III
We have now followed the dramatic pastoral from its obscure origin in the eclogue to the eve of its assuming a recognized and abiding position in the literature of Europe[167]. But if it is in a measure easy thus to trace back the Arcadian drama to its historical sources, and to show how the Aminta came to be possible, it is not so easy to show how it came to be actual. All creative work is the outcome of three fashioning forces, the historical position, the personal circumstances of the artist, and his individual genius. The pastoral drama had reached what I may perhaps be allowed to call the 'psychological point' in its development. At the same moment it happened that Tasso, having returned from a fruitless and uncongenial mission to the Valois court, enjoyed a brief period of calm and prosperity in the congenial society of Leonora d' Este, before the critical bickerings to which he exposed himself in connexion with the Gerusalemme wrought havoc with an already over-sensitive and overstrained temperament. Furthermore it happened that he brought to the spontaneous composition of his courtly toy just that touch of languorous beauty, that soft vein of sentiment, which formed perhaps his most characteristic contribution to the artistic tone of his age, veiling a novel mood in his favourite phrase, un non so che[168]. Had all this not been, had not the fortune of a suitable genius and the chance of personal surroundings jumped with the historical possibility, we might indeed have had any number of lifeless 'Sacrifices' and 'Unhappy Ones,' but Italy would have added no new kind to the forms of dramatic art. Had it not been for the Aminta, the pastoral drama must almost necessarily have been stillborn, for Guarini was too much of a pedant to do more than to imitate and enlarge, while other writers belong to the decline.
The Aminta, while possessing a delicate dramatic structure of its own, yet retains not a little of the simplicity of the ecloga rappresentativa. Indeed, it is worth noting, alike on account of this quality in the poem itself as also of its literary ancestry, that, in a letter written within a year of its original production, Tiburio Almerici speaks of it by the old name of eclogue[169]. Referring to its representation at Urbino, he writes: 'Il terzo spettacolo, che si è goduto questo carnovale, è stato un' egloga del Tasso, che fu recitata questo giovedì passato da alcuni gioveni d' Urbino nella sala, che fu fatta per la venuta delia Principessa.' The princess in question was none other than Lucrezia d' Este, who had lately become the wife of Tasso's former companion Francesco Maria della Rovere, now Duke of Urbino, and who with her sister Leonora, the heroine of the Tasso legend, had, it will be remembered, stood sponsor to Beccari's play nearly twenty years before. The representation at Urbino to which Almerici alludes was not of course the first. Written in the winter of 1572-3 during the absence of Duke Alfonso, the piece was acted after his return from Rome in the summer of the latter year. Ferrara, as we have seen, had become and was long destined to remain the special home of the pastoral drama in Italy. Here on July 31, in the palace of Belvedere, built on an island in the Po, the court of the Estensi assembled to witness the production of Tasso's play[170]. The staging, both on this and on subsequent occasions, was no doubt answerable to the nature of the piece, and added the splendour of the masque to the classic grace of the fable. Almerici remarks on the special attractions for spectators and auditors alike of what he calls 'la novità del coro fra ciascuno atto,' by which he clearly meant the spectacular interludes known as intermedî, the verses for which are commonly printed at the end of the play[171]. But the representation which struck the imagination of contemporaries was that before the Grand Duke Ferdinand at Florence. This took place in 1590[172]. Guarini's play had in its turn won renown far beyond the frontiers of Italy, while the author of the Aminta, a yet attractive but impossible madman, was destined for the few remaining years of his life to drag his tale of woes and but too often his rags from one Italian court to another, ere he sank at last exhausted where S. Onofrio overlooks St. Peter's dome.
