and the lunes of Tamburlaine. Nowhere, either in
his voluptuousness or in its counterpart of disgust, is there
moderation. The Hellenic precept, 'Nothing overmuch,' the gracious Greek
virtue of temperate restraint, which is for art what training is for
athletes, discipline for soldiers, and pruning for orchard trees, has
been violated in every canto, each phrase, the slightest motive of this
poem. Sensuality can bear such violation better than sublimity;
therefore the perfume of voluptuousness in the _Adone_, though
excessive, is both penetrating and profound; while those passages which
aim at inspiring terror or dilating the imagination, fail totally of
their effect. The ghastly, grotesque, repulsive images are so
overcharged that they cease even to offend. We find ourselves in a
region where tact, sense of proportion, moral judgment, and right
adjustment of means to ends, have been wantonly abandoned. Marino avowed
that he only aimed at surprising his readers:

E del poeta il fin la meraviglia.

[Footnote 194: See the climax to the episode of Filauro and Filora.]

But 45,000 lines of sustained astonishment, of industrious and
indefatigable appeals to wonder by devices of language, devices of
incident, devices of rhodomontade, devices of innuendo, devices of
_capricci_ and _concetti_, induce the stolidity of callousness. We leave
off marveling, and yield what is left of our sensibility to the
fascination of inexhaustible picturesqueness. For, with all his faults,
Marino was a master of the picturesque, and did possess an art of
fascination. The picturesque, so difficult to define, so different from
the pictorial and the poetical, was a quality of the seventeenth century
corresponding to its defects of bad taste. And this gift no poet shared
in larger measure than Marino.

Granted his own conditions, granted the emptiness of moral and
intellectual substance in the man and in his age, we are compelled to
acknowledge that his literary powers were rich and various. Few
writers, at the same time, illustrate the vices of decadence more
luminously than this Protean poet of vacuity. Few display more clearly
the 'expense of spirit in a waste of shame.' None teach the dependence
of art upon moralized and humane motives more significantly than this
drunken Helot of genius. His indifference to truth, his defiance of
sobriety, his conviction that the sole end of art is astonishment, have
doomed him to oblivion not wholly me