Renaissance in Italy Volume VI Part 46

Fur._ i. 42, 43, and xxiv. 80) on which it has been modeled, we shall perceive how much Guarini lost in force by not writing with his eye upon the object or with the authenticity of inward vision, but with a self-conscious effort to improve by artifices and refinements upon something he has read. See my essay on 'The Pathos of the Rose in Time,'

April, 1886.]

Though the scene of the _Pastor Fido_ was laid in Arcadia, the play really represented polite Italian society. In the softness of its sentiment, its voluptuous verbal melody, and its reiterated descant upon effeminate love-pleasure, it corresponded exactly to the spirit of its age.[185] This was the secret of its success; and this explains its seduction. Not Corisca's wanton blandishments and professed cynicism, but Mirtillo's rapturous dithyrambs on kissing, Dorinda's melting moods of tenderness, and Amarilli's delicate regrets that love must be postponed to honor, justified Bellarmino's censure. Without anywhere transgressing the limits of decorum, the _Pastor Fido_ is steeped in sensuousness. The sentiment of love idealized in Mirtillo and Amarilli is pure and self-sacrificing. _Ama l'onesta mia, s'amante sei_, says this maiden to her lover; and he obeys her. Yet, though the drama is dedicated to virtue, no one can read it without perceiving the blandishments of its luxurious rhetoric. The sensual refinement proper to an age of social decadence found in it exact expression, and it became the code of gallantry for the next two centuries.

[Footnote 185: Even Silvio, the most masculine of the young men, whose heart is closed to love, appears before us thus:

Oh Silvio, Silvio! a che ti die Natura Ne' piu begli anni tuoi Fior di belta si delicato e vago, Se tu se' tanto a calpestarlo intento?

Che s'avess'io cotesta tua s bella E s fiorita guancia, Addio selve, direi: E seguendo altre fere, E la vita pa.s.sando in festa e'n gioco, Farei la state all'ombra, e 'l verno al foco.

Meanwhile the literary dictator of the seventeenth century was undoubtedly Marino. On him devolved the scepter which Petrarch bequeathed to Politian, Politian to Bembo, and Bembo to Torquato Ta.s.so.

In natural gifts he was no unworthy successor of these poets, though the gifts he shared with them were conspicuously employed by him for purposes below the scope of any of his predecessors. In artistic achievement he concentrated the less admirable qualities of all, and brought the Italian poetry of the Renaissance to a close by exaggerating its previous defects. Yet, as a man, Marino is interesting, more interesting in many respects than the melancholy discontented Ta.s.so. He accepted the conditions of his age with genial and careless sympathy, making himself at once its idol, its interpreter, and its buffoon.

Finally, he ill.u.s.trates the law of change which transferred to Neapolitans in this age the scepter which had formerly been swayed by Tuscans and Lombards.[186]

Giovanni Battista Marino was born at Naples in 1569. His father, a jurist of eminence, bred him for the law. But the attractions of poetry and pleasure were irresistible by this mobile son of the warm South--

La lusinga del Genio in me prevalse, E la toga deposta, altrui lascisi Parolette smaltir mendaci e false.

Ne dubbi testi interpretar curai, Ne discordi accordar chiose mi calse, Quella stimando sol perfetta legge Che de'sensi sfrenati il fren corregge.

Legge omai piu non v' ha la qual per dritto Punisca il fallo o ricompensi il merto.

Sembra quando e fin qu deciso e scritto D'opinion confuse abisso incerto.

Dalle calumnie il litigante afflitto Somiglia in vasto mar legno inesperto, Reggono il tutto con affetto ingordo, Pa.s.sion cieca ed interesse sordo.

[Footnote 186: Telesio, Bruno, Campanella, Salvator Rosa, Vico, were, like Marino, natives of the Regno.]