The structure of the play is not free from a good deal of stiffness and artificiality, which it bequeathed to its successors. It borrowed from the classical drama a chorus, on the whole less Greek than Latin, the use of confidants, and the introduction of messengers and descriptive passages. These last, it may be noted, are deliberately and wantonly classical, not merely necessitated by the exigencies of the action, difficult of representation as in the attempted suicide of Aminta, impossible as in the rescue of Silvia from the satyr, but resorted to in order to veil the dramatic weakness of the author's imagination, as is plain from the description of the final meeting of the lovers. Yet it may be freely admitted that to this device, the substitution namely of narrative for action, we owe most of the finest poetic passages of the play: the description of the youthful loves of Aminta and Silvia and the former's ruse to win a kiss, the picture of Silvia bound to the tree by the pool, Tirsi's account of the court, the description of Silvia at the spring--one of the most elaborate in the piece--the account of her escape from the wolves, last but not least that description of Silvia finding the unconscious Aminta, so full of subtle and effeminate seduction, prophetic of a later age of morals and of taste:
Ma come Silvia il riconobbe, e vide
Le belle guance tenere d' Aminta
Iscolorite in sì leggiadri modi,
Che viola non è che impallidisca
Si dolcemente, e lui languir sì fatto,
Che parea già negli ultimi sospiri
Esalar l'alma; in guisa di Baccante
Gridando, e percotendosi il bel petto,
Lasciò cadersi in sul giacente corpo,
E giunse viso a viso, e bocca a bocca. (V. i.)
So too the chorus, though awkward enough from a dramatic point of view and in so far as it fulfils any dramatic purpose, offers a sufficient justification for its existence in the magnificent ode on 'honour,' that rapturous song of the golden age of love, the poetic supremacy of which has never been questioned, whatever may have been thought of its ethical significance. To that aspect we shall return later. At present it will be well to give some more or less detailed account of the action of the piece itself.
The shepherd Aminta loves Silvia, formerly as a child his playmate and companion, now a huntress devoted to the service of Diana, proud in her virginity and unfettered state. The play opens in a sufficiently conventional manner, but wrought with sparkling verse, with two companion scenes. In the first of these Silvia brushes aside the importunities of her confidant Dafne who seeks to allure her to the blandishments of love with sententious natural examples and modern instances.
Cangia, cangia consiglio,
Pazzerella che sei,
Che il pentirsi dassezzo nulla giova;
such is the burden of her song, or yet again, recalling the golden days of love she too of yore had wasted:
Il mondo invecchia
E invecchiando intristisce.
Words of profound melancholy these, uttered in the days of the burnt-out fires of the renaissance. But all this moves not Silvia, nymph of the woods and of the chase, and, if she is indeed as fancy-free as she would have us believe, her lover may even console himself with the reflection that
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing will make her--
The devil take her!
She has, after all, every right to the position. The next scene introduces Aminta and his friend Tirsi, to whom he reveals the object and the history of his love. Translated into bald prose, his confession has no very great interest, but it opens with one of those exquisitely pencilled sketches that lie scattered throughout the play.
All' ombra d' un bel faggio Silvia e Filli
Sedean un giorno, ed io con loro insieme;
Quando un' ape ingegnosa, che cogliendo
Sen giva il mel per que' prati fioriti,
Alle guance di Fillide volando,
Alle guance vermiglie come rosa,
Le morse e le rimorse avidamente;
Ch' alla similitudine ingannata
Forse un fior le credette.
Silvia heals the hurt by whispering over it a charm; and the whole description is instinct with that delicate, soft sentiment of Tasso's which almost, though never quite, sinks into sentimentality. Aminta feigns to have been stung on the lip, and begs Silvia to heal the hurt.
La semplicetta Silvia,
Pietosa del mio male,
S' offrì di dar aita
Alla finta ferita, ahi lasso! e fece
Più cupa e più mortale
La mia piaga verace,
Quando le labbra sue
Giunse alle labbra mie.
It is easy to argue that this is childish, that it mattered no whit though they kissed from now to doomsday. But only the reader who cannot feel its beauty is safe from the enervating narcotic of Tasso's style.
