Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature.
by John Addington Symonds.
PART II
CHAPTER IX.
THE ORLANDO FURIOSO.
_Orlando Furioso_ and _Divina Commedia_--Ariosto expresses the Renaissance as Dante the Middle Ages--Definition of Romantic, Heroic, Burlesque, Heroic-comic, and Satiric Poems--Ariosto"s Bias toward Romance--Sense of Beauty in the _Cinque Cento_--Choice of Boiardo"s unfinished Theme--The Propriety of this Choice--Ariosto"s Irony and Humor--The Subject of the _Furioso_--Siege of Paris--Orlando"s Madness--Loves of Ruggiero and Bradamante--Flattery of the House of Este--The World of Chivalry--Ariosto"s Delight in the Creatures of his Fancy--Close Structure of the Poem--Exaggeration of Motives--Power of Picture-painting--Faculty of Vision--Minute Description--Rhetorical Amplification--Rapidity of Movement--Solidity--Nicety of Ethical a.n.a.lysis--The Introductions to the Cantos--Episodes and _Novelle_--Imitations of the Cla.s.sics--Power of Appropriation and Trans.m.u.tation--Irony--Astolfo"s Journey to the Moon--Ariosto"s Portrait--S. Michael in the Monastery--The Cave of Sleep--Humor--Pathos and Sublimity--Olimpia and Bireno--Conception of Female Character--The Heroines--Pa.s.sion and Love--Ariosto"s Morality--His Style--The Epithet of Divine--Exquisite Finish--Ariosto and Ta.s.so--Little Landscape-Painting--Similes--Realism--Adaptation of Homeric Images--Ariosto"s Relation to his Age.
Ariosto"s Satires make us know the man _intus et in cute_--to the very core. The lyrics have a breadth and amplitude of style that mark no common master of the poet"s craft. Yet neither the Satires nor the Lyrics reveal the author of the _Furioso_. The artist in Ariosto was greater than the man; and the _Furioso_, conceived and executed with no reference to the poet"s personal experience, enthroned him as the Orpheus of his age. The _Orlando Furioso_ gave full and final expression to the _cinque cento_, just as the _Divina Commedia_ uttered the last word of the middle ages. The two supreme Italian singers stood in the same relation to their several epochs. Dante immortalized medieval thoughts and aspirations at the moment when they were already losing their reality for the Italian people. Separated from him by a short interval of time, came Petrarch, who subst.i.tuted the art of poetry for the prophetic inspiration; and while Petrarch was yet singing, Boccaccio antic.i.p.ated in his multifarious literature the age of the Renaissance. Then the evolution of Italian literature was interrupted by the cla.s.sical revival; and when Ariosto appeared, it was his duty to close the epoch which Petrarch had inaugurated and Boccaccio had determined, by a poem investing Boccaccio"s world, the sensuous world of the Renaissance, with the refined artistic form of Petrarch. This he accomplished. But even while he was at work, Italy underwent those political and mental changes, in the wars of invasion, in the sack of Rome, in the siege of Florence, in the Spanish occupation, in the reconstruction of the Papacy beneath the pressure of Luther"s schism, which ended the Renaissance and opened a new age with Ta.s.so for its poet. Those, therefore, who would comprehend the spirit of Italy upon the point of transition from the middle ages, must study the Divine Comedy. Those who would contemplate the genius of the Renaissance, consummated and conscious of its aim, upon the very verge of trans.m.u.tation and eventual ruin, must turn to the _Orlando Furioso_. It seems to be a law of intellectual development that the highest works of art can only be achieved when the forces which produced them are already doomed and in the act of disappearance.[1]
[Footnote 1: Students who care to trace the thoughts and characters of this great poem to their sources, should read Pio Rajna"s exhaustive essay, _Le Fonti dell"Orlando Furioso_, Firenze, Sansoni, 1876. The details of the Orlando are here investigated and referred with scientific patience to Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and other originals. If anything, Signor Rajna may seem to have overstrained the point of critical sagacity. It is hardly probable that Ariosto, reader of few books as Virginio says he was, should have drawn on stores so multifarious of erudition.]
Italian critics have cla.s.sified their narrative poems, of which the name is legion, into Romantic, Heroic, Burlesque, Heroic-comic, and Satiric.[2] The romantic poet is one who having formed a purely imaginary world, deals with the figments of his fancy as though they were realities. His object is to astonish, fascinate, amuse and interest his readers. Nothing comes amiss to him, whether the nature of the material be comic or tragic, pathetic or satiric, miraculous or commonplace, impossible or natural, so long as it contributes grace and charm to the picture of adventurous existence he desires to paint.
His aim is not instruction; nor does he seek to promote laughter.
