impetuosi venti
Che spiran nell'incendio, e 'l fan maggiore
Con turbini d'Amore,
Ch' apportan sempre ai miserelli amanti
Foschi nembi di duol, piogge di pianti.
From this to the style of the Adone there was only one step to be taken.
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.
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 Tasso. 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 Tasso. 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 illustrates 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.
Nè dubbi testi interpretar curai,
Nè discordi accordar chiose mi calse,
Quella stimando sol perfetta legge
Che de'sensi sfrenati il fren corregge.
Legge omai più non v' ha la qual per dritto
Punisca il fallo o ricompensi il merto.
Sembra quando è fin quì 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,
Passion cieca ed interesse sordo.
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 noble patrons, among whom the Duke of Bovino, the Prince of Conca, and Tasso'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 assisted 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 è 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 assassin 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 ingratitude. 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'Urfè 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 orna mented 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; noblemen 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.
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—