The first scene of the second act introduces a new character, the satyr, type of brute nature in the artificially polished Arcadia of courtly shepherds. He inherits no savoury character from his literary predecessors, and he is content to play to the rôle. His monologue may be passed over; it and still more the next scene serve to measure the cynical indelicacy of feeling which was tolerated in the Italian courts. It is a quality wholly different from the mere coarseness exhibited in the English drama under Elizabeth and James, but it is one which will astonish no one who has looked on the dramatic reflection of Italian society in the scenes of the Mandragola. The satyr is succeeded on the stage by the confidants Dafne and Tirsi in consultation as to the means of bringing about an understanding between Aminta and Silvia. The scene is characterized by those caustic reflections on women which serve to balance the extravagant iciness of the 'careless' nymphs and became a commonplace of the pastoral drama.
Or, non sai tu com' è fatta la donna?
Fugge, e fuggendo vuol ch' altri la giunga;
Niega, e negando vuol ch' altri si toglia;
Pugna, e pugnando vuol ch' altri la vinca.
Listening to the deliberations of these two, it cannot but strike us that in spite of their polished speech the straightforward London stage would have hesitated but little to bestow on them the names they deserve, and which it were yet scarce honest to have here set down. We pass on, and, whatever may be said regarding the moral atmosphere of the rest of the play, we shall not again have to make complaint of the corruption of manners assumed in the situation. In the following scene Tirsi undertakes the difficult task of inducing Aminta to intrude upon Silvia, where she is said to be alone at the spring preparing for the chase. It is only by hinting that Silvia has secretly instructed Dafne to arrange the tryst that he in the end succeeds in persuading the bashful lover to risk the displeasure of his mistress.
At the opening of Act III Tirsi enters lamenting in bitter terms the cruelty of Silvia. Interrogated by the chorus, he relates how, as he and Aminta approached the spring where Silvia was bathing, they heard a cry and, hastening to the spot, found the nymph bound hand and foot to a tree, and confronting her the satyr. At their approach the monster fled, and Aminta released the nymph, who ignuda come nacque at once took flight, leaving her lover in despair. In the meanwhile Aminta has sought to kill himself with his own spear, but has been prevented by Dafne, and the two now enter. At this moment too comes Nerina, one of the 'messengers' of the piece, with the news that Silvia has been slain while pursuing a wolf in the forest. Thereupon Aminta, with a last reproach to Dafne for having prevented him from putting an end to his miserable life before being the recipient of such direful news, rushes off the scene at a pace to mock pursuit. In the next act, however, Silvia reappears and narrates her escape. Here we arrive at the dramatic climax of the play. Dafne expresses her fear that the false report of Silvia's death may indeed prove the death of Aminta. The nymph at first shows herself incredulous, but on learning that he had already once sought death on her account she wavers and owns to pity if not to love--
Oh potess' io
Con l' amor mio comprar la vita sua,
Anzi pur con la mia la vita sua,
S' egli è pur morto!
Hereupon Ergasto enters with the news that Aminta has thrown himself from a cliff, and Silvia, now completely overcome, goes off with the intention of dying on the body of her dead lover.
The shortness, as well as the dramatic weakness, of the fifth act is conspicuous even in proportion to the modest limits of the whole. It runs to less than one hundred and fifty lines, and merely relates how Aminta's fall was broken, how Silvia's love awoke, and all ended happily. The most significant passage, that namely which describes Aminta being called back to life in Silvia's arms, has been already quoted. He revives unharmed, and the lovers,
Alike in age, in generous birth alike
And mutual desires,
gather in love the fruits which they have sown in weeping.
It is worth while quoting the final chorus in witness of the spirit of half bantering humour in which the whole was conceived even by the serious Tasso, a spirit we unfortunately too often seek in vain among his followers.
