Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/204

186 whose themes have long since become antiquated, but who still challenges the attention of posterity by charm of style. "Cela qui n'est pas écrit ne dure pas" is a rule without exception, and the converse is often, though not always, true also. One highly important class of these writers is that large section of the poets who modelled themselves avowedly on the greatest master of style their literature possessed or possesses, the man whose thoughts, often most precious in themselves, are displayed to incomparable advantage by incomparable felicity of expression.

Very few Italian lyrical poets of the sixteenth century ventured to stray far from the traces of Petrarch, who became to them what Virgil and Homer and Ovid had necessarily become to writers in Latin verse. Had Petrarch excelled in epic as he excelled in lyric, Ariosto and Tasso too would have been his humble followers, and the whole of the poetical Hterature of the age would have been imitative, and consequently second-rate. Yet, although the mass of this derivative literature is intolerably empty and insipid, much is distinguished by a perfection of expression which makes it not merely delightful reading but a valuable study. The poets frequently seem to approach Petrarch very nearly, but none reproduce him. Those succeed best whose imitation is the least avowed, and who are most remote from their model in native temperament, such as Tansillo, on the other hand, Bembo, Molza, and their like, who in mere form have most nearly approached Petrarch by most completely suppressing their own individuality, present much less to interest modern readers, although their contemporaries, estimating them from another point of view, extolled them to the skies.

Bembo and Molza, nevertheless, only followed in the