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326 reached perfection, running to seed in the strained and feverish pursuit of novelty undirected by any new and fruitful inspiration. In "secentismo," one might venture to say, nothing is new but everything is novel. To startle and amaze was the motive of each new departure in form or verse or conceit. As Marino says—

"È del poeta il fin la maraviglia,             Parlo dell' eccellente e non del goffo,              Chi non sa far stupir vada alia striglia."

But the only method of surprising that Marino and his contemporaries discovered was to heighten the notes, to make the conceits of compliment and flattery more far-fetched and hyperbolical, the descriptions more detailed and flamboyant, the horrors more hideous and grotesque, the mock-heroic more satirical and prosaic in spirit. They added no single new note or form to Italian poetry.

In lyrical poetry, despite the impatience of Petrarch's influence expressed by Marino, his work, and that of his imitators, is only the last phase in the progressive decadence which had invaded the Italian sonnet and lyric at least from Petrarch onwards. Indeed the courtly poets of the close of the fifteenth century, Cariteo, Tebaldeo, and Serafino Dall' Aquila, developed in their sonnets and strambotti all the extravagances of mere compliment latent in their great predecessor's work, all that tasteless pseudo-metaphysics of love, begotten of the frigid elaboration of metaphor (Addison's "mixed wit"), which M. Vianey has paraphrased from the poems