Non so se il molto amaro
Che provato ha costui servendo, amando,
Piangendo e disperando,
Raddolcito esser puote pienamente
D' alcun dolce presente:
Ma, se più caro viene
E più si gusta dopo 'l male il bene,
Io non ti chieggio, Amore,
Questa beatitudine maggiore:
Bea pur gli altri in tal guisa;
Me la mia ninfa accoglia
Dopo brevi preghiere e servir breve:
E siano i condimenti
Delle nostre dolcezze
Non sì gravi tormenti,
Ma soavi disdegni,
E soavi ripulse,
Risse e guerre a cui segua,
Reintegrando i cori, o pace o tregua.
It is with these words that the author leaves his graceful fantasy; and such, we have perhaps the right to assume, was the spirit in which the whole was composed. Were any one to object to our seeking to analyse the quality of the piece, arguing that to do so were to break a butterfly upon the wheel, much might reasonably be said in support of his view. Nevertheless, when a work of art, however delicate and slender, has received the homage of generations, and influenced cultivated taste for centuries, and in widely different countries, we have a right to inquire whereon its supremacy is based, and what the nature of its influence has been.
With the sources from which Tasso drew the various elements of his plot we need have little to do. The child-love of Silvia and Aminta is of the stuff of Daphnis and Chloe; the ruse by which the kiss is obtained is borrowed from Achilles Tatius; the compliment to the court of the Estensi is after the manner of Vergil, or of Castiglione, or of Ariosto, or of any other of the allegorical eclogists of whom Vergil was the first; the germ of the golden-age chorus is to be found in the elegies of Tibullus (II. iii); the character of the satyr belongs to tradition; the rent veil of Silvia reminds us of that of Ovid's Thisbe (Met. IV. 55). The language too is reminiscent. The finest lines in the play--
Amiam: che 'l sol si muore, e poi rinasce;
A noi sua breve luce
S' asconde, e 'l sonno eterna notte adduce--(Coro I.)
belong to Catullus:
Viuamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus;...
soles occidere et redire possunt;
nobis cum semel occidit breuis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda. (Carm. V.)
The words in which Amore describes himself in the prologue--
non mica un dio
Selvaggio, o della plebe degli dei,
Ma tra' grandi celesti il più possente--
recall Ovid's lines:
nec de plebe deo, sed qui caelestia magna
sceptra manu teneo. (Met. I. 595.)
Again, the line:
Dove la costa face di sè grembo;
which occurs alike in the play (V. i.) and in the Purgatorio (VII. 68), supplies evidence, as do similar borrowings in the Gerusalemme, of Tasso's study of Dante.
The prologue introduces Amore in pastoral disguise, escaped from the care of his mother, who would confine his activity to the Courts, and intent on loosing his shafts among the nymphs and shepherds of Arcadia. In the form of this prologue, which became the model for subsequent pastoral writers in Italy[173], and in the heavenly descent of the principal characters, we may see the influence of the mythological play; while the substance both of the prologue and of the epilogue, or Amore fuggitivo, in which Venus comes to seek her runaway among the ladies and gallants of the court, is of course borrowed from the famous first idyl of Moschus. Again the topical element is not absent, though it is less prominent than some of the earlier work might lead us to expect. In the poet Tirsi--
allor ch' ardendo
Forsennato egli errò per le foreste
Sì, ch' insieme movea pietate e riso
Nelle vezzose ninfe e ne' pastori;
Nè già cose scrivea digne di riso,
Sebben cose facea digne di riso--(I. i.)
we may, of course, see the poet himself. In Batto too, mentioned together with Tirsi, it is not unreasonable to recognize Battisto Guarini, whom at that time Tasso might still regard as his friend. Again, it is usual to identify Elpino with Giovanbattista Pigna, secretary of state at the Estense court, and one with whom, though no friend of the poet's, it was yet to his advantage to stand well. The flattery bestowed is not a little fulsome:
Or non rammenti
Ciò che l' altrieri Elpino raccontava,
Il saggio Elpino a la bella Licori,
Licori che in Elpin puote cogli occhi
Quel ch' ei potere in lei dovria col canto,
Se 'l dovere in amor si ritrovasse;
E 'l raccontava udendo Batto e Tirsi,
Gran maestri d' amore; e 'l raccontava
Nell' antro dell' Aurora, ove sull' uscio
È scritto: Lungi, ah lungi ite, profani?
