that is excellent, I
say: It is Greek Poetry.' In this self-revealing sentence lies the
ruling instinct of the man as scholar. The highest praise he can confer
upon Italian matters, is to call them Greek Poetry. 'When I have to
express my aims in verse, I compare myself to Columbus, who said that he
would discover a new world or drown.' Again, in this self-revealing
sentence, Chiabrera betrays the instinct which in common with his period
he obeyed. He was bound to startle society by a discovery or to drown.
For this, be it remembered, was the time in which Pallavicino, like
Marino, declared that poetry must make men raise their eyebrows in
astonishment. For Chiabrera, educated as he had been, that new world
toward which he navigated was a new Hellenic style of Italian poetry;
and the Theban was to guide him toward its shores. But on the voyage
Chiabrera drowned: drowned for eternity in hyper-atlantic whirlpools of
oblivion. Some critics, pitying so lofty, so respectable an ambition,
have whispered that he found a little Island of the Blest and there
planted modest myrtles of mediocre immortality. Yet this is not the
truth. On such a quest there was only failure or success. He did not
succeed. His cold mincemeat from Diocean tables, tepid historic
parallels, artificially concocted legends, could not create Greek poetry
again beneath the ribs of death. The age was destined to be saved by
music. License was its only liberty, as the _Adone_ taught. Unmusical
Chiabrera, buckram'd up by old mythologies and sterling precepts, left
its life untouched. His antique virtues stood, like stucco gods and
goddesses, on pedestals in garden groves, and moldered. His Pindaric
flights were such as a sparrow, gazing upward at a hawk, might venture
on. Those abrupt transitions, whereby he sought to simulate the lordly
_sprezzatura_ of the Theban eagle, 'soaring with supreme dominion in the
azure depths of air,' remind us mainly of the hoppings of a frog.
Chiabrera failed: failed all the more lamentably because he was so
scholarly, so estimable. He is chiefly interesting now as the example of
a man devoted to the Church, a pupil of Jesuits, a moralist, and a
humanist, in some sense also a patriot, who felt the temper of his time,
and strove to innovate in literature. Devoid of sincere sympathy with
his academically chosen models, thinking he had discovered a safe path
for innovation, he fell flat in the slime and perished.

Marino had human