Putting all serious purposes aside, he creates a wonderland wherein the actions and pa.s.sions of mankind shall be displayed, with truth to nature, under the strongly colored light of the artistic fantasy. The burlesque poet enters the same enchanted region; but he deliberately degrades it below the level of common life, parodies the fanciful extravagances of romance, and seeks to raise a laugh at the expense of its most delicate illusions. The heroic poet has nothing to do with pure romance and pleasurable fiction. He deals with the truths of history, resolving to embellish them by art, to extract lessons of utility, to magnify the virtues and the valor of the n.o.blest men, and to inflame his audience with the fire of lofty aspiration. His object, unlike that of the romancer, is essentially serious. He is less anxious to produce a work of pure beauty than to raise a monument of ideal and moralized sublimity. The heroic-comic poet adopts the tone, style, conduct and machinery of the heroic manner; but he employs his art on some trivial or absurd subject, making his ridicule of baseness and pettiness the more pungent by the mock-gravity of his treatment.
Unlike the burlesque writer, he does not aim at mere scurrility. There is always method in his buffoonery, and a satiric purpose in his parody. The satirist strikes more directly; he either attacks manners, customs, inst.i.tutions, and persons without disguise, or he does so under a thin veil of parable. He differs from the heroic-comic poet chiefly in this, that he does not array himself in the epical panoply.
Within the range of Italian literature we find ready examples of these several styles. Boiardo and Ariosto are romantic poets. The _Morgante Maggiore_ is a romance with considerable elements of burlesque and satire mingled.[3] Ta.s.so"s _Gerusalemme Liberata_ is a fair specimen of the heroic, and Ta.s.soni"s _Secchia Rapita_ of the heroic-comic species. The _Ricciardetto_ of Fortiguerri and Folengo"s _Orlandino_ represent burlesque, while Casti"s _Animali Parlanti_ is a narrative satire.
[Footnote 2: See Ugo Foscolo"s essay on the Narrative and Romantic Poems of Italy in the _Quarterly Review_ for April, 1819.]
[Footnote 3: Especially in Morgante and Margutte.]
It may seem at first sight strange that Ariosto should have preferred the romantic to the heroic style of poetry, and that the epic of the Italian Renaissance should be a pure play of the fancy. Yet this was no less natural to the man revealed in his Epistles, than to the spirit of his century as we have learned to know it. The pa.s.sions and convictions that give force to patriotism, to religion, and to morality, were extinct in Italy; nor was Ariosto an exception to the general temper of his age. Yet the heroic style demands some spiritual motive a.n.a.logous to the enthusiasm for Rome which inspired Virgil, or to the faith that touched the lips of Milton with coals from the altar. An indolent and tranquil epicurean, indifferent to the world around him, desiring nothing better than a life among his books, with leisure for his loves and day-dreams, had not the fiber of a true heroic poet; and where in Italy could Ariosto have found a proper theme? Before he settled to the great work of his life, he began a poem in _terza rima_ on the glories of the House of Este. That was meant to be heroic; but the fragment which remains, proves how frigid, how all unsuited to his genius and his times, this insincere and literary epic would have been.[4] Italy offered elements of greatness only to a prophet or a satirist. She found her prophet in Michelangelo. But what remained for a poet like Ariosto, without Dante"s anger or Swift"s indignation, without the humor of Cervantes or the fire of Juvenal, without Ta.s.so"s piety or Shakspere"s England, yet equal as an artist to the greatest singers whom the world has known? The answer to this question is not far to seek. What really survived of n.o.ble and enthusiastic in the _cinque cento_ was the sense of beauty, the adoration of form, the worship of art. The supreme artist of his age obeyed a right instinct when he undertook a work which required no sublime motive, and which left him free for the production of a masterpiece of beauty. In this sphere the defects of his nature were not felt, and he became the mouthpiece of his age in all that still remained of greatness to his country.
[Footnote 4: See _Capitolo_ iii.]
In like manner we can explain to ourselves Ariosto"s choice of Boiardo"s unfinished theme. He was not a poet with something irresistible to say, but an artist seeking a fit theater for the exercise of his omnipotent skill. He did not feel impelled to create, but to embellish. Boiardo had constructed a vast hall in the style of the Renaissance, when it first usurped on Gothic; he had sketched a series of frescoes for the adornment of its walls and roof, and then had died, leaving his work incomplete. To enrich the remaining panels with pictures conceived in the same spirit, but executed in a freer and a grander manner, to adorn them with all that the most wealthy and fertile fancy could conceive, and to bestow upon them perfect finish, was a task for which Ariosto was eminently suited. Nor did he vary from the practice of the greatest masters in the other arts, who willingly lent their own genius to the continuation of designs begun by predecessors. Few craftsmen of the Renaissance thought as much of the purpose of their work or of its main motive as of execution in detail and richness of effect. They lacked the cla.s.sic sense of unity, the medieval sincerity and spontaneity of inspiration. Therefore Ariosto was contented to receive from Boiardo a theme he could embroider and make beautiful, with full employment of his rare inventive gifts upon a mult.i.tude of episodical inventions. It is vain to regret that a poet of his caliber should not have bent his faculties to the task of a truly original epic--to the re-awakening of prostrate Italy, to the scourging of her feebleness and folly, or even to the celebration of her former glories. Had he done either of these things, his poem would not have been so truly national, and we should have lacked the final product of a most brilliant though defective period of civilization.
