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 titter into prose:
Così 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 passionate, 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] Tasso'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 passion, 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.
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 Hellenic 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 passages 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:
È del poeta il fin la meraviglia.
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.