Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/385

Rh Even in Italy, where better than anywhere else one may study the poetry of the Renaissance in decadence,—decadence undisturbed by the emergence of new forces,—lyrical poetry still lingers. All that is best in Marino's sonnets, and madrigals, and the octaves of the Adone, is musical and picturesque lyric. Chiabrera's pompous odes show little genuine inspiration, but Testi's have ardour and flow; and in Chiabrera's canzonette France repaid some of her debt to Italy.

Only in France herself is this lyrical spirit already wellnigh extinct when the century opens. Malherbe, or the spirit of which Malherbe is the first representative, comes, "like an envious sneaping frost," killing the plant which had borne beautiful if delicate blooms in the songs of Ronsard and Du Bellay. The sonorous eloquence of Corneille is a fine thing of its kind, but a lover of pure poetry would give a good deal of it for "Mignonne allons voir si la rose," and "Á vous troupe légère." Théophile is the last of the French poets who preserves some of the lyrical inspiration of an older generation.

The chief symptom of decadence in this final flowering of Renaissance lyric is the phenomenon, which has attracted so much attention, of "conceit"—the "accutezze" or Marinism of Italy, Gongorism of Spain, "préciosité" of French and "metaphysical wit" of English poetry. The time is past for speaking of seventeenth-century "wit" or "conceit" as though it were some sudden and inexplicable phenomenon, some startling epidemic in European letters. For it is clear that