Ariosto"s own temperament and the conditions of his age alike condemned him to the completion of a romance longer than the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ together, which has for its sole serious aim, if serious aim it has of any sort, the glorification of an obscure family, and which, while it abounds in pathos, wisdom, wit, and poetry of dazzling brilliance, may at the same time be accused of levity, adulation, and licentiousness. To arraign Ariosto for these faults is tantamount to arraigning his whole century and nation. The greatest artist of the sixteenth century found no task worthier of his genius than to flatter the House of Este with false pedigrees and fulsome praises. He had no faith that could prevent him from laughing at all things human and divine, not indeed, with the t.i.tanic play of Aristophanes, whose merriment is but the obverse of profound seriousness, but with the indulgent nonchalance of an epicurean. No sentiment of sublimity raised him above the grosser atmosphere in which love is tainted with l.u.s.t, luxurious images are sought for their own sake, and pa.s.sion dwindles in the languor of voluptuousness. The decay of liberty, the relaxation of morals and the corruption of the Church had brought the Italians to this point, that their representative Renaissance poem is stained with flattery, contaminated with licentiousness, enfeebled with levity. Poetic beauty of the highest order it cannot claim. That implies more earnestness of purpose and an ideal of sublimer purity. Still, though the _Furioso_ misses the supreme beauty of the _Iliad_, the _Antigone_ and the _Paradise Lost_, it has in superfluity that secondary beauty which expressed itself less perfectly in Italian painting. In one respect it stands almost alone. The form reveals no inequalities or flaws. This artist"s hand has never for a moment lost its cunning; this Homer never nods.
Pulci approached the romance of Charlemagne from a _bourgeois_ point of view. He felt no sincere sympathy with the knightly or the religious sentiment of his originals. Boiardo treated similar material in a chivalrous spirit. The novelty of his poem consisted in the fusion of the Carolingian and Arthurian Cycles; for while he handled an episode of the former group, he felt sincere admiration for errant knighthood as figured in the tales of Lancelot and Tristram.
Throughout the _Orlando Innamorato_ we trace the vivid influence of feudal ideals. Ariosto differed in his att.i.tude from both of his predecessors. The irony that gives a special quality to his romance, is equally removed from the humor of Pulci and the frank enthusiasm of Boiardo. Ariosto was neither the citizen of a free burgh playing with the legends of a bygone age, nor yet the highborn n.o.ble in whose eyes the adventures of Orlando and his comrades formed a picture of existence as it ought to be. He was a courtier and a man of letters, and his poem is a masterpiece of courtly and literary art. Boiardo never flattered the princes of the House of Este. Ariosto took every occasion to interweave their panegyric with his verse. For Boiardo the days of chivalry were a glorious irrecoverable golden age. Ariosto contemplated this mythical past less with the regret of a man who had fallen upon worse days, than with the satisfaction of an artist who perceives the rare opportunities for poetic handling it afforded. He does not really believe in chivalry; where Boiardo is in earnest, Ariosto jests. It is not that, like Cervantes, he sought to satirize the absurdities of romance, or that he set himself, like Folengo, to burlesque the poems of his predecessors; but his philosophy inclined him to watch the doings of humanity with a genial half-smile, an all-pervasive irony that had no sting in it. A poet who stands thus aside and contemplates the comedy of the world with the dry light of a kindly and indulgent intellect, could not treat the tales of Paladins and giants seriously. He uses them as the machinery of a great work on human life, painting mankind, not as he thinks it ought to be, but as he finds it. This treatment of romance from the standpoint of good sense and quiet humor produces an apparent discrepancy between his practical knowledge of the world and his fanciful extravagance. In the artistic harmony effected by Arios...o...b..tween these opposite elements lies the secret of his irony. His worldly wisdom has the solidity of prose and embraces every circ.u.mstance of life. The creatures of his imagination belong to fairyland and exceed the wildest dreams in waywardness. He smiles to see them play their pranks; yet he never loses sight of reality, and moves his puppets by impulses and pa.s.sions worthy of real men and women. Having granted the romantic elements of wonder and exaggeration for a basis, we find the superstructure to be natural. Never was sagacity of insight combined more perfectly with exuberance of fancy and a joyous lightheartedness than in this poem.
Nowhere else have sound lessons in worldly wisdom been conveyed upon a stage of so much palpable impossibility.
We may here ask what is the main subject of the _Orlando Furioso_. The poem has three chief sources of interest--the siege of Paris and the final rout of the Saracen army, the insanity of Orlando, and the loves of Ruggiero and Bradamante. The first serves merely as a groundwork for embroidery, a background for relieving more attractive incidents.
