“gue do-diEdip-di Laio, ttappas-menosia ra il Poe mu tio lipo, per,” &c.,
a moderate dose of which should suffice to drive a person of some imagination, and excessive nerves, to Bedlam. Read straight, however, Denores is much more sedative, not to say soporific, than exciting: and his dealings with Tragedy, the Heroic Poem, and Comedy have scarcely any other interest than as symptoms of that determination towards unqualified, if not wholly unadulterated, Aristotelianism which has been remarked upon.
Il Sogno, overo della Poesia, by Gabriele Zinano,[[151]] dedicated at Reggio on the 15th October 1590 to the above-mentioned Ferrando Gonzaga of Guastalla, is a very tiny treatise, Zinano. written with much pomp of style, but apparently unnoticed by most of the authorities on the subject. The author had studied Patrizzi (or Patrici, as he, too, calls him), and was troubled in his mind about Imitation, and about the equivocal position of Empedocles. He comforts himself as he goes on, and at last comes to a sort of eclectic opportunism, which extols the instruction and delight of poetry, admits that it can practically take in all arts and sciences, but will not admit fable as making it without verse, or verse without fable, and denies that both, even together, make it necessarily good. The little piece may deserve mention for its rarity, and yet once more, as symptomatic of the hold which critical discussion had got of the Italian mind, Zinano is evidently full of the Deca Istoriale and the Deca Disputata, but alarmed at their heresies.
Paolo Beni, the antagonist of Summo, the champion of prose for tragedy as well as for comedy, and a combatant in the controversy over the Pastor Fido, which succeeded in time, and almost equalled in tedium, that over the Gerusalemme, will come best in the next Book; and though I have not neglected, I find little to say about, Correa[[152]] and others.[[153]] Mazzone da Miglionico, &c. A sign of the times is the somewhat earlier I Fiori della Poesia[[154]] of Mazzone da Miglionico (not to be confounded with the above-mentioned Mazzoni), a tightly packed quarto of five hundred pages, plus an elaborate index. This is a sort of “Bysshe” ante Bysshium—a huge gradus of poetic tags from Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, arranged ready for anybody who wishes to pursue the art of poetry according to the principles of Vida. Here you may find choice of phrases to express the ideas of “going to bed for the purpose of sleeping,” of “black and beautiful eyes,” of “shoes that hurt the feet,” and of “horses that run rapidly.” It was inevitable that this manual at once and reductio ad absurdum of the mechanic Art of Poetical Imitation should come—indeed, others had preceded Mazzone, for instance Fabricius, in Germany (see next Book). But one cannot help invoking a little woe on those by whom it came.
Summo.
The twelve Discorsi[[155]] of Faustino Summo manage to cover as many questions in their 93 leaves: the end of Poetry; the meaning of the word philanthropia;[[156]] the last words (the purgation clause) of the Definition of Tragedy; the possibility of a happy ending; the representation of atrocities and deaths; the admissibility of true fables; the necessity of unity of action; the propriety of drama in prose; furor poeticus; the sufficiency of verse to make poetry; the legitimacy of tragi-comedy and pastoral; and the quality of the Pastor Fido. Summo gives us our last word here with singular propriety. He is not quite Aristotelian to the point of infallibility, and his orthodoxy is what may be called a learned orthodoxy—that is to say, he is careful to quote comments or arguments of many of the writers whom we have mentioned in this chapter and the last, from Trissino to Denores, and of a few whom we have not. But in him this orthodoxy is in the main constituted: it is out of the stage of formation and struggle; and it is ready—all the more so that many of its documents have already passed with authority to other countries and languages—to take its place as the creed of Europe.
[97]. My copy is the second edition (apud Petrum Santandreanum, s. l., 1581).
[98]. This joke requires a little explanation and adaptation to get it into English. The Latin is miror majores nostros sibi tam iniquos fuisse ut factoris vocem maluerint oleariorum cancellis circumscribere. In fact, Fattojo and Fattojano, if not fattore, do mean in Italian “Oil-Press” and “Oil-Presser.”
[99]. Scaliger goes so far as to say that “it would be better never to have read” the Symposium and the Phædrus, because of their taint with the Grœcanicum scelus.