Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/292

274 mistaken a lusus naturæ for an inspired genius, a calculating boy for a Newton or a Galileo. It might indeed have been better for Marini if he had trusted more to his natural faculty for improvisation. "His first strokes," says Settembrini, "are sometimes beautiful, and if he left them as they were all would be well, but he touches and retouches until they are quite blurred." This refers to the descriptions in his Adone (1623), a poem which is nothing but description. Adonis does nothing, but is carried involuntarily through a series of situations contrived to display the pictorial power of the poet. The showman makes the puppet dance, and the puppet returns the compliment. There is no story, no moral, no character, no inner unity, nothing but forty-five thousand lines of word-painting, rich and brilliant indeed, but commonplace in so far as the poet sees nothing invisible to ordinary eyes, and evinces no originality in his manner of regarding man and nature.

Such merely verbal beauty must inevitably satiate, and Marini has experienced more neglect, and even contempt, than many men of far inferior faculty. In his own day he carried all before him, and was even more admired in France than in Italy. It is at least to his credit not to have undertaken his gorgeous but empty Adone until he had convinced himself of his inability to vie with Tasso in a nobler form of epic. He also composed one really dignified poem on the deplorable condition of Italy (attributed, however, by many to Fulvio Testi), and poured forth a flood of idyllic and bucolic, marine, erotic, and lyrical poetry, not devoid of striking beauties, but so disfigured by conceits as to be necessarily condemned to oblivion upon the revival of a purer taste. In some respects he might be compared to