derides, in the style of Volpato engravings after Guido. They move across his canvas with ethereal grace. What can be more charming than Diana visiting Endymion, and confessing to the Loves that all her past career as huntress and as chaste had been an error? Venus, too, when she takes that sensuously dreamy all-poetic journey across the blue Mediterranean to visit golden-haired King Enzo in his sleep, makes us forget her entrance into Modena disguised as a lad trained to play female parts upon the stage. This blending of true elegance with broad farce is a novelty in modern literature. We are reminded of the songs of the Mystae on the meadows of Elysium in the _Frogs_. Scarron and Voltaire, through the French imitators of Tassoni, took lessons from his caricature of Saturn, the old diseased senator traveling in a sedan chair to the celestial parliament, with a clyster-pipe in front of him and his seat upon a close stool. Moliere and Swift, votaries of Cloacina, were anticipated in the climax of Count Culagna's attempt to poison his wife, and in the invention of the enchanted ass so formidable by Parthian discharges on its adversary. Over these births of Tassoni's genius the Maccaronic Muse of Folengo and his Bolognese predecessors presided. There is something Lombard, a smack of sausage in the humor. But it remained for the Modenese poet to bring this Mafelina into the comity of nations. We are not, indeed, bound to pay her homage. Yet when we find her inspiring such writers as Swift, Voltaire, Sterne and Heine, it is well to remember that Tassoni first evoked her from Mantuan gutters and the tripe-shops of Bologna.

'The fantastically ironical magic tree' of the _Secchia Rapita_ spread its green boughs not merely for chattering baboons. Nightingales sang there. The monkey-like Culagna, with his tricks and antics, disappears. Virtuous Renoppia, that wholesome country lass, the _bourgeois_ counterpart of Bradamante, withholds her slipper from the poet's head when he is singing sad or lovely things of human fortune. Our eyes, rendered sensitive by vulgar sights, dwell with unwonted pleasure on the chivalrous beauty of King Enzo. Ernesto's death touches our sympathy with pathos, in spite of the innuendo cast upon his comrade Jaconia. Paolo Malatesta rides with the shades of doom, the Dantesque cloud of love and destiny, around his forehead, through that motley mock-heroic band of burghers. Manfredi, consumed by an unholy passion for his sister, burns for one moment, like a face revealed by lightning, on our vision and is gone. Finally, when the mood seizes him (for Tassoni persuades us into thinking he is but the creature of caprice), he tunes the soft idyllic harp and sings Endymion's love-tale in strains soft as Marino's, sweet as Tasso's, outdoing Marino in delicacy, Tasso in reserve. This episode moved rigid Alfieri to admiration. It remains embedded in a burlesque poem, one of the most perfectly outlined triumphs of refined Italian romantic art. Yet such was the strength of the master's hand, so loyal was he to his principle of contrast, that he cuts the melodious idyl short with a twang of the guitar-strings, and strikes up a tavern ballad on Lucrezia. The irony which ruled his art demanded this inversion of proprieties. Cynthia wooing Endymion shows us woman in her frailty; Lucrece violated by Tarquin is woman in her dignity. The ironical poet had to adorn the first story with his choicest flowers of style and feeling, to burlesque the second with his grossest realism.

This antithesis between sustained poetry and melodiously-worded slang, between radiant forms of beauty and grotesque ugliness, penetrates the _Secchia Rapita_ in every canto and in every detail. We pass from battle-scenes worthy of Ariosto and Tasso at their best into ditches of liquid dung. Ambassadors are introduced with touches that degrade them to the rank of _commis voyageurs_. Before the senate the same men utter orations in the style of Livy. The pomp of war is paraded, its machinery of catapults is put in motion, to discharge a dead ass into a besieged town; and when the beleagured garrison behold it flying through the air, they do not take the donkey for a taunt, but for a heavenly portent. A tournament is held and very brave in their attire are all the combatants. But according to its rules the greatest sluggard wins the crown of honor. Even in the similes, which formed so important an element of epic decoration, the same principle of contrast is maintained. Fine vignettes from nature in the style consecrated by Ariosto and Tasso introduce ludicrous incidents. Vulgar details picked up from the streets prepare us for touches of pathos or poetry.

Tassoni takes high rank as a literary artist for the firmness with which he adhered to his principle of irony, and for the facility of vigor which conceals all traces of effort in so difficult a task. I may be thought to have pitched his praise too high. But those will forgive me who enjoy the play of pure sharp-witted fancy, or who reflect upon the sadness of the theme which occupies my pen in these two volumes.