use an odalisque. 'The only rule worth thinking of,' he said,
'is to know how and when and where to break all rules, adapting
ourselves to current taste and the fashions of the age.' His epic
represents a successful, because a vivid, reaction against
conventionality. The life that throbs in it is incontestable, even
though that life may be nothing better than ephemeral. With like
brutality of instinct, healthy because natural, the barocco architects
embraced ugliness, discord, deformity, spasm, as an escape from harmony
and regularity with which the times were satiated. Prose-writers burst
the bonds of Bembo, trampled on Boccaccio, reveled in the stylistic
debaucheries of Bartolo. Painters, rendered academic in vain by those
Fabii of Bologna who had striven to restore the commonwealth of art by
temporizing, launched themselves upon a sea of massacre and murder,
blood and entrails, horrors of dark woods and Bacchanalia of chubby
Cupids. The popular Muse of Italy meanwhile emerged with furtive grace
and inexhaustible vivacity in dialectic poems, dances, Pulcinello,
Bergamasque Pantaloon, and what of parody and satire, Harlequinades, and
carnival diversions, any local soil might cherish.[198] All this revolt
against precedent, this resurrection of primeval instinct, crude and
grinning, took place, let us remember, under the eyes of the Jesuits,
within the shadow of the Inquisition, in an age reformed and ordered by
the Council of Trent. Art was following Aretino, the reprobate and
rebel. He first amid the languors of the golden age--and this is
Aretino's merit--discerned that the only escape from its inevitable
exhaustion was by passing over into crudest naturalism.

[Footnote 198: See Scherillo's two books on the _Commedia dell'Arte_ and
the _Opera Buffa_.]

But for Chiabrera, the excellent gentleman, the patronized of princes,
scrupulous upon the point of honor, pupil of Jesuits, pious, twisted
back on humanism by his Roman tutors, what escape was left for him? Obey
the genius of his times he must. Innovate he must. He chose the least
indecorous sphere at hand for innovation; and felt therewith most
innocently happy. Without being precisely conscious of it, he had
discovered a way of adhering to time-honored precedent while following
the general impulse to discard precedent. He threw Petrarch overboard,
but he took on Pindar for his pilot. 'When I see anything eminently
beautiful, or hear something, or taste something