n ever-rippling tide of Lydian melody. The acme of pleasure, as
conceived by him, is kissing. Twenty-three of the most inspired stanzas
of the eighth canto are allotted to a panegyric of the kiss, in which
delight all other amorous delights are drowned.[193] Tasso's melancholy
yearning after forbidden fruit is now replaced by satiety contemplating
the image of past joys with purring satisfaction. This quality of
self-contented sentiment partly explains why the type of beauty adored
is neither womanly nor manly, but adolescent. It has to be tender,
fragile, solicitous, unripe; appealing to sensibility, not to passion,
by feminine charms in nerveless and soulless boyhood. The most
distinctive mark of Adonis is that he has no character, no will, no
intellect. He is all sentiment, sighs, tears, pliability, and sweetness.

[Footnote 192: The hypocrisy of the allegory is highly significant for
this phase of Italian culture. We have seen how even Tasso condescended
to apply it to his noble epic, which needed no such miserable pretense.
Exquisitely grotesque was the attempt made by Centorio degli Ortensi to
sanctify Bandello's _Novelle_ by supplying each one of them with a moral
interpretation (ed. Milano: Gio. Antonio degli Antoni, 1560, See
Passano's _Novellieri in Prosa_, p. 28).]

[Footnote 193: What I have elsewhere, called 'the tyranny of the kiss'
in Italian poetry, begins in Tasso's _Rinaldo_, acquires vast
proportions in Guarino's _Pastor Fido_, and becomes intolerable in
Marino's _Adone_.]

This emasculate nature displays itself with consummate effect in the
sobbing farewell, followed by the pretty pettishnesses, of the
seventeenth canto.

As a contrast to his over-sweet and cloying ideal of lascivious grace,
Marino counterposes extravagant forms of ugliness. He loves to describe
the loathsome incantations of witches. He shows Falserina prowling among
corpses on a battle-field, and injecting the congealed veins of her
resuscitated victim with abominable juices. He crowds the Cave of
Jealousy with monsters horrible to sight and sense; depicts the
brutality of brigands; paints hideous portraits of eunuchs, deformed
hags, unnameable abortions. He gloats over cruelty, and revels in
violence.[194] When Mars appears upon the scene, the orchestra of lutes
and cymbals with which we had been lulled to sleep, is exchanged for a
Corybantic din of dissonances. Orgonte, the emblem of pride, outdoes the
hyperboles of Rodomonte