CHAPTER XVII.

CONCLUSION.

Retrospect--Meaning of the Renaissance--Modern Science and

Democracy--The Preparation of an Intellectual Medium for

Europe--The Precocity of Italy--Servitude and Corruption--Antiquity

and Art--The Italian Provinces--Florence--Lombardy and Venice--The

March of Ancona, Urbino, Umbria--Perugia--Rome--Sicily and

Naples--Italian Ethnology--Italian Independence on the Empire and the

Church--Persistence of the Old Italic Stocks--The New Nation--Its

Relation to the Old--The Revival of Learning was a National

Movement--Its Effect on Art--On Literature--Resumption of the Latin

Language--Affinities between the Latin and Italian Genius--Renascence

of Italian Literature combined with Humanism--Greek Studies

comparatively Uninfluential--The Modern Italians inherited Roman

Qualities--Roman Defects--Elimination of Roman Satire--Decay of Roman

Vigor--Italian Realism--Positivism--Sensuousness--Want of Mystery,

Suggestion, Romance--The Intellectual Atmosphere--A Literature of Form

and Diversion--Absence of Commanding Genius--Lack of Earnestness--Lack of

Piety--Materialism and Negation--Idyllic Beauty--The Men of the Golden

Age--The Cult of Form--Italy's Gifts to Europe--The Renaissance is not

to be Imitated--Its Importance in Human Development--Feudalism,

Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution 488

APPENDICES.

No. I.--Italian Comic Prologues 533

No. II.--Passages Translated from Folengo and Berni, which Illustrate

the Lutheran Opinions of the Burlesque Poets 536

No. III.--On Palmieri's "Citta di Vita" 548

INDEX 555

RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.

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 Analysis--The

Introductions to the Cantos--Episodes and

_Novelle_--Imitations of the Classics--Power of

Appropriation and Transmutation--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--Passion and Love--Ariosto's

Morality--His Style--The Epithet of Divine--Exquisite

Finish--Ariosto and Tasso--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 substituted

the art of poetry for the prophetic inspiration; and while Petrarch

was yet singing, Boccaccio anticipated in his multifarious literature

the age of the Renaissance. Then the evolution of Italian literature

was interrupted by the classical 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 Tasso 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 transmutation 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 classified 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 passions 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 noblest 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, institutions, 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] Tasso's _Gerusalemme Liberata_ is a fair specimen

of the heroic, and Tassoni'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 passions 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 analogous 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 Tasso'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 noble 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 classic 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 multitude 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 Titanic 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 lust, luxurious images are sought for their

own sake, and passion 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 attitude 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 noble 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 Ariosto between these opposite elements

lies the secret of his irony. His worldly wisdom has the solidity of

prose and embraces every circumstance 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 passions

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 principal 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 accumulation 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 passages, we may

reckon fifteen principal 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; xxxv. 4-9, prophecy of

Ippolito; xxxvi. 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 coarse 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 passaro 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 appetite

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 massive 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 principal figures

are confounded with a multitude 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 blustering 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 passion of love till it

becomes insanity, and the sense of honor till it passes over into

whimsical punctiliousness, and the marvelous until the utmost bounds

of credibility are passed. 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 pass 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 multitude 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-passages--he

never repeats himself. A fresh image has passed 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-space 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 title 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 passion 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

multitude of minor illustrations, 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 ingratitude 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

_Laocoon_ 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 analogous 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 analyzed at length; and

their utterances, even at the fever-heat of passion, are expanded with

a dazzling wealth of illustration. 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

accumulated 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, passions 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 analysis 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 passage

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 analytical 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 passions

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 xxxvii. 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. Tasso

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 passages 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 passions, 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 accumulated. 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 passion expelling

another, nobler 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 xxxviii. xxxi. 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 classics 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 assimilated 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

classic 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 emancipation of the modern spirit in a work of catholic

beauty, preluding to the final emancipation 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 noblest 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, passion, 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 space, 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 Hell:

L'orecchie attente allo spiraglio tenne,

E l'aria ne senti 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.

Faro fuggir Plutone e Satanasso,

E 'l can trifauce levero dal passo.

This light-hearted reliance in a perfectly practical spirit upon his

magic horn is wholly in keeping with Ariosto's genius. The terrible

situation, the good sense of the adventurer, and the enchantment which

protects him are so combined as to be prosaically natural. Astolfo

gropes his way into the cavern and is immediately suffocated by dense

smoke. In the midst of it above his head he sees a body hanging and

swinging to and fro like a corpse on a gibbet. He cuts at this object

with his sword, and wakes the melancholy voice of Lidia, who tells him

that in the smoke are punished obdurate and faithless lovers. The tale

of her falseness to Alceste is very beautiful, and shows great

knowledge of the heart. But it leads to nothing in the action of the

poem, and Astolfo goes out of Hell as he came in--except that the

smoke has befouled both face and armor, and he has to scrub himself in

a fountain before he can get clean again. Meanwhile Ariosto has

parodied the opening of Dante's _Inferno_ with its sublime:

Mi mise dentro alle segrete cose.

Lidia is the inversion of Francesca; for her sin was, not compliance

with the impulses of nature, but unkindness to her lover. This

travesty is wrought with no