Granted his own conditions, granted the emptiness of moral and intellectual substance in the man and in his age, we are compelled to acknowledge that his literary powers were rich and various. Few writers, at the same time, illustrate the vices of decadence more luminously than this Protean poet of vacuity. Few display more clearly the 'expense of spirit in a waste of shame.' None teach the dependence of art upon moralized and humane motives more significantly than this drunken Helot of genius. His indifference to truth, his defiance of sobriety, his conviction that the sole end of art is astonishment, have doomed him to oblivion not wholly merited. The critic, whose duty forces him to read through the Adone, will be left bewildered by the spectacle of such profuse wealth so wantonly squandered.[195] In spite of fatigue, in spite of disgust, he will probably be constrained to record his opinion that, while Tasso represented the last effort of noble poetry struggling after modern expression under out-worn forms of the Classical Revival, it was left for Marino in his levity and license to evoke a real and novel though rococo form, which nicely corresponded to the temper of his times, and determined the immediate future of art. For this reason he requires the attention which has here been paid him.
But how, it may be asked, was it possible to expand the story of Venus and Adonis into an epic of 45,000 lines? The answer to this question could best be given by an analysis of the twenty cantos: and since few living students have perused them, such a display of erudition would be pardonable. Marini does not, however, deserve so many pages in a work devoted to the close of the Italian Renaissance. It will suffice to say that the slender narrative of the amour of Venus and her boyish idol, his coronation as king of Cyprus, and his death by the boar's tusk, is ingeniously interwoven with a great variety of episodes. The poet finds occasion to relate the principal myths of Hellenic passion treating these in a style which frequently reminds us of Ovid's Metamorphoses; he borrows tales from Apuleius, Lucian, and the pastoral novelists; he develops the theme of jealousy in Mars and Vulcan, introduces his own autobiography, digresses into romantic adventures by sea and land, creates a rival to Venus in the sorceress Falserina, sketches the progress of poetry in one canto and devotes another to a panegyric of Italian princes, extols the House of France and adulates Marie de Medicis, surveys the science of the century, describes fantastic palaces and magic gardens, enters with curious minuteness into the several delights of the five senses, dis courses upon Courts, ambition, avarice and honor, journeys over the Mediterranean, conducts a game of chess through fifty brilliant stanzas; in brief, while keeping his main theme in view, is careful to excite and sustain the attention of his readers by a succession of varied and ingeniously suggested novelties. Prolixity, indefatigable straining after sensational effect, interminable description, are the defects of the Adone; but they are defects related to great qualities possessed by the author, to inexhaustible resources, curious knowledge, the improvisatore's facility, the trained rhetorician's dexterity in the use of language, the artist's fervid delight in the exercise of his craft.
Allowing for Marino's peculiar method, his Adone has the excellence of unity which was so highly prized by the poets of his age and nation. Critics have maintained that the whole epic is but a development of the episode of Rinaldo in Armida's garden. But it is more than this. It contains all the main ingredients of the Italian Romance, with the exception of chivalry and war. There is a pastoral episode corresponding to that of Erminia among the shepherds, a magnificent enchantress in the manner of Alcina, an imprisonment of the hero which reminds us of Ruggiero in Atlante's magic castle, a journey like Astolfo's to the moon, a conflict between good and evil supernatural powers, a thread of allegory more or less apparent, a side glance at contemporary history; and these elements are so combined as to render the Adone one of the many poems in the long romantic tradition. It differs mainly from its predecessors in the strict unity of subject, which subordinates each episode and each digression to the personal adventures of the heroine and hero; while the death and obsequies of Adonis afford a tragic close that is lacking to previous poems detached from the Carolingian cycle. Contemporary writers praised it as a poem of peace. But it is the poem of ignoble peace, of such peace as Italy enjoyed in servitude, when a nation of cicisbei had naught to occupy their energies but sensual pleasure. Ingenious as Marino truly was in conducting his romance upon so vast a scheme through all its windings to one issue, we feel that the slender tale of a boy's passion for the queen of courtesans and his metamorphosis into the scarlet windflower of the forest supplied no worthy motive for this intricate machinery. The metaphor of an alum basket crystallized upon a petty frame of wire occurs to us when we contemplate its glittering ornaments, and reflect upon the poverty of the sustaining theme. It might in fact stand for a symbol of the intellectual vacancy of the age which welcomed it with rapture, and of the society which formed a century of taste upon its pattern.
