IL PASTOR FIDO. With the of Tasso the (Pastor Fido) of Battista Guarini (1538-1612) is associated as closely in the mind of posterity as their authors were associated in friendship and in the service of the House of Este at Ferrara. The success of the was, in fact, Guarini's inspiration for writing his famous pastoral drama, which, if it never obscured the glory of its delicate predecessor, at least came to enjoy a fame just as wide and an authority even more unquestioned by the theorists of style and dramatic poetry in the following century. The success of the Fido' in this latter respect realized the author's predominant purpose in composing it. Guarini belongs to the age before him in his acceptance of the canons of Aristotelian poetics. He be longs to the age after him in the sense that he tried to criticize those canons, by demon strating that the "kinds" of poetry recognized by the earlier criticism were not the only ones, and that other new ones could be invented though the inventor still remained faithful to the fundamental and unalterable principles of poetic imitation laid down by Aristotle. In its conception, thus, the was a work of ingenuity, aimed at proving that the tragic and comic elements, separated by Aristotle, could be blended in a new "species" of art to which the name "tragi-comedy" came to be applied. There is nothing remarkable, historically, about such a literary ambition. Poets before Guarini's time wrote dramas and epics to prove that the rules illustrated in the great classical poems could be applied to works in the modern national languages. Those of his day and after him went farther, and after discovering the new in theory each tried also to compose the enduring masterpiece which would illustrate the new laws and be come the model for all successive imitations. The main obstacle to success in such attempts was the envy of competing poets. The (Pastor made its way to the longed-for goal only after polemics which lasted for several decades, though the author enjoyed the unusual lot of surviving them and in his own life time witness ing the canonization of his poem.
What makes these old literary quarrels un interesting now is that they view "plot" as the principal subject for discussion. They throw no light on what are now regarded as true literary values. Even Guarini's treatment of the
itself, called by him the
of Tragi-comedy,' has little value as an aesthetic interpretation. In the history of dramatic technique, considered from the mod ern point of view, the
would be classified as a play of the strict Italian Renais sance tradition; the action is of little import ance genetically. Faithful to the method of the Greeks, its dramatic method is to contemplate lyrically the psychological effects of the action, which is not produced by the psychological traits of the characters. As was true of the
A very just appreciation of the