Je faisais Amarante, ou Cloris, ou Sylvie, Rotrou's best known plays were written after the appearance of Le Cid, and are tragedies with a good many elements of tragi-comedy. Le Véritable Saint Genest (1645), adapted from Lo fingido verdadero of Lope de Vega, is a martyr-tragedy which catches in a simpler way some of the ardour and elevation of Polyeucte. There are no subtle cross-currents of feeling, however, and our attention is concentrated on the actor-martyr. Venceslas (1647), taken from a Spanish play by Francisco de Rojas, and Cosroès (1648) have more of the characteristically Corneillean conflict of motive managed, if not with the greater poet's strength and eloquence, with very considerable sincerity and dignity. The later contemporaries of Corneille who connect him most closely with his great successor, as his brother Thomas and Quinault, lie outside the range of this essay. 1 The salient features in the history of comedy 1 have been touched in passing. Represented at the beginning of the century by farce, not by the academic comedy of the sixteenth century, it made a fresh departure about 1629 in the work of Mairet, Corneille, 1 Several of the comedies of this period, including Mairet's Duc d'Ossonne, Rotrou's La Sour, and Saint-Sorlin's Les Visionnaires, have been reprinted, with biographical introductions, in Le Théâtre Français au XVIe et au XVIIe Siècle, ed. M. Édouard Fournier, Paris, n.d. and Rotrou. Corneille's experiment was the most interesting an endeavour to paint the life of Paris, not satirically, but realistically and comically, suggestive of one aspect of Jonson's comedies and of the Tatler. Pierre du Ryer's Les Vendanges de Suresnes (1635) was an experiment in the same direction, a study of the manners of the rich bourgeois class framed in the improbable plot of the pastoral drama. Once revived, however, comedy came under the prevailing influence of the Spanish drama. Corneille himself in Le Menteur and its successor, Rotrou in La Bague d'Oubli and Diane, Scarron in his burlesque Jodelet ou le Maître valet and Don Japhet d'Arménie and others, translate and adapt from the Spanish; and the general trend of this comedy is towards burlesque, the study of humours more extravagant but presented with less accumulation of detail than Jonson's. An excellent example is Les Visionnaires (1640) of Desmarests Saint-Sorlin, the confidant and useful servant in onerous offices of Richelieu. It is a comedy quite in the style of Jonson, from the preface explaining the "humours" of the characters to the interesting discussion of the Unities between the lady whose passion is the stage and the Ronsardising poet. But Saint-Sorlin's boasting captain is more like the captain of the Commedia dell' Arte than Boabadil. The scene of the play would require for probability to be the inside of an asylum. It was not to these burlesque polite comedies that Molière's work is most closely akin, but to the native and older farce, as is set forth in the next volume. CHAPTER VIII. ITALY AND GERMANY. SECENTISMO." MARINO-LA LIRA '-'L'ADONE.' 66 FOLLOWERS. CHIA BRERA-THE ITALIAN CANZONE AND THE CLASSICAL ODE-BERCHIABRERA'S PINDARICS AND CANZONETTE. NARDO TASSO SECCHIA PROSE GALILEO -- D'AVILA RAPITA FOLLOWERS FLEMING. HYMNS. Secentismo. IN studying the poetry of Italy1 in the seventeenth century, one finds oneself face to face with a phenomenon to which that much abused term decadence can be more intelligibly and legitimately applied than to anything in English or French poetry of the same period. In the affectations of Marino and his contemporaries—and one may not except altogether Chiabrera and Tassoni— we see an art which, whatever its limitations, had 1 Storia Letteraria d'Italia Scritta da una Società di Professori. Il Seicento, Antonio Bellini, Milano. D'Ancona e Bacci: Manuale della Letteratura Italiana, vol. iii., Firenze, 1904. For other histories with comments see Elton, Augustan Ages, p. 382, note, and add La Vita Italiana nel Seicento, an issue of "conferenze tenute a Firenze nel 1894." Important periodicals are Il Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, and La Nuova Antologia. 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 "E del poeta il fin la maraviglia, Parlo dell' eccellente e non del goffo, 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. Decadence of 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 Lyrical Poetry 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 of Serafino. "Pending the fatal issue of this duel Serafino is the benefactor of his kind. Carry him into the desert and he will supply water from his eyes, fire from his heart. If a besieged castle is in want of water, call for him. Does a mariner desire wind to fill his sails, bring the poet. Is an unfortunate person freezing in winter, let him draw near. Love has put water in his eyes, the wind in his mouth, fire in his heart. And the proof that he is all fire is just that he is all water. He is like green wood which gives out water when it burns." In this poetry at the same time the more ideal conception of love gave place to the classical and sensual.1 Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano endeavoured to give new life to the Italian lyric by refining and enriching the fresh and living songs of the people; but the inspirer of cinquecentist lyric poetry was Cardinal Bembo, who revived a purer but still quite artificial Petrarchian tradition which-except in the sonnets of Michael Angelo - was little more than an exercise in style.2 Marino's hyperboles and ingenuities are not more extravagant than those of many of his predecessors, and the prettiness which is their characteristic had appeared already, at any rate in Tasso's poetry. Nor, although he boasted that like his townsman 1 See Flamini, L'Italianismo a Tempo d'Enrico III. in Studi di Storia Letteraria, Livorno, 1895, and Joseph Vianey, L'Influence Italienne chez les Précurseurs de la Pléiade in Annales de la Faculté des Lettres de Bordeaux, Avril-Juin 1903. Vianey refers to Alessandro D'Ancona, Del secentismo nella poesia cortigiana del secolo XV. in Studj sulla letteratura italiana de primi secoli, Ancona, 1881. 2 See Mazzoni, La Lirica del Cinquecento in La Vita Italiana nel Cinquecento, Milano, 1901. |