Such, in the poet's maturity, was his judgment upon law; and probably he expressed the same opinion with frankness in his youth. Seeing these dispositions in his son, the severe parent cast him out of doors, and young Marino was free to indulge vagabond instincts with lazzaroni and loose companions on the quays and strands of Naples. In that luxurious climate a healthy native, full of youth and vigor, needs but little to support existence. Marino set his wits to work, and reaped too facile laurels in the fields of Venus and the Muses. His verses speedily attracted the notice of n.o.ble patrons, among whom the Duke of Bovino, the Prince of Conca, and Ta.s.so's friend the Marquis Manso have to be commemorated. They took care that so genuine and genial a poet should not starve. It was in one of Manso's palaces that Marino had an opportunity of worshiping the singer of Armida and Erminia at a distance. He had already acquired dubious celebrity as a juvenile Don Juan and a writer of audaciously licentious lyrics, when disaster overtook him. He a.s.sisted one of his profligate friends in the abduction of a girl. For this breach of the law both were thrown together into prison, and Marino only escaped justice by the sudden death of his accomplice. His patrons now thought it desirable that he should leave Naples for a time. Accordingly they sent him with letters of recommendation to Rome, where he was well received by members of the Crescenzio and Aldobrandino families. The Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandino made him private secretary, and took him on a journey to Ravenna and Turin. From the commencement to the end of his literary career Marino's march through life was one triumphal progress. At Turin, as formerly in Naples and Rome, he achieved a notable success. The Duke of Savoy, Carlo Emmanuele, offered him a place at Court, appointed him secretary, and dubbed him Knight of S. Maurice.

Vidi la corte, e nella corte io vidi Promesse lunghe e guiderdoni avari, Favori ingiusti e patrocini infidi, Speranze dolci e pentimenti amari, Sorrisi traditor, vezzi omicidi, Ed acquisti dubbiosi e danni chiari, E voti vani ed idoli bugiardi, Onde il male e sicuro e il ben vien tardi.

It was the custom of all poets in that age to live in Courts and to abuse them, to adulate princes and to vilify these patrons. Marino, however, had real cause to complain of the treachery of courtiers. He appears to have been a man of easy-going temper, popular among acquaintances, and serviceable to the society he frequented. This comradely disposition did not save him, however, from jealousies and hatreds; for he had, besides, a Neapolitan's inclination for satire.

There was a Genoese poetaster named Gasparo Murtola established in Court-service at Turin, who had recently composed a lumbering poem, _Il Mondo Creato_. Marino made fun of it in a sonnet; Murtola retorted; and a warfare of invectives began which equaled for scurrility and filth the duels of Poggio and Valla. Murtola, seeing that he was likely to be worsted by his livelier antagonist, waited for him one day round a corner, gun in hand. The gun was discharged, and wounded, not Marino, but a favorite servant of the duke. For this offense the a.s.sa.s.sin was condemned to death; and would apparently have been executed, but for Marino's generosity. He procured his enemy's pardon, and was repaid with the blackest ingrat.i.tude. On his release from prison Murtola laid hands upon a satire, _La Cuccagna_, written some time previously by his rival.

This he laid before the duke, as a seditious attack upon the government of Savoy. Marino now in his turn was imprisoned; but he proved, through the intervention of Manso, that the _Cuccagna_ had been published long before his arrival at Turin. Disgusted by these incidents, he next accepted an invitation from the French Court, and journeyed to Paris in 1615, where the Italianated society of that city received him like a living Phoebus. Maria de Medici, as Regent, with Concini for her counselor and lover, was then in all her vulgar glory. Richelieu's star had not arisen to eclipse Italian intrigue and to form French taste by the Academy. D'Urfe and Du Bartas, more marinistic than Marino, more euphuistic than Euphues, gave laws to literature; and the pageant pictures by Rubens, which still adorn the Gallery of the Louvre, marked the full-blown and sensuous splendor of Maria's equipage. Marino's genius corresponded nicely to the environment in which he now found himself; the Italians of the French Court discerned in him the poet who could best express their ideal of existence. He was idolized, glutted with gold, indulged and flattered to the top of his bent. Yearly appointments estimated at 10,000 crowns were augmented by presents in return for complimentary verses or for copies of the poem he was then composing. This poem was the _Adone_, the theme of which had been suggested by Carlo Emmanuele, and which he now adroitly used as a means of flattering the French throne. First printed at Paris in 1623, its reception both there and in Italy secured apotheosis in his lifetime for the poet.[187] One minor point in this magnificent first folio edition of _Adone_ deserves notice, as not uncharacteristic of the age. Only two Cantos out of the twenty are distinguished by anything peculiar in their engraved decorations. Of these two, the eleventh displays the shield of France; the thirteenth, which describes Falsirena's incantations and enchantments, is ornamented with the symbol of the Jesuits, IHS. For this the publishers alone were probably responsible. Yet it may stand as a parable of all-pervasive Jesuitry. Even among the roses and raptures of the most voluptuous poem of the century their presence makes itself felt, as though to hint that the _Adone_ is capable of being used according to Jesuitical rules of casuistry A.M.D.G. One warning voice was raised before the publication of this epic. Cardinal Bentivoglio wrote from Italy beseeching Marino to 'purge it of lasciviousness in such wise that it may not have to dread the lash of our Italian censure.' Whether he followed this advice, in other words whether the original MS. of the _Adone_ was more openly licentious than the published poem, I do not know. Anyhow, it was put upon the Index in 1627. This does not, however, appear to have impaired its popularity, or to have injured its author's reputation. Soon after the appearance of _Adone_, Marino, then past fifty, returned to Naples. He was desirous of reposing on his laurels, wealthy, honored, and adored, among the scenes from which he fled in danger and disgrace thirty years before. His entrance into Naples was an ovation. The Iazzaroni came to meet his coach, dancing and scattering roses; n.o.blemen attended him on horse-back; ladies gazed on him from balconies. A banner waving to the wind announced the advent of 'that ocean of incomparable learning, soul of lyres, subject for pens, material for ink, most eloquent, most fertile, phoenix of felicity, ornament of the laurel, of swans in their divine leisure chief and uncontested leader.' At Naples he died in 1625--felicitous in not having survived the fame which attended him through life and reached its climax just before his death.

