GUARINI AND LUZZATTO
An aristocrat all his life, Guarini was out of place in the court life of Ferrara. He spent his vigor in a vain attempt to accommodate himself to the sixteenth century Italian conditions. Then, broken in strength and fortune, he retired to produce his dramatic masterpiece. Not that the Pastor Fido can be truly termed dramatic. It is much more of a lyric. But just as Banquo, himself no king, was the father of kings, so Guarini, of little consequence as a dramatist, begot famous dramas. For the Faithful Shepherd deeply influenced European drama throughout the two centuries which followed its publication in 1590.
The Hebraic muse owed much to Guarini. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707-1747) has been the only writer of Hebrew plays whose work counts in the literary sense. Luzzatto derived his whole dramatic inspiration from Guarini. Let no one question this assertion without first comparing La-Yesharim Tehillah and Migdal ‘Oz with the Pastor Fido. The characters and scenes, and even more, the style, are closely alike. Nor is this latter fact wonderful. John Addington Symonds describes Guarini’s work as “a masterpiece of diction, glittering and faultless, like a bas-relief of hard Corinthian bronze.” Luzzatto produces the same effect in his Hebrew imitation, using a similar metre as well as similar dramatic conventions. In imitating, however, he re-interprets. Guarini’s play is sometimes gross, it is never truly rustic. But a Hebrew poet, moved by such models as the Song of Songs, better knew how to be sensuous with purity; grossness must be antipathetic to him. On the other hand, Hebrew poetry is genuinely rustic. The biblical shepherd, whether in scriptural history or romance, is the most beloved of heroes. Some of the great characters of the Bible are shepherds: Abraham, Moses, David, Amos, Shulammith—but why pile up instances? It is obvious that a Hebrew poet, adopting a rural background for a lyrical drama, must inevitably write with sincerity. He could not, at the same time, fail to write with delicacy. Luzzatto took much from Guarini, but he both refined and adorned what he borrowed.
Yet, though it is because of Luzzatto that I am writing of Guarini, nevertheless, Guarini, and not Luzzatto, is my present subject. So I will re-tell for the reader the story of the Pastor Fido. Not that it is an easy task. Guarini, who influenced the late Elizabethans, shared, with the best of the latter, the inordinate fancy for complicated plots. Plot is entangled within plot, until we lose sight of the main theme. Luzzatto—I find it impossible to keep the Hebrew out!—here simplifies. He hardly gives us a story at all; he provides an allegory, eking out Guarini with Midrash. In the process of disentangling Guarini’s intricacies, he somewhat sacrifices the chief merit of his Italian model. Luzzatto’s dramatis personae are almost abstractions; they remind us of the figures in morality plays. A Luzzatto drama more resembles Everyman than it does As You Like it. Of Guarini, on the other hand, it may be said, that though he means his characters to represent types, he draws them as individuals. Silvio, to adopt Mr. Symond’s summaries, is “cold and eager”; Mirtillo “tender and romantic.” Corisca’s “meretricious arts” contrast with and enhance Amarillis’s “pure affection”; Dorinda is “shameless.” The dramatist, however, be he Luzzatto or Guarini, writes with a distinct tendency. His aim is to set up the country life and the country girl as essentially superior to the city varieties. This motive is as old as satire, and as young as the “verses of society.” Austin Dobson’s Phyllida is all that is sweet and natural, she is a foil to the artificiality of the “ladies of St. James’s.” Guarini enjoys the honor not of creating the mood, but of bringing it into new vogue.
But I am still keeping from the story. The scene is Arcadia. Yearly the inhabitants must sacrifice a young maiden to Diana. Diana had suffered through the perfidy of Lucrina; but the Oracle declares:
Your Woes, Arcadians! never shall have End,
Till Love shall two conjoin of heavenly Race,
And till a faithful Shepherd shall amend,
By matchless Zeal, Lucrina’s old Disgrace.
Montano, the priest of Diana, seeks, therefore, to join in marriage his only son, Silvio, to the noble nymph, Amarillis, descended from Pan. But Silvio thought more of hunting than of love. The young shepherd, Mirtillo, becomes enamored of Amarillis, and she of him. The artful Corisca, desiring the shepherd for herself, charges Amarillis with infidelity—she is betrothed, though not wedded, to Silvio. Amarillis is sentenced to death. Mirtillo offers himself, and is accepted, as her substitute. Led to the—fatal, not the bridal—altar, Mirtillo’s identity is discovered. The shepherd is Montano’s son. Let us read the rest in the terms of the “argument” (as given in the 1782 English version): “On which Occasion, the true Father, bewailing that it should fall to his lot to execute the law on his own blood—(for to Montano, as priest, the office of carrying out the sacrificial rite belonged)—is by Tirenio, a blind soothsayer, clearly satisfied by the interpretation of the Oracle itself, that it was not only opposite to the will of the gods that this victim should be sacrificed, but moreover that the happy period (i.e., end) was now come to the woes of Arcadia, which had been predicted by the sacred Voice, and from which, as every circumstance now strongly corresponded, they concluded that Amarillis could not be, nor ought to be, the spouse of any other than Mirtillo. And as a little previous to this, Silvio, thinking to wound a wild beast, had pierced Dorinda, who had been exceedingly distressed by the slight he had shown to her violent passion for him, but whose wonted savageness was changed by this accident and softened into compassion—after her wound was healed, which at first was thought mortal, and after Amarillis was become the spouse of Mirtillo, he too became now enamoured of Dorinda, and married her; by means of these events, so happy and so extraordinary, Corisca is at length convinced of and confesses her guilt, and, having implored pardon and obtained it from the loving couple, her perturbed spirit now pacified and satiated with the Follies of the World, she determines to change her Course of Life.” The play ends with the wedding chorus for the hero and heroine (Luzzatto, too, wrote his plays for marriage celebrations). In words very like those used by Luzzatto, Guarini’s shepherds sing to Mirtillo and Amarillis:
O happy pair!
Who have in Sorrow sown, and reap’d in Joy,
How hath your bitter share of grief’s alloy
Now sweetened and confirmed your present bliss!
And may ye learn from this,
Blind, feeble mortals! to distinguish right
What are true ills, and what is pure delight—
Not all that pleases is substantial good;
Not all which grieves, true ill, well understood—
That, of all joys, must be pronounced the best,
Which virtue’s arduous triumphs yield the breast.
In this story may be perceived the germs both of Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess and of Luzzatto’s Unto the Upright Praise. But while the former seized upon and elaborated the sensuous element in Guarini’s plot, giving us a truly disgusting figure in Chloe, Luzzatto pounced on the finer aspects, and his heroines outshine even Amarillis in purity and beauty of mind, just as his heroes surpass Mirtillo in fidelity to the standards of manhood. That one and the same model should have produced two such varied copies says much for the genius of the original author. To him, it is true, we owe the tragi-comedy of intrigue. But to him also we are indebted for idylls, as full-blooded as those of Theocritus, but far more spiritual.