melodrama.  Orpheus himself is a purely lyrical personage.  Of character, he can scarcely be said to have anything marked; and his part rises to its height precisely in that passage where the lyrist has to be displayed.  Before the gates of Hades and the throne of Proserpine he sings, and his singing is the right outpouring of a poet’s soul; each octave resumes the theme of the last stanza with a swell of utterance, a crescendo of intonation that recalls the passionate and unpremeditated descant of a bird upon the boughs alone.  To this true quality of music is added the persuasiveness of pleading.  That the violin melody of his incomparable song is lost, must be reckoned a great misfortune.  We have good reason to believe that the part of Orpheus was taken by Messer Baccio Ugolini, singing to the viol.  Here too it may be mentioned that a tondo in monochrome, painted by Signorelli among the arabesques at Orvieto, shows Orpheus at the throne of Plato, habited as a poet with the laurel crown and playing on a violin of antique form.  It would be interesting to know whether a rumour of the Mantuan pageant had reached the ears of the Cortonese painter.

If the whole of the ‘Orfeo’ had been conceived and executed with the same artistic feeling as the chief act, it would have been a really fine poem independently of its historical interest.  But we have only to turn the page and read the lament uttered for the loss of Eurydice, in order to perceive Poliziano’s incapacity for dealing with his hero in a situation of greater difficulty.  The pathos which might have made us sympathise with Orpheus in his misery, the passion, approaching to madness, which might have justified his misogyny, are absent.  It is difficult not to feel that in this climax of his anguish he was a poor creature, and that the Maenads served him right.  Nothing illustrates the defect of real dramatic imagination better than this failure to dignify the catastrophe.  Gifted with a fine lyrical inspiration, Poliziano seems to have already felt the Bacchic chorus which forms so brilliant a termination to his play, and to have forgotten his duty to the unfortunate Orpheus, whose sorrow for Eurydice is stultified and made unmeaning by the prosaic expression of a base resolve.  It may indeed be said in general that the ‘Orfeo’ is a good poem only where the situation is not so much dramatic as lyrical, and that its finest passage—­the scene in Hades—­was fortunately for its author one in which the dramatic motive had to be lyrically expressed.  In this respect, as in many others, the ‘Orfeo’ combines the faults and merits of the Italian attempts at melo-tragedy.  To break a butterfly upon the wheel is, however, no fit function of criticism:  and probably no one would have smiled more than the author of this improvisation, at the thought of its being gravely dissected just four hundred years after the occasion it was meant to serve had long been given over to oblivion.