Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/251

Rh and virtues, so natural to the Spaniard and the man of the Middle Age in general, were uncongenial to the Italian, whose Rappresentazioni were always peopled by definite, tangible persons, even if of the spiritual order. The Adamo of Andreini, early in the seventeenth century, from which Milton undoubtedly derived his first idea of treating the Fall in a miracle play, might have led to a development in this direction, but remained an isolated eccentricity. The true national development lay in quite another path, the pastoral drama. Something like this might be found in Gil Vicente, but we may be certain that his works weretotally unknown in Italy, and that the pastoral play grew out of such romances as the Arcadia, such eclogues as those of Baptista Mantuanus, and the court masques in which the principal parts were taken by shepherds and shepherdesses. Politian's Orfeo is not very far from being such a piece, although it is a good deal more. A pastoral masque was composed as early as 1506 by Castiglione for the amusement of the court of Urbino. Others followed from time to time, and developed into a real pastoral drama by Beccari in 1554; but the literary pretensions of this class of composition continued to be very slender until it was virtually created by Tasso's Aminta in 1573. Few novel experiments in literature have enjoyed a more immediate or more permanent success. Numerous as were the Aminta's imitators, its primacy has never but once been seriously challenged, and its nature and simplicity have in general been justly preferred to the more elaborate artifice of the Pastor Fido. It is indeed deficient in the rich poetry of its English rival, the Faithful Shepherdess, "as inferior, poetically speaking," says Leigh Hunt, "as a lawn with a few trees on it is to the depths of a forest."