Vedrai s’al cantar mio porgi l’orecchia,
    Elena trasformarsi in una secchia.

[Footnote 200:  Canto i. 2.]

A mere trifle thus becomes a point of dispute capable of bringing gods, popes, emperors, kings, princes, cities, and whole nations into conflict.  At the same time the satirist betrays his malice by departing as little as possible from the main current of actual events.  History lends verisimilitude to the preposterous assumption that heaven and earth were drawn into a squabble about a bucket:  and if there is any moral to be derived from the Secchia Rapita we have it here.  At the end of the contention, when both parties are exhausted, it is found that the person of a king weighs in the scale of nations no more than an empty bucket:[201]

    Riserbando ne’ patti a i Modanesi
    La secchia, e ’l re de’Sardi ai Bolognesi.

Such is the main subject of the Secchia Rapita; and such is Tassoni’s irony, an irony worthy of Aristophanes in its far-reaching indulgent contempt for human circumstance.  But the poem has another object.  It was written to punish Count Alessandro Brusantini.  The leading episode, which occupies about three cantos of the twelve, is an elaborate vilification of this personal enemy travestied as the contemptible Conte di Culagna.

Tassoni’s method of art corresponds to the irony of his inspiration.  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.