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 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