Diceva egli, e diceva che gliel disse
Quel grande che cantò l' armi e gli amori,
Ch' a lui lasciò la fistola morendo;
Che laggiù nello 'nferno è un nero speco,
Là dove esala un fumo pien di puzza
Dalle tristi fornaci d' Acheronte;
E che quivi punite eternamente
In tormenti di tenebre e di pianto
Son le femmine ingrate e sconoscenti. (I. i.)
He who sang of arms and love is of course Ariosto--
Le donne, i cavalier, l' arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l' audaci imprese io canto--
from whom Tasso borrows the above description of the reward awaiting ungrateful women, as also the fiction of the tell-tale walls and chairs in Mopso's account of the court (I. ii). And this Elpino, whose pipe elsewhere
correr fa di puro latte i fiumi
E stillar melle dalle dure scorze, (III. i.)
later becomes the Alete of the Gerusalemme,
Gran fabbro di calunnie adorne in modi
Novi che sono accuse e paion lodi. (II. 58.)
His flattery had not shielded the unhappy poet against the ill-will of the minister[174].
Again, the picture drawn by Tirsi of the ideal court (I. ii.) is a glowing compliment to that of the Estensi and to Duke Alfonso himself. It is contrasted with the usual pastoral denunciation of court and city put into the mouth of the pretended augur Mopso. In this character it has been customary to see Sperone Speroni, who later accused Tasso of plagiarizing him in the Gerusalemme, and was the first to apply the ominous word 'madman' to the unfortunate poet. To Speroni's play Canace Tasso may have been indebted for the free measures with which he diversified his blank verse, as likewise for the line:
Pianti, sospiri e dimandar mercede;[175]
though it must not be supposed that there is any resemblance in style between the Aminta and Speroni's revolting and frigid declamation of butchery and lust. Nor did the debt pass unnoticed. In 1585 Guarini, who had long since parted with the sinking ship of the younger poet's friendship, was ready to flatter Speroni with the declaration 'che tanto di leggiadria è sempre paruto a me, che abbia nell' Aminta suo conseguito Torquato Tasso, quant' egli fù imitatore della Canace[176].'
Lastly, in the hopeless suit of Aminta to Silvia, criticism has not failed to see a reference to the supposed relation between Tasso and Leonora d' Este. That Tasso, who in his overwrought imagination no doubt harboured a sentimental regard for the princess, was conscious of the parallel is in some degree probable; that he should have identified his creation with himself is, in view of the solution of the dramatic situation, utterly impossible. Indeed, it would perhaps not be extravagant to suppose that his care to identify himself with Aminta's confidant may have been an unusual but not untimely piece of caution on his part, to prevent poisoned gossip connecting him too closely with his hero.
The question of the influence of the Aminta on later works and on European thought generally opens up large and difficult issues. It is one of those works which we are not justified in treating from the purely literary point of view. If we wish to see it in its relation to contemporary society, and to estimate its influence upon subsequent literature, we cannot afford to neglect its ethical bearings. This inquiry must necessarily lead us beyond the sphere of literary criticism proper, but it is a task which one who has undertaken to give an account of pastoral literature has no right to shirk.
The central motive of the piece is the struggle between the feverish passion of Aminta and the virginal coldness of Silvia. Of this motive and of the manner in which it is treated it is not altogether easy to speak, and this less from any inherent element in the subject or from the difficulty of accurately apprehending the peculiarities of sentiment proper to former ages, than from the readiness of all ages alike to accept in such matters the counterfeit coin of conventional protestation for the sterling reticence of natural delicacy. No doubt this tendency has been aided by the fact that the secrets of a girl's heart, whatever may be their true dramatic value, form an unsuitable and ineffective subject for declamation. The difficulties must not, however, be allowed to weigh against the importance of coming to a clear understanding as to the true nature of this non so che of false sentiment, of which it would hardly be too much to affirm that it made the fortune of the pastoral in aristocratic Italy on the one hand, and proved its ruin in middle-class London on the other.
To Tasso is due that assumption of extravagant and conventional pudor which forms one of the most abiding features of the pastoral drama. To censure an exaggeration of the charm of modesty on the threshold of the seicento, or to object a strained sense of chastity against the author of the golden-age chorus, may indeed seem strange; but, as with Fletcher at a later date, the very extravagance of the paradox may supply us with the key to its solution.
The falsity of Tasso's position is evinced partly in the main action of the drama, partly in the commentary supplied by the minor personages. The character of Aminta himself is unimportant in this respect; when we have described him as effeminate, sickly, and over-refined, we have said all that is necessary in view of the position he occupies with regard to Silvia. She, we are given to understand, is the type of the 'careless' shepherdess, the unspotted nymph of Diana[177], rejoicing in the chase alone, and importuned by the love of Aminta, which she neither reciprocates nor understands, and of the genuineness of which she shows herself, indeed, not a little sceptical. If, however, she is as careless as she appears, her conversion is certainly most sudden. The picture, moreover, drawn by Dafne of Silvia coquetting with her shadow in the pool, though possibly coloured by malice, supplies a sufficient hint of the true state of the girl's fancy. She is in truth such a Chloe of innocence as might spring up in the rank soil of a petty Italian court infected with post-Tridentine morality. Were she indeed careless of Aminta's devotion we could easily sympathize with her when she brushes aside Dafne's importunity with the words:
Faccia Aminta di sè e de' suoi amori
Quel ch' a lui piace; a me nulla ne cale. (I. i.)
It is altogether different with her attitude of arrogant pudicity when she announces:
Odio il suo amore
Ch' odia la mia onestate; (Ib.)
and again:
In questa guisa gradirei ciascuno
Insidiator di mia virginitate,
Che tu dimandi amante, ed io nemico. (Ib.)
Silvia here conjoins the unwholesome medieval ideal of virginity with the corrupt spectre of renaissance 'honour'--
quel vano
Nome senza soggetto,
Quell' idolo d' errori, idol d' inganno[178], (Coro I.)
as Tasso himself styled it--that conventional mask so bitterly contrasted with the natural goodness of the age of gold[179].
The general conception of love and its attendant emotions that permeates the work and vitiates so many of its descendants appears yet more glaringly characterized in some of the minor personages. On these it is not my intention to dwell. Of Dafne and Tirsi, that is, be it remembered, Tasso's self, I have spoken, however briefly, yet at sufficient length already. Suffice it to add here that Dafne's suggestion, that modesty is commonly but a veil for lust, is nothing more than the cynical expression of the attitude adopted throughout the play. Love is no ideal and idealizing emotion, but a mere gratification of the senses--a luxuria scarcely distinguishable from gula. Ignorance can alone explain an attitude of indifference towards its pleasures. The girl who does not care to embrace opportunity is no better than a child--'Fanciulla tanto sciocca, quanto bella,' as Dafne says. So, again, there is nothing ennobling in the devotion of the hero, nothing elevating in his fidelity. All the mysticism, all the ideality, of the early days of the renaissance have long since disappeared, and chivalrous feeling, that last lingering glory of the middle age, is dead.