In another and higher literary quality the Adone represents that moment of Italian development. A foreigner may hardly pass magisterial judgment on its diction. Yet I venture to remark that Marino only at rare intervals attains to purity of poetic style; even his best passages are deformed, not merely by conceits to which the name of Marinism has been given, but also by gross vulgarities and lapses into trivial prose. Notwithstanding this want of distinction, however, he has a melody that never fails. The undulating, evenly on-flowing cantilena of his verbal music sustains the reader on a tide of song. That element of poetry, which, as I have observed, was developed with remarkable success by Tasso in some parts of the Gerusalemme is the main strength of the Adone. With Marino the Chant d'Amour never rises so high, thrills so subtly, touches the soul so sweetly and so sadly, as it does in Tasso's verse. But in all those five thousand octave stanzas it is rarely altogether absent. The singing faculty of the Neapolitan was given to this poet of voluptuousness; and if the song is neither deep nor stirring, neither stately nor sublime, it is because his soul held nothing in its vast vacuity but sensuous joy.[196] A musical Casanova, an unmalignant Aretino, he sang as vulgar nature prompted; but he always kept on singing. His partiality for detonating dissonances, squibs and crackers of pyrotechnical rhetoric, braying trumpets and exploding popguns, which deafen and distract our ears attuned to the suave cadence of the cantilena, is no less characteristic of the Neapolitan. Marino had the impro visatory exuberance, the impudence, the superficial passion, the luxurious delight in life, and the noisiness of his birthplace. He also shared its love of the grotesque as complement and contrast to pervading beauty.
A serious fault to be found with Marino's style is its involved exaggeration in description. Who, for instance, can tolerate this picture of a young man's foot shod with a blue buskin?
L'animato del piè molle alabastro
Che oscura il latte del sentier celeste
Stretto alla gamba con purpureo nastro
Di cuoio azzurro un borsacchin gli veste.
Again he carries to the point of lunacy that casuistical rhetoric, introduced by Ariosto and refined upon by Tasso, with which luckless heroines or heroes announce their doubts and difficulties to the world in long soliloquies. The ten stanzas which set forth Falserina's feelings after she has felt the pangs of love for Adonis, might pass for a parody:
Ardo, lassa, o non ardo! ahì qual io sento
Stranio nel cor non conosciuto affetto!
E forse ardore? ardor non è, chè spento
L'avrei col pianto; è ben d'ardor sospetto!
Sospetto no, piuttosto egli è tormento.
Come tormento fia, se da diletto?
And so forth through eighty lines in which every conceivable change is rung upon Amo o non amo?_._._._Io vivo e moro pur_._._._Io non ho core e lo mio cor n'ha dui. With all this effort no one is convinced of Falserina's emotion, and her long-winded oration reads like a schoolboy's exercise upon some line of the fourth Aeneid. Yet if we allow the sense of rhythmical melody to intervene between our intellectual perception and Marino's language, we shall still be able to translate these outpourings into something which upon the operatic stage would keep its value. False rhetoric and the inability to stop when enough and more than enough has been said upon any theme to be developed, are the incurable defects of Marino. His profuse fioriture compared with the simpler descant of Ariosto or Tasso remind us of Rossini's florid roulades beside the grace of Pergolese's or the majesty of Marcello's song.
The peculiar quality of bad taste which is known in Italy as Marinismo, consisted in a perpetual straining after effect by antitheses, conceits, plans on words degenerating into equivocation, and such-like rhetorical grimaces. Marino's ars poetica was summed up in this sentence: 'Chi non sa far stupir, vada alia striglia.' Therefore, he finds periphrases for the simplest expressions. He calls the nightingale sirena de'boschi, gunpowder l'irreparabil fulmine terreno, Columbus il ligure Argonauta, Galileo il novello Endimione. In these instances, what might have been expanded into a simile, is substituted for the proper word in order to surprise the reader. When he alludes to Dante, he poses a conundrum on that poet's surname: Ben sull'ali liggier tre mondi canta. The younger Palma is complimented on wresting the palm from Titian and Veronese. Guido Reni is apostrophized as: Reni onde il maggior Reno all'altro cede[197] We are never safe in reading his pages from the whirr and whistle of such verbal fireworks. And yet it must be allowed that Marino's style is on the whole freer from literary affectations than that of our own Euphuists. It is only at intervals that the temptation to make a point by clever trickery seems irresistible. When he is seriously engaged upon a topic that stirs his nature to the depth, as in the eighth canto, description flows on for stanza after stanza with limpid swiftness. Another kind of artifice to which he has resort, is the repetition of a dominant word: