Con tai lusinghe il lusinghiero amante
La lusinghiera Dea lusinga e prega.
Godiamci, amiamei. Amor d'amor mercede,
Degno cambio d'amore è solo amore.
This play on a word sometimes passes over into a palpable pun, as in the following pretty phrase:
O mia dorata ed adorata Dea.
Still we feel that Shakespeare was guilty of precisely the same verbal impertinences. It is only intensity of feeling which prevents such lines as:
Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call:
All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more:
from being Marinistic. But it must be added that this intensity of feeling renders the artifice employed sublimely natural. Here we lay our finger on the crucial point at issue in any estimate of literary mannerism. What is the force of thought, the fervor of emotion, the acute perception of truth in nature and in man, which lies behind that manneristic screen? If, as in the case of Shakespeare, sufficiency or superabundance of these essential elements is palpable, we pardon, we ignore, the euphuism. But should the quality of substance fail, then we repudiate it and despise it. Therefore Marino, who is certainly not more euphuistic than Shakespeare, but who has immeasurably less of potent stuff in him, wears the motley of his barocco style in limbo bordering upon oblivion, while the Swan of Avon parades the same literary livery upon both summits of Parnassus. So true it is that poetry cannot be estimated apart from intellectual and moral contents. Had Marino written:
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down: