Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/249

Rh G U A K 1 237 to little purpose, suffered from the spite and ill-will of two successive secretaries, Pigna and Montecatini, quarrelled with his old friend Tasso, and at the end of fourteen years of service found himself half-ruined, with a large family and no prospects. When Tasso was condemned to S. Anna, the duke promoted Guarini to the vacant post of court poet. There is an interesting letter extant from the latter to his friend Cornelia BeiitLvoglio, describing the efforts he made to fill this place appropriately. &quot; I strove to transform my self into- another person, and, like a player, reassumei the character, costume, and feelings of my youth. Advanced in manhood, I forced myself to look young ; I turned my natural melancholy into artificial gaiety, affected loves I did not feel, exchanged wisdom for folly, and, in a word, passed from a philosopher into a poet.&quot; How ill-adapted he felt himself to this masquerade life may be gathered from the following sentence : &quot; I am already in my forty-fourth year, the father of eight children, two of whom are old enough to be my censors, while my daughters are of an age to marry.&quot; Abandoning so uncongenial a strain upon his faculties, Guarini retired in 1582 to his ancestral farm, the j Villa Guarina, in the lovely country that lies between the Adige and Po, where he gave himself up to the cares of his family, the nursing of his dilapidated fortunes, and the composition of the Pastor Fido. He was not happy in his domestic lot; for he had lost his wife young, and quarrelled with his elder sons about the division of his estate. Litiga tion seems to have been an inveterate vice with Guarini ; nor was he ever free from legal troubles. After studying his biography, the conclusion is forced upon our minds that he was originally a man of robust and virile intellect, ambi tious of greatness, confident in his own powers, and well qualified for serious affairs, whose energies found no proper scope for their exercise. Literary work offered but a poor sphere for such a character, while the enforced inactivity of court life soured a naturally capricious and choleric temper. Of poetry he spoke with a certain tone of con descension, professing to practise it only in his leisure moments; nor are his miscellaneous verses of a quality to secure for their author a very lasting reputation. It is therefore not a little remarkable that the fruit of his retire ment a disappointed courtier past the prime of early man hood should have been a dramatic masterpiece worthy to be ranked with the classics of Italian literature. Deferring a further account of the Pastor Fido for the present, the remaining incidents of Guarini s restless life may be briefly told. In 1585 he w.is at Turin superintending the first public performance of his drama, whence Alphonso recalled him to Ferrara, and gave him the office of secretary of state. This reconciliation between the poet and his patron did not last long. Guarini moved to Florence, then to Rome, and back again to Florence, where he established himself as the courtier of Ferdinand de Medici. A dishonourable mar riage, pressed upon his son Guarino by the grand-duke, roused the natural resentment of Guarini, always scrupulous upon the point of honour. He abandoned the Medicean court, and took refuge with Francesco Maria of Urbino, the last scion of the Montefeltro-della-Rovere house. Yet he found no satisfaction at Urbino. &quot;The old court is a dead institution,&quot; he writes to a friend ; &quot;one may see a shadow of it, but not the substance in Italy of to-day. Ours is an age of appearances, and one goes a-masquerading all the year.&quot; This was true enough. Those dwindling deadly- lively little residence towns of Italian ducal families, whose day of glory was over, and who were waiting to be slowly absorbed by the capacious appetite of Austria, were no fit places for a man of energy and independence. Guarini finally took refuge in his native Ferrara, which, since the death of Alphonso, had now devolved to the papal see. Here, and at the Villa Guarini, his last years were passed in study, lawsuits, and polemical disputes with his contemporary critics, until 1612, when he died at Venice in his seventy- fifth year. The Pastor Fido is a pastoral drama composed not with out reminiscences of Tasso s Aminta. The scene is laid in Arcadia, where Guarini supposes it to have been the custom to sacrifice a maiden yearly to Diana. But an oracle has declared that when two scions of divine lineage are united in marriage, and a faithful shepherd has atoned for the ancient error of a faithless woman, this inhuman rite shall cease. The plot turns upon the unexpected fulfilment of this prophecy, contrary to all the schemes which had been devised for bringing it to accomplishment, and in despite of apparent improbabilities of divers kinds. It is extremely elaborate, and, regarded as a piece of cunning mechanism, leaves nothing to be desired. Each motive has been care fully prepared, each situation amply developed. Yet, con sidered as a play, the Pastor Fido disappoints a reader trained in the school of Sophocles or Shakespeare. The action itself seems to take place off the stage, and only the results of action, stationary tableaux representing the move ment of the drama, are put before us in the scenes. Tiie art is lyrical, not merely in form but in spirit, and in adap tation to the requirements of music which demands station ary expressions of emotion for development. The charac ters have been well considered, and are exhibited with great truth and vividness ; the cold and eager hunter Silvio con trasting with the tender and romantic Mirtillo, and Corisca s meretricious arts enhancing the pure affection of Amarilli. Dorinda presents another type of love so impulsive that it prevails over a maiden s sense of shame, while the courtier Carino brings the corruption of towns into comparison with the innocence of the country. In Carino the poet painted his own experience, and here his satire upon the court of Ferrara is none the less biting because it is gravely measured. In Corisca he delineated a woman vitiated by the same town life, and a very hideous portrait has he drawn. Though a satirical element was thus introduced into the Pastor Fido in order to relieve its ideal picture of Arcadia, the whole play is but a study of contemporary feeling in Italian society. There is no true rusticity whatever in the drama. This correspondence with the spirit of the age secured its success during Guarini s lifetime; this made it so dangerously seductive that Cardinal Bellarmine told the poet he had done more harm to Christendom by his blandishments than Luther by his heresy. Without anywhere transgressing the limits of decorum, the Pastor Fido is steeped in sensuous- ness ; and the immodesty of its pictures is enhanced by rhetorical concealments more provocative than nudity. Moreover, the love described is effeminate and wanton, felt less as passion than as lust enveloped in a veil of sentiment. We divine the coming age of cicisbei and castrati. Of Guarini s style it would be difficult to speak in terms of too high praise. The thought and experience of a lifetime have been condensed in these five acts, and have found expression in language brilliant, classical, chiselled to perfection. Here and there the taste of the 17th century makes itself felt in frigid conceitsand forced antitheses; nor does Guarini abstain from sententious maxims which reveal the moralist rather than the poet. Yet these are but minor blemishes in a masterpiece of diction, glittering and faultless like a polished bas-relief of hard Corinthian bronze. That a single pastoral should occupy so prominent a place in the history of litera ture seems astonishing, until we reflect that Italy, upon the close of the 16th century, expressed itself in the Pastor Fido, and that the influence of this drama was felt through all the art of Europe till the epoch of the Revolution. It is not a mere play. The sensual refinement proper to an age of social decadence found in it the most exact embodiment, and made it the code of gallantry for the next two centuries.