[Footnote 187: It is worth noting that Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_ was first printed in 1593, thirty years previously.]

The _Adone_ strikes us at first sight as the supreme poem of epicene voluptuousness. Its smooth-chinned hero, beautiful as a girl, soft as a girl, sentimental as a girl, with nothing of the man about him--except that 'Nature, as she wrought him, fell adoting,'--threads a labyrinth of suggestive adventures, in each of which he is more the patient than the agent of desire. Mercury introduces him to our attention in a series of those fables (tales of Narcissus, Ganymede, Cyparissus, Hylas, Atys) by which antiquity figured the seductiveness of adolescence. Venus woos him, and Falserina tries to force him. Captured in feminine attire by brigands, he is detained in a cave as the mistress of their chief, and doted on by the effeminate companion of his prison. Finally, he contends for the throne of Cyprus with a band of luxurious youths--

Barda.s.sonacci, paggi da taverna.

The crown is destined for the physically fairest. The rival charms of the compet.i.tors are minutely noted, their personal blemishes sagaciously detected, by a council of pleasure-sated worldlings. In his death Adonis succ.u.mbs to the a.s.sault of a boar, fatally inflamed with l.u.s.t, who wounds the young man in his groin, dealing destruction where the beast meant only amorous caresses. G.o.ds and G.o.desses console Venus in her sorrow for his loss, each of whom relates the tale of similar disasters.

Among these legends Apollo's love for Hyacinth and Phoebus' love for Pampinus figure conspicuously. Thus Marino's Adonis excites unhealthy interest by the spectacle of boyhood exposed to the caprices and allurements of both s.e.xes doting on unfledged virility.

What contributes to this effect, in the central motive of the poem, is that Venus herself is no artless virgin, no innocent Chloe, corresponding to a rustic Daphnis. She is already wife, mother, adulteress, _femme entretenue_, before she meets the lad. Her method of treating him is that of a licentious queen, who, after seducing page or groom, keeps the instrument of her pleasures in seclusion for occasional indulgence during intervals of public business. Vulcan and Mars, her husband and her _cicisbeo_, contest the woman's right to this caprice; and when the G.o.d of war compels, she yields him the c.r.a.pulous fruition of her charms before the eye of her disconsolate boy-paramour. Her pre-occupation with Court affairs in Cythera--b.a.l.l.s, pageants, sacrifices, and a people's homage--brings about the catastrophe. Through her temporary neglect, Adonis falls victim to a conspiracy of the G.o.ds.

Thus the part which the female plays in this amorous epic is that of an accomplished courtesan, highly placed in society. All the pathos, all the attraction of beauty and of sentiment, is reserved for the adolescent male.

This fact, though disagreeable, has to be noted. It is too characteristic of the wave of feeling at that time pa.s.sing over Europe, to be ignored. The morbid strain which touched the Courts alike of Valois, Medici and Stuarts; which infected the poetry of Marlowe and of Shakespeare; which cast a sickly pallor even over sainthood and over painting in the school of Bologna, cannot be neglected. In Marino's _Adone_ it reaches its artistic climax.[188]

This, however, is not the main point about the poem. The _Adone_ should rather be cla.s.sed as the epic of voluptuousness in all its forms and species. If the love-poetry of the Italian Renaissance began with the sensuality of Boccaccio's _Amoroso Visione_, it ended, after traversing the idyl, the novel, the pastoral, the elegy and the romance, in the more complex sensuality of Marino's _Adone_; for this, like the _Amoroso Visione_, but far more emphatically, proclaims the beatification of man by s.e.xual pleasure:--

Tramortiscon di gioia ebbre e languenti L'anime stanche, al ciel d'Amor rapite.

Gl'iterati sospiri, i rotti accenti, Le dolcissime guerre e le ferite, Narrar non so--fresche aure, onde correnti, Voi che il miraste, e ben l'udiste, il dite!

Voi secretari de'felici amori, Verdi mirti, alti pini, ombrosi allori! (Canto viii.)

[Footnote 188: Ferrari, in his _Rivolnzioni d'Italia_, vol. iii. p. 563, observes: 'Una Venere sospetta versa lagrime forse maschili sul bellissimo Adonide,' etc. Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_, in like manner, is so written as to force the reader to feel with Venus the seduction of Adonis.]

Thus voluptuousness has its transcendentalism; and Marino finds even his prolific vocabulary inadequate to express the mysteries of this heaven of sensuous delights.[189]

It must not be thought that the _Adone_ is an obscene poem. Marino was too skillful a master in the craft of pleasure to revolt or to regale his readers with grossness. He had too much of the Neapolitan's frank self-abandonment to nature for broad indecency in art to afford him special satisfaction; and the taste of his age demanded innuendo. The laureate of Courts and cities saturated with licentiousness knew well that Coan vestments are more provocative than nudity. It was his object to flatter the senses and seduce the understanding rather than to stimulate coa.r.s.e appet.i.te. Refinement was the aphrodisiac of a sated society, and millinery formed a main ingredient in its love-philters.[190] Marino, therefore, took the carnal instincts for granted, and played upon them as a lutist plays the strings of some lax thrilling instrument. Of moral judgment, of antipathy to this or that form of l.u.s.t, of prejudice or preference in the material of pleasure, there is no trace. He shows himself equally indulgent to the pa.s.sion of Mirra for her father, of Jove for Ganymede, of Bacchus for Pampinus, of Venus for Adonis, of Apollo for Hyacinth. He tells the disgusting story of Cinisca with the same fluent ease as the lovely tale of Psyche; pa.s.ses with the same light touch over Falserina at the bedside of Adonis and Feronia in his dungeon; uses the same palette for the picture of Venus caressing Mars and the struggles of the nymph and satyr. All he demanded was a basis of soft sensuality, from which, as from putrescent soil, might spring the pale and scented flower of artful luxury.

[Footnote 189: With the stanza quoted above Marino closes the cycle which Boccaccio in the _Amoroso Visione_ (canto xlix.) had opened.]

[Footnote 190: On this point I may call attention to the elaborate portraits drawn by Marino (canto xvi.) of the seven young men who contend with Adonis for the prize of beauty and the crown of Cyprus.

Quite as many words are bestowed upon their costumes, jewelry and hair-dressing as upon their personal charms.]

In harmony with the spirit of an age reformed or deformed by the Catholic Revival, Marino parades cynical hypocrisy. The eighth canto of _Adone_ is an elaborately-wrought initiation into the mysteries of carnal pleasure. It is a hymn to the sense of touch:[191]

Ogni altro senso pu ben di leggiero Deluso esser talor da falsi oggetti: Questo sol no, lo qual sempre e del vero Fido ministro e padre dei diletti.

Gli altri non possedendo il corpo intero, Ma qualche parte sol, non son perfetti.

Questo con atto universal distende Lesue forze per tutto, e tutto il prende.

[Footnote 191: I have pleasure in inviting my readers to study the true doctrine regarding the place of touch among the senses as laid down by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_, part iii. sec. 1, chap. ii.]

We are led by subtle gradations, by labyrinthine delays, to the final beatification of Adonis. Picture is interwoven with picture, each in turn contributing to the panorama of sensual Paradise. Yet while straining all the resources of his art, with intense sympathy, to seduce his reader, the poet drops of set purpose phrases like the following:

Flora non so, non so se Frine o Taide Trovar mai seppe oscenita si laide.

Here the ape masked in the man turns around and grins, gibbering vulgar words to point his meaning, and casting dirt on his pretended decency.

While racking the resources of allusive diction to veil and to suggest an immodest movement of his hero (Adonis being goaded beyond the bounds of boyish delicacy by lascivious sights), he suddenly subsides with a knavish t.i.tter into prose:

Cos il fanciullo all'inonesto gioco.

