It is characteristic of the mood expressed in the Adone that voluptuousness should not be passionate, but sentimental.  Instead of fire, the poet gives us honeyed tears to drink, and rocks the soul upon an ever-rippling tide of Lydian melody.  The acme of pleasure, as conceived by him, is kissing.  Twenty-three of the most inspired stanzas of the eighth canto are allotted to a panegyric of the kiss, in which delight all other amorous delights are drowned.[193] Tasso’s melancholy yearning after forbidden fruit is now replaced by satiety contemplating the image of past joys with purring satisfaction.  This quality of self-contented sentiment partly explains why the type of beauty adored is neither womanly nor manly, but adolescent.  It has to be tender, fragile, solicitous, unripe; appealing to sensibility, not to passion, by feminine charms in nerveless and soulless boyhood.  The most distinctive mark of Adonis is that he has no character, no will, no intellect.  He is all sentiment, sighs, tears, pliability, and sweetness.

[Footnote 192:  The hypocrisy of the allegory is highly significant for this phase of Italian culture.  We have seen how even Tasso condescended to apply it to his noble epic, which needed no such miserable pretense.  Exquisitely grotesque was the attempt made by Centorio degli Ortensi to sanctify Bandello’s Novelle by supplying each one of them with a moral interpretation (ed.  Milano:  Gio.  Antonio degli Antoni, 1560, See Passano’s Novellieri in Prosa, p. 28).]

[Footnote 193:  What I have elsewhere, called ‘the tyranny of the kiss’ in Italian poetry, begins in Tasso’s Rinaldo, acquires vast proportions in Guarino’s Pastor Fido, and becomes intolerable in Marino’s Adone.]

This emasculate nature displays itself with consummate effect in the sobbing farewell, followed by the pretty pettishnesses, of the seventeenth canto.

As a contrast to his over-sweet and cloying ideal of lascivious grace, Marino counterposes extravagant forms of ugliness.  He loves to describe the loathsome incantations of witches.  He shows Falserina prowling among corpses on a battle-field, and injecting the congealed veins of her resuscitated victim with abominable juices.  He crowds the Cave of Jealousy with monsters horrible to sight and sense; depicts the brutality of brigands; paints hideous portraits of eunuchs, deformed hags, unnameable abortions.  He gloats over cruelty, and revels in violence.[194] When Mars appears upon the scene, the orchestra of lutes and cymbals with which we had been lulled to sleep, is exchanged for a Corybantic din of dissonances.  Orgonte, the emblem of pride, outdoes the hyperboles of Rodomonte 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,