Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/127

Rh and should there be a lapse into seriousness, there was room for satire on the clergy, and for sentiments of the Reformation. These tales, it is true, were products of culture separated from the realities of society, and neglectful of them; but they were not, as might have been anticipated, expressive of individual rather than national temperament. They are prominently characterized by the Italian love of incident, pictures, and fun. The incidents are invented for their own sake, not to develop character or exhibit it in action; they are only adventures, happenings, skillfully interwoven and rapidly passed; but amid them the conduct of the personages is true Italian, realistic. In presenting these incidents, and the scenes in which they take place, the poets, as Lessing complained, adopt pictorial methods: they describe the ladies piecemeal, the landscapes leaf by leaf. Possibly, as has been suggested, the habitual sight of pictures enables the Italian to succeed where the German fails; to harmonize the colors on the canvas and build up the fragments into a proportioned statue, and thus obtain a single mental impression. Whether this be so or not, the pictorial quality is a tribute exacted