Orlando"s madness, though it gives its name to the romance, is subordinate to the princ.i.p.al action. It forms a proper development of the situation in the _Orlando Innamorato_; and Ariosto intends it to be important, because he frequently laments that the Paladin"s absence from the field injured the cause of Christendom. But Charlemagne, by help of Rinaldo, Bradamante, and Marfisa, conquers without Orlando"s aid. Thus the hero"s insanity is only operative in neutralizing an influence that was not needed; and when he regains his wits, he performs no critical prodigies of valor. Finding the Saracens expelled from France, and Charlemagne at peace, Orlando fights a duel with a crownless king upon a desert island more for show than for real service. Far different is the remaining motive of the poem. If the _Furioso_ can be said to have constructive unity, the central subject is the love and marriage of Ruggiero. Ariosto found this solution of the plot foreshadowed in the _Innamorato_. The pomp and ceremony with which the fourth book opens, the value attached to the co-operation of Ruggiero in the war with Charlemagne, and the romantic beginning of his love for Bradamante, make it clear that Boiardo would have crowned his poem, as Ariosto has done, with the union of the ancestors of Casa d"Este. Flattery, moreover, was Ariosto"s serious purpose.
Consequently, the love of Ruggiero and Bradamante, whose protracted disappointments furnished the occasion for renewed prophecies and promises of future glory for their descendants, formed the artistic center of his romance. The growing importance of all that concerns this pair of characters, the acc.u.mulation of difficulties which interfere with their union, and the final honor reserved for Ruggiero of killing the dreadful Rodomonte in single combat, are so disposed and graduated as to make the marriage of the august couple the right and natural climax to an epic of 100,000 lines. The fascinations of Angelica, the achievements of Orlando and Rinaldo, the barbaric chivalry of Rodomonte and Marfisa, even the shock of Christian and Pagan armies, sink into insignificance before the interest that environs Bradamante toward the poem"s ending. Victorious art was needed for the achievement of this success. Like a pyramid, upon the top of which a sculptor places a gilded statue, up grows this voluminous romance, covering acres of the plain at first, but narrowing to a point whereon the poet sets his heroes of the House of Este.[5]
[Footnote 5: Ariosto"s method of introducing flattery is simple. He makes Merlin utter predictions from his tomb, Melissa prophesy to Bradamante and Atlante to Ruggiero; or he displays magic frescoes, statues, and embroideries, where the future splendors of the Este family are figured; or, again, in the exordia of his cantos he directly addresses his patrons. Omitting lesser pa.s.sages, we may reckon fifteen princ.i.p.al panegyrics of the Este house: canto iii. 16 to end, the fabulous pedigree; viii. 62, 63, praise of Ippolito; xiii.
57 and on, praises of the women of the family; xiv. beginning, the battle of Ravenna and Alfonso; xv. 2, 29, Alfonso"s defeat of the Venetians; xviii. 1, 2, Alfonso"s justice; x.x.xv. 4-9, prophecy of Ippolito; x.x.xvi. 1-9, Ippolito and the Venetians; xl. 1-5, defeat of the Venetians again; xli. 1-3, general adulation; xli. 62-67, pedigree again; xlii. 3, Alfonso wounded; xlii. 83-92, women of the family again; xliii. 54-62, praises of Ferrara; xlvii. 85-97, life of Ippolito. The most extravagant flatteries are lavished upon Ippolito and Lucrezia Borgia. When we remember who and what these Este princes were--how brutal in his cruelty Alfonso, how coa.r.s.e and selfish and sensual Ippolito, how doubtful in her life Lucrezia--we cannot but feel these panegyrics to be sickening in their impudence.]
Though the marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante forms the consummation of the _Furioso_, it would show want of sympathy with Ariosto"s intention to imagine that he wrote his poem for this incident alone.
The opening lines of the first canto are explicit:
Le donne, i cavalier, l"arme, gli amori, Le cortesie, l"audaci imprese io canto Che furo al tempo che pa.s.saro i Mori D"Africa il mare, in Francia nocquer tanto....
"The ladies, the knights, the feats of arms, the loves, the courtesies, the bold adventures are my theme." In one word, his purpose was to paint the world of chivalry. Agramante"s expedition into France gives him the time; Orlando"s madness is an episode; Ruggiero"s marriage forms a fitting climax. But his true subject-matter is chivalry--the dream-world of love, honor, magic, marvel, courtesy, adventure, that afforded to his fancy scope for its most brilliant imaginings. In Ariosto"s age chivalry was a thing of the past, even among the nations of the North. It is true that Francis I. was kneeling on the battlefield before Bayard to receive the honor of knighthood in the names of Oliver and Roland. It is true that Henry VIII. was challenging his Most Christian cousin to a kingly settlement of their disputed claims in a pitched field. But the spirit of the times was not in these picturesque incidents. Charles V., who incarnated modern diplomacy, dynastic despotism, and autocratic statecraft, was deciding the destinies of Europe. Gunpowder had already revolutionized the art of feudal war.