But the end of all this practice is that innocent Adonis has been conducted by slow and artfully contrived approaches to a wanton's embrace, and that the spectators of his seduction have become, as it were, parties to his fall. To make Marino's cynicism of hypocrisy more glaring, he prefaces each canto with an allegory, declaring that Adonis and Venus symbolize the human soul abandoned to vice, and the allurements of sensuality which work its ruin. In the poem itself, meanwhile, the hero and heroine are consistently treated as a pair of enviable, devoted, and at last unfortunate lovers.[192]

It is characteristic of the mood expressed in the _Adone_ that voluptuousness should not be pa.s.sionate, but sentimental. Instead of fire, the poet gives us honeyed tears to drink, and rocks the soul upon an ever-rippling tide of Lydian melody. The acme of pleasure, as conceived by him, is kissing. Twenty-three of the most inspired stanzas of the eighth canto are allotted to a panegyric of the kiss, in which delight all other amorous delights are drowned.[193] Ta.s.so's melancholy yearning after forbidden fruit is now replaced by satiety contemplating the image of past joys with purring satisfaction. This quality of self-contented sentiment partly explains why the type of beauty adored is neither womanly nor manly, but adolescent. It has to be tender, fragile, solicitous, unripe; appealing to sensibility, not to pa.s.sion, by feminine charms in nerveless and soulless boyhood. The most distinctive mark of Adonis is that he has no character, no will, no intellect. He is all sentiment, sighs, tears, pliability, and sweetness.

[Footnote 192: The hypocrisy of the allegory is highly significant for this phase of Italian culture. We have seen how even Ta.s.so condescended to apply it to his n.o.ble epic, which needed no such miserable pretense.

Exquisitely grotesque was the attempt made by Centorio degli Ortensi to sanctify Bandello's _Novelle_ by supplying each one of them with a moral interpretation (ed. Milano: Gio. Antonio degli Antoni, 1560, See Pa.s.sano's _Novellieri in Prosa_, p. 28).]

[Footnote 193: What I have elsewhere, called 'the tyranny of the kiss'

in Italian poetry, begins in Ta.s.so's _Rinaldo_, acquires vast proportions in Guarino's _Pastor Fido_, and becomes intolerable in Marino's _Adone_.]

This emasculate nature displays itself with consummate effect in the sobbing farewell, followed by the pretty pettishnesses, of the seventeenth canto.

As a contrast to his over-sweet and cloying ideal of lascivious grace, Marino counterposes extravagant forms of ugliness. He loves to describe the loathsome incantations of witches. He shows Falserina prowling among corpses on a battle-field, and injecting the congealed veins of her resuscitated victim with abominable juices. He crowds the Cave of Jealousy with monsters horrible to sight and sense; depicts the brutality of brigands; paints hideous portraits of eunuchs, deformed hags, unnameable abortions. He gloats over cruelty, and revels in violence.[194] When Mars appears upon the scene, the orchestra of lutes and cymbals with which we had been lulled to sleep, is exchanged for a Corybantic din of dissonances. Orgonte, the emblem of pride, outdoes the hyperboles of Rodomonte and the lunes of Tamburlaine. Nowhere, either in his voluptuousness or in its counterpart of disgust, is there moderation. The h.e.l.lenic precept, 'Nothing overmuch,' the gracious Greek virtue of temperate restraint, which is for art what training is for athletes, discipline for soldiers, and pruning for orchard trees, has been violated in every canto, each phrase, the slightest motive of this poem. Sensuality can bear such violation better than sublimity; therefore the perfume of voluptuousness in the _Adone_, though excessive, is both penetrating and profound; while those pa.s.sages which aim at inspiring terror or dilating the imagination, fail totally of their effect. The ghastly, grotesque, repulsive images are so overcharged that they cease even to offend. We find ourselves in a region where tact, sense of proportion, moral judgment, and right adjustment of means to ends, have been wantonly abandoned. Marino avowed that he only aimed at surprising his readers:

e del poeta il fin la meraviglia.

[Footnote 194: See the climax to the episode of Filauro and Filora.]

But 45,000 lines of sustained astonishment, of industrious and indefatigable appeals to wonder by devices of language, devices of incident, devices of rhodomontade, devices of innuendo, devices of _capricci_ and _concetti_, induce the stolidity of callousness. We leave off marveling, and yield what is left of our sensibility to the fascination of inexhaustible picturesqueness. For, with all his faults, Marino was a master of the picturesque, and did possess an art of fascination. The picturesque, so difficult to define, so different from the pictorial and the poetical, was a quality of the seventeenth century corresponding to its defects of bad taste. And this gift no poet shared in larger measure than Marino.