We are, indeed, justified in regarding what I may term the degeneration of sexual feeling in the Aminta as to a great extent the negation of chivalrous love, for, even apart from the allegorizing mysticism of Dante, that love contained its ennobling elements. And yet, strangely enough, not a little of the convention at least of chivalrous love survives in the debased Arcadian love of the sentimental pastoral. Both alike are primarily of an animal nature, and this in a sense other than that in which physical love may be said to form an element in all natural relation between man and woman. Again, in both we find the rational machinery by which love shall be rewarded. The lover serves his apprenticeship, either with deeds of arms or with sighs and sonnets, and the credit of the mistress is light who refuses to reward him for his service. The System assumes neither choice, nor passion, nor pleasure on her part. Her act is regarded in the cold light of a calculated payment, undisguised by any joy of passionate surrender. But whereas in the outgrowth of feudalism, in the chivalry of the middle ages, this system formed the great incentive to martial daring, whereas when idealized in Beatrice it became almost undistinguishable from the ferveurs of religion, we find it with Tasso sinking into a weak and mawkish sensuality. More than any other sentimentalist Tasso justified his title by 'fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism,' and it may be added that the ear is constantly catching the fundamental note.
The foregoing remarks appeared necessary in order to understand the subsequent history of the dramatic pastoral as well as the conditions under which it took form and being, but they have led us far beyond the limits of literary criticism proper. The next characteristic of the play to be considered is one which, while possessing an important ethical bearing, is also closely connected with the aesthetic composition. I refer to the peculiar, not sensual but sensuous, nature of the beauty. The effect produced by the descriptions, by the suggestions, by the general tone, by the subtle modulations of the verse in adaptation to its theme, is less one of literary and intellectual than of direct emotional perception, producing the immediate physical impression of an actual presence. The beauty has a subtle enervating charm, languid and voluptuous, at the same time as clear and limpid in tone. The effect produced is one and whole, that of a perfect work of art, and the same impression remains with us afterwards. Smooth limbs, soft and white, that shine through the waters of the spring and amid the jewelled spray, or half revealed among the thickets of lustrous green, a slant ray of sunlight athwart the loosened gold of the hair--the vision floats before us as if conjured up by the strains of music rather than by actual words. This kinship with another art did not escape so acute a critic as Symonds as a characteristic of Tasso's style. But the kinship on another side with the art of painting is equally close; a thousand pictures rise before us as we follow the perfect melody of the irregular lyric measures. The white veil fluttering and the swift feet flashing amid the brambles and the trailing creepers of the wood, bright crimson staining the spotless purity of the flying skirts as the huntress bursts through the clinging tangles that seek to hold her as if jealous of a human love, the lusty strength of the bronzed and hairy satyr in contrast with the tender limbs of the captive nymph, the dark cliff, and the still mirror of the lake reflecting the rosebuds pressed artfully against the girl's soft neck as she crouches by its brink,
Backed by the forest, circled by the flowers,
Bathed in the sunshine of the golden hours,
the armed huntress, the grey-coated wolves, and the white-robed chorus--here are a series of pictures of seductive beauty for the brush of a painter to realize upon the walls of some palace of pleasure.
The Aminta attained a wide popularity even before the appearance of the first edition from the Aldine house at Venice early in 1581--the epistle is dated 1580. The printer of the Ferrarese edition of the same year remarks: 'Tosto che la Fama ... mi rapportò, che in Venetia si stampava l' Aminta, ... così subito pensai, che quella sola Impressione dovesse essere ben poca per sodisfattione di tanti virtuosi, che sono desiderosi di vederla alla luce.' A critical edition was prepared at Paris in the middle of the following century by Egidio Menagio of the Accademia della Crusca, and dedicated to Maria della Vergna, better known, under her married name of Madame de la Fayette, as the author of the Princesse de Clèves[180]. In 1693 the play was attacked by Bartolomeo Ceva Grimaldi, Duke of Telese, in an address read before the Accademia degli Uniti at Naples[181]. He was answered before the same society by Francesco Baldassare Paglia, and in 1700 appeared Giusto Fontanini's elaborate defence[182]. To each chapter of this work is prefixed a passage from Grimaldi's address, which is then laboriously refuted. The Duke's attack is puerile cavil, and in spite of the reputed ability of its author the defence must be admitted to be much on the same level.