[6] The order of the Golden Fleece, monarchical and pompous, had eclipsed the orders of the Temple and S. John. What remained of chivalry formed a splendid adjunct to Court-equipage; and the knight errant, if he ever existed, was merged in the modern gentleman. Far less of real vitality had chivalry among the cities of the South, in the land of Popes like Sixtus, adventurers like Cesare Borgia, princes like Lodovico Sforza, commercial aristocracies like the Republic of S. Mark. A certain ideal of life, summed up in the word _cortesia_, existed in Italy; where numerous petty Courts had become the school of refined sentiment and manners. But this was not what we mean by chivalry, and even this was daily falsified by the cynicism and corruption of the princes and their servants.[7] Castiglione"s _Cortegiano_, the handbook of that new ideal, must be read by the light of the Roman diaries and Machiavelli"s speculative essays. The Renaissance was rapidly destroying the feudal fabric of ideas throughout Europe. Those ideas were always weak in Italy, and it was in Italy that the modern intellect first attained to self-consciousness. Therefore the magic and marvels of romance, the restless movement of knight-errantry, the love of peril and adventure for their own sake, the insane appet.i.te for combat, the unpractical virtues no less than the capricious willfulness of Paladins and Saracens, presented to the age and race of men like Guicciardini nothing but a mad unprofitable medley. _Dove avete trovato, messer Lodovico, tante minchionerie?_ was no unpardonable question for a Cardinal to make, when he opened the _Furioso_ in the Pontificate of Clement VII. Of all this Ariosto was doubtless well aware. Yet he recognized in the _Orlando_ a fit framework for the exercise of his unrivaled painter"s power. He knew that the magic world he had evoked was but a plaything of the fancy, a glittering bubble blown by the imagination. This did not suggest an afterthought of hesitation or regret: for he could make the plaything beautiful. The serious problem of his life was to construct a miracle of art, organically complete, harmonious as a whole and lovely in the slightest details. Yet he never forgot that chivalry was a dream; and thus there is an airy unsubstantiality in his romantic world. His characters, though they are so much closer to us in time and sympathy, lack the real humanity of Achilles in the _Iliad_ or of Penelope in the _Odyssey_. They do not live for us, because they were not living for the poet, but painted with perfection from an image in his brain.
He stood aloof from the work of his own hands, and turned it round for his recreation, viewing it with a smile of conscious and delighted irony. Nowhere did he suffer himself to be immersed in his own visionary universe. That wonderland of love and laughter, magic and adventure, which so amused his fancy that once he walked from Carpi to Ferrara in slippers dreaming of it, was to him no more solid than the shapes of clouds we form, no more durable than the rime that melts before the sun to nothing. The smile with which he contemplates this fleeting image, is both tender and ironical. Sarcasm and pathos mingle on his lips and in his eyes; for while he knows it to be but a vision, he has used it as the form of all his thought and feeling, making of this dream a mirror for the world in which his days were spent.
[Footnote 6: See the ending of the ninth and the beginning of the eleventh cantos of the _Furioso_.]
[Footnote 7: What Ariosto thought about contemporary Italy may be gathered from these lines (xvii. 76):
O d"ogni vizio fetida sentina, Dormi, Italia imbriaca, e non ti pesa Ch"ora di questa gente, ora di quella, Che gia serva ti fu, sei fatta ancella?]
Notwithstanding the difficulty of precisely ascertaining the main subject of the _Orlando Furioso_, the unity of the poem is close, subtle, serried. But it is the unity of a vast piece of tapestry rather than of architecture. There is nothing ma.s.sive in its structure, no simple and yet colossal design like that which forms the strength of the _Iliad_ or the _Divine Comedy_. The delicacy of its connecting links, and the perpetual shifting of its scene distinguish it as a romantic poem from the true epic. The threads by which the scheme is held together, are slight as gossamer; the princ.i.p.al figures are confounded with a mult.i.tude of subordinate characters; the interest is divided between a succession of episodical narratives. At no point are we aroused by the shock of a supreme sensation, such as that which the death of Patroclus in the _Iliad_ communicates. The rage of Rodomonte inside the walls of Paris has been cited as an instance of heroic grandeur. But the effect is exaggerated. Ariosto is too much amused with the extravagant situation for the bl.u.s.tering of his Pagan to arouse either terror or surprise. When we compare this episode with the appearance of Achilles in the trench, the elaborate similes and prolonged description of the Italian poet are as nothing side by side with the terrific shout of the Greek hero stung at last into activity. And what is true of Rodomonte may be said of all the studied situations in the _Furioso_. Ariosto pushes every motive to the verge of the burlesque, heightening the pa.s.sion of love till it becomes insanity, and the sense of honor till it pa.s.ses over into whimsical punctiliousness, and the marvelous until the utmost bounds of credibility are pa.s.sed. This is not done without profound artistic purpose. The finest comic effects in the poem are due to such exaggerations of the motives; and the ironic laughter of the poet is heard at moments when, if he preserved his gravity, we should accuse him of unpardonable childishness. Our chief difficulty in appreciating the _Furioso_ is to take the author"s point of view, to comprehend the expenditure of so much genius and wisdom upon paradoxes, and to sympathize with the spirit of a masterpiece which, while it verges on the burlesque, is never meant to pa.s.s the limit.
