iration. We
find his originality in a peculiar blending of serious and burlesque
styles, in abrupt but always well-contrived transitions from heroical
magniloquence to plebeian farce and from scurrility to poetic elevation,
finally in a frequent employment of the figure which the Greeks called
[Greek: para prosdokian]. His poem is a parody of the Aristophanic type.
'Like a fantastically ironical magic tree, the world-subversive idea
which lies at the root of it springs up with blooming ornament of
thoughts, with singing nightingales and climbing chattering apes.'[202]
To seek a central motive or a sober meaning in this caprice of the
satirical imagination would be idle. Tassoni had no intention, as some
critics have pretended, to exhibit the folly of those party wars which
tore the heart of Italy three centuries before his epoch, to teach the
people of his day the miseries of foreign interference, or to strike a
death-blow at classical mythology. The lesson which can be drawn from
his cantos, that man in warfare disquiets himself in vain for naught,
that a bucket is as good a _casus belli_ as Helen, the moral which
Southey pointed in his ballad of the Battle of Blenheim, emerges, not
from the poet's design, but from the inevitable logic of his humor.
Pique inspired the _Secchia Rapita_, and in the despicable character of
Count Culagna he fully revenged the slight which had been put upon him.
The revenge is savage, certainly; for the Count remains 'immortally
immerded' in the long-drawn episode which brought to view the shame of
his domestic life. Yet while Tassoni drew blood, he never ceased to
smile; and Count Culagna remains for us a personage of comedy rather
than of satire.

[Footnote 201: Canto xii. 77.]

[Footnote 202: So Heine wrote of Aristophanes. See my essay in _Studies
of the Greek Poets_.]

In the next place, Tassoni meant to ridicule the poets of his time. He
calls the _Secchia Rapita_ 'an absurd caprice, written to burlesque the
modern poets.' His genius was nothing if not critical, and literature
afforded him plenty of material for fun. Romance-writers with their
jousts and duels and armed heroines, would-be epic poets with their
extra-mundane machinery and pomp of phrase, Marino and his hyperbolical
conceits, Tuscan purists bent on using only words of the Tre Cento,
Petrarchisti spinning cobwebs of old metaphors and obsolete periphrases,
all felt in turn the touch of his light lash. The homage paid t