INTRODUCTION
best, have only the mild charm that belongs to frivolous pedantry. At their worst, they have an indefinable nastiness which afflicts the nerves like stale scent, or the paintings of Carlo Dolci, or the stucco rotundities of Baroque cherubs. Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.
The excesses of the Seicento have been regarded by various writers as another aspect of the literary movement which produced Euphuism in England. But the conceits of Euphues and Loves Labour's Lost possess, even when most absurd, a certain quality of youthfulness, a hearty joy in the delightful exercise of testing the resources of a newly discovered medium of expression to its uttermost limit, which we look for vainly in Marini and his satellites. The laborious Italian elegance is that of an old and tired person who poses painfully as young; it is wily, not exuberant, and the sensual note that is the chief characteristic of its material has no virile quality. The patriotic enthusiasm that finds its voice in art was dead in Italy; she was already, in Metternich's grim phrase, nothing but a geographical expression. Religious ardour was equally lacking; the base Jesuit sentimentalism spread from the pulpit to the academies; Gesù Bambino was the patron of the Arcadians; even Chiabrera, who at least possessed a power of language and a poetic ambition that were denied to his complacent contemporaries, stooped to the most miserable depths in his religious poetry.[1] Meanwhile,
- ↑ Cf. his description of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, where he invokes the Muses to sing the praises of the Saint:—
Tendete, Arciere d'ammirabil canto,
Musici dardi al saettato Santo.