In putting this dream-world of his fantasy upon the canvas, Ariosto showed the power of an accomplished painter. This is the secret of the _Furioso"s_ greatness. This makes it in a deep sense the representative poem of the Italian Renaissance. All the affinities of its style are with the ruling art of Italy, rather than with sculpture or with architecture; and the poet is less a singer uttering his soul forth to the world in song, than an artist painting a mult.i.tude of images with words instead of colors. His power of delineation never fails him. Through the lucid medium of exquisitely chosen language we see the object as clearly as he saw it. We scarcely seem to see it with his eyes so much as with our own, for the poet stands aloof from his handiwork and is a spectator of his pictures like ourselves. So authentic is the vision that, while he is obliged by his subject to treat the same situations--in duels, battles, storms, love-pa.s.sages--he never repeats himself. A fresh image has pa.s.sed across the camera obscura of his brain, and has been copied in its salient features. For the whole of this pictured world is in movement, and the master has the art to seize those details which convey the very truth of life and motion. We sit in a dim theater of thought, and watch the motley crowd of his fantastic personages glide across the stage. They group themselves for a moment ere they flit away; and then the scene is shifted, and a new procession enters; fresh _tableaux vivants_ are arranged, and when we have enjoyed their melodies of form and color, the spell is once more broken and new actors enter. The stage is never empty; scene melts into scene without breathing-s.p.a.ce or interruption; but lest the show should weary by its continuity, the curtain is let down upon each canto"s closing, and the wizard who evokes these phantoms for our pleasure, stands before it for a moment and discourses wit and wisdom to his audience.
It is this all-embracing universally illuminating faculty of vision that justifies Galileo"s epithet of the DIVINE for Ariosto. This renders his t.i.tle of the Italian Homer intelligible. But we must remember that these high-sounding compliments are paid him by a nation in whose genius the art of painting holds the highest rank; and it may well happen that critics less finely sensitive to pictorial delineation shall contest them both. As in Italian painting, so in Ariosto"s poetry, deep thought and poignant pa.s.sion are not suffered to interrupt the calm unfolding of a world where plastic beauty reigns supreme. No thrilling cry from the heart of humanity is heard; no dreadful insight into mortal woe disturbs the rhythmic dance. Tragedy is drowned and swallowed in a sea of images; and if the deeper chords of pathos are touched here and there, they are so finely modulated and blent with the pervading melody that a harsh note never jars upon our ears. A nation in whom the dramatic instinct is paramount, an audience attuned to _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_, will feel that something essential to the highest poetry has been omitted. The same imperious pictorial faculty compels Ariosto to describe what more dramatic poets are contented to suggest. Where Dante conveys an image in one pregnant line, he employs an octave for the exhibition of a finished picture.[8] Thus our attention is withdrawn from the main object to a mult.i.tude of minor ill.u.s.trations, each of which is offered to us with the same lucidity. The daedal labyrinth of exquisitely modeled forms begins to cloy, and in our tired ingrat.i.tude we wish the artist had left something to our own imagination. It is too much to be forced to contemplate a countless number of highly-wrought compositions. We long for something half-seen, indicated, shyly revealed by lightning flashes and withdrawn before it has been fully shown. When Lessing in _Laoc.o.o.n_ censured the famous portrait of Alcina, this was, in part at least, the truth of his complaint. She wearies us by the minuteness of the touches that present her to our gaze; and the elaboration of each detail prevents us from forming a complete conception of her beauty.
But the Italians of the sixteenth century, accustomed to painted forms in fresco and in oils, and educated in the descriptive traditions of Boccaccio"s school, would not have recognized the soundness of this criticism. For them each studied phrase of Ariosto was the index to an image, summoned by memory from the works of their own masters, or from life. His method of delineation was a.n.a.logous to that of figurative art. In a word, the defect pointed out by the German critic is the defect of Ariosto"s greatest quality, the quality belonging to an age and race in which painting was supreme.
[Footnote 8: Those who are curious may compare the three lines in which Dante likens Piero delle Vigne"s voice issuing from his tree of torment to the hissing of sap in a green log upon the fire (_Inf._ xiii. 40) with the eight lines used by Ariosto to expand the same simile (_Orl. Fur._ vi. 27); or, again, Dante"s picture of the sick woman on her bed of fever (_Purg._ vi. 149) with Ariosto"s copy (_Orl.
Fur._ xxviii. 90).]
Closely allied to this pictorial method in the representation of all objects to our mental vision, was Ariosto"s rhetorical amplification.
He rarely allows a situation to be briefly indicated or a sentiment to be divined. The emotions of his characters are a.n.a.lyzed at length; and their utterances, even at the fever-heat of pa.s.sion, are expanded with a dazzling wealth of ill.u.s.tration. Many of the episodes in the _Furioso_ are eminently dramatic, and the impression left upon the memory is forcible enough. But they are not wrought out as a dramatist would handle them. The persons do not act before us, or express themselves by direct speech. The artist has seen them in motion, has understood what they are feeling; and by his manner of describing them he makes us see them also. But it is always a picture, always an image; that presents itself. Soul rarely speaks to soul without the intervention of interpretative art. This does not prevent Ariosto from being a master of the story-teller"s craft. No poet of any nation knew better what to say and what to leave unsaid in managing a fable. The facility of his narration is perfect; and though the incidents of his tales are extremely complicated, there is no confusion. Each story is as limpid as each picture he invents. Nor, again, is there any languor in his poem. Its extraordinary swiftness can only be compared to the rush of a shining river, flowing so smoothly that we have to measure its speed by objects on the surface. The _Furioso_, in spite of its acc.u.mulated images, in spite of its elaborated rhetoric, is in rapid onward movement from the first line to the last. It has an elasticity which is lacking to the monumental architecture of the _Divine Comedy_. It is free from the stationary digressions that impede a student of _Paradise Lost_.
The fairy-like fantastic structure of the _Furioso_ has a groundwork of philosophical solidity. Externally a child"s story-book, it is internally a mine of deep world-wisdom, the product of a sane and vigorous intellect. Not that we have any right to seek for allegory in the substance of the poem. When Spenser fancied that Ariosto had "ensampled a good governour and vertuous man" in Orlando--in the Orlando who went mad, neglected his liege-lord, and exposed Christendom to peril for Angelica"s fair face--he was clearly on the wrong tack. For a man of Ariosto"s temperament, in an age of violent contrast between moral corruption and mental activity, it was enough to observe human nature without creating ideals. His knowledge of the actions, motives, pa.s.sions and characters of men is concrete; and his readings in the lessons of humanity, are literal. The excellence of his delineation consists precisely in the nicety of _nuances_, the blending of vice and virtue, the correct a.n.a.lysis of motives. He paints men and women as he finds them, not without the irony of one who stands aloof from life and takes malicious pleasure in pointing out its misery and weakness. If I wished to indicate a single pa.s.sage that displays this knowledge of the heart, I should not select the too transparent allegory of Logistilla[9]--though even here the contrast between Alcina"s seductive charms and the permanent beauty of her sister is wrought with a magnificence of detail worthy of Spenser. I would rather point to the reflections which conclude the tale of Marganorre and his wicked sons.[10] In lucid exposition of fact lay the strength of Ariosto; and here it may be said that he proved his affinity to the profoundest spirits of his age in Italy--to Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the founders of a.n.a.lytical science for modern Europe. This intimate study of the laws which govern human action when it seems most wayward, is displayed in Grifone"s subjection to the faithless Orrigille, in the conflict of pa.s.sions which agitate the heroes of Agramante"s camp, in the agony of Orlando when he finds Medoro"s name coupled with Angelica"s, in Bradamante"s jealousy, in the conflict of courtesy between Leone and Ruggiero, in the delusive visions of Atlante"s castle, in the pride of Rodomonte, and in the comic termination of Angelica"s coquetries. The difference between Ariosto and Machiavelli is, that while the latter seems to have dissected human nature with a scalpel, the former has gained this wisdom by sympathy. The one exhibits his anatomical preparations with grim scientific gravity; the other makes his puppets move before us, and smiles sarcastically at their antics.
[Footnote 9: Canto x. 52 _et seq._]
[Footnote 10: Canto x.x.xvii. 104 _et seq._]
Sometimes he condenses his philosophy of life in short essays that form the prefaces to cantos, introducing us as through a shapely vestibule into the enchanted palace of his narrative. Among these the finest are the exordia on Love and Honor, on Jealousy, on Loyalty, on Avarice, on the fickleness of Fortune, on Hypocrisy in Courts, and on the pains of Love.[11] The merit of these discourses does not consist in their profundity so much as in their truth. They have been deeply felt and are of universal applicability. What all men have experienced, what every age and race of men have known, the supreme poet expresses with his transparent style, his tender and caressing melody of phrase, his graceful blending of sympathy and satire. Ta.s.so in the preface to _Rinaldo_ rebukes Ariosto for the introduction of these digressions. He says they are below the dignity of the heroic manner, and that a true poet should be able by example and the action of his characters to point the moral without disquisition. This may be true. Yet Ariosto was writing a romance, and we welcome these personal utterances as a relief from the perpetual movement of his figures. In like manner we should be loth to lose the lyrical inter-breathings of Euripidean choruses, or Portia"s descant upon mercy, or Fielding"s interpolated reflections, all of which are halting-places for the mind to rest on in the rapid course of dramatic or narrative evolution.
Still it is not in these detached pa.s.sages that Ariosto shows his greatest wealth of observation. The _novelle_, scattered with a lavish hand through all his cantos, combine the same sagacity with energy of action and pictorial effect. Whatever men are wont to do, feel, hope for, fear--what moves their wrath--what yields them pleasure, or inflicts upon them pain--that is the material of Ariosto"s tales. He does not use this matter either as a satirist or a moralist, as a tragic poet to effect a purification of the pa.s.sions, or, again, as a didactic poet to inculcate lessons. Like Plautus, he seems to say: "Whatever be the hues of life, my words shall paint them." Following the course of events without comment, his page reflects the mask of human joys and griefs which is played out before him. In the tale of Polinesso and Ginevra all the elements of pathos that can be extracted from the love of women and the treachery of men, are acc.u.mulated. The desertion of Olimpia by Bireno after the sacrifices she has made for him, invests the myth of Ariadne with a wild romantic charm.
Isabella"s devotion to Zerbino through captivity and danger; the friendship of Cloridano for the beautiful Medoro, and their piety toward Dardinello"s corpse; Angelica"s doting on Medoro, and the idyll of their happiness among the shepherd folk; the death of Brandimarte, and Fiordeligi"s agony of grief; Fiordespina"s vain love for Bradamante, and her consolation in the arms of Ricciardetto; the wild legend of the Amazons, who suffered no male stranger to approach their city; Norandino"s loyalty to Lucina in the cave of Orco; Lidia"s cruel treatment of Alceste; the arts whereby Tanacro and Olindo, sons of Marganorre, work their wicked will in love; Gabrina"s treachery toward husband and paramour; Giocondo"s adventures with the king Astolfo; the ruse by which Argia justifies her infidelity to Anselmo; the sublime courtesies of Leone; the artful machinations of Melissa--these are the rubrics of tales and situations, so varied, so fertile in resource, that a hundred comedies and tragedies might be wrought from them.
Ariosto, in his conduct of these stories, attempts no poetical justice. Virtue in distress, vice triumphant, one pa.s.sion expelling another, n.o.bler motives conquered by baser, loyalty undermined by avarice, feminine frailty made strong to suffer by the force of love; so runs the world, and so the poet paints it.
[Footnote 11: Cantos x.x.xviii. x.x.xi. xxi. xliii. xlv. xliv. xvi.]
New and old, false and real, he mixes all together, and by the alchemy of his imagination makes the fusion true. The cla.s.sics and the Italian poets, writers of history and romance, geographers and chroniclers, have been laid under contribution. But though the poem is composed of imitations, it is invariably original, because Ariosto has seen and felt whatever he described. Angelica on the horse going out to sea recalls Europa. The battle with the Orc is borrowed from the tale of Perseus. Astolfo in the myrtle grove comes straight from Virgil.
Cloridano and Medoro are Nisus and Euryalus in modern dress. The shield of Atlante suggests Medusa"s head. Pegasus was the parent of the Hippogriff, and Polyphemus of Orco. Rodomonte rages like Mezentius and dies like Turnus. Grifone on the bridge is a Renaissance study from Horatius Cocles. Senapo repeats the myth of Phineus and the Harpies. Yet throughout these plagiarisms Ariosto remains himself. He has a.s.similated his originals to his own genius, and has given every incident new life by the vividness of his humanity. If it were needful to cite an instance of his playful, practical ironic treatment of old material, we might point to Lucinda"s feminine delicacy in the cave of Orco. She refuses to smear herself with the old goat"s fat, and fails to escape with Norandino and his comrades from the hands of this new Polyphemus. So comprehensive is the poet"s fancy that it embraces the cla.s.sic no less than the medieval past. Both are blent in a third substance which takes life from his own experience and observation. In this respect the art of Ariosto corresponds to Raphael"s--to the Stanza of the Segnatura or the Antinous-Jonah of the Chigi Chapel. It is the first emanc.i.p.ation of the modern spirit in a work of catholic beauty, preluding to the final emanc.i.p.ation of the reason in the sphere of criticism, thought, and science.
The quality which gives salt and savor to Ariosto"s philosophy of life is irony, sometimes bordering on satire, sometimes running over into drollery and humor. Irony is implicit in the very substance of the _Furioso_. The choice of a _mad_ Orlando for hero reveals the poet"s intention; and the recovery of his lost wits from the moon parodies the medieval doctrine that only in the other world shall we find our true selves. The fate of Angelica, again, is supremely ironical. After flouting kings and Paladins, the n.o.blest knights of the whole world, her lovers, she dotes upon a handsome country-lad and marries him in a shepherd"s hut. Medoro plucks the rose for which both Christendom and Paynimry had fought in furious rivalry; and wayward Love requites their insults with a by-blow from his dart. Such, smiles the poet, is the end of pride, ambition, pa.s.sion, and the coquetries that placed the kingdoms of the East and West in peril. Angelica is the embodiment of mortal frailty. The vanity of human wishes, the vicissitudes which blind desire prepares for haughtiest souls, the paradoxes held in store by destiny, are symbolized and imaged in her fate.
Astolfo"s journey to the moon, related in the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth cantos, presents the Ariostean irony with all its gradations of satire, parody, and comic humor. This Duke of England in the Italian romances played the part of an adventurous vain-glorious cavalier, eminent for courtesy and courage, who carried the wandering impulse of knight-errantry to the extreme verge of the ridiculous. We find him at the opening of the thirty-fourth canto in possession of Atlante"s Hippogriff and Logistilla"s marvelous horn. Mounting his winged horse, he flies through s.p.a.ce, visits the sources of the Nile, and traverses the realm of Ethiopia. There he delivers King Senapo from a brood of Harpies, whom he pursues to the mouth of a cavern whence issues dense smoke. This is the entrance into h.e.l.l:
L"orecchie attente allo spiraglio tenne, E l"aria ne sent percossa e rotta Da pianti e d"urli, e da lamento eterno; Segno evidente quivi esser lo "nferno.
The paladin"s curiosity is roused, and he determines to advance:
Di che debbo temer, dicea, s"io v"entro?
Che mi posso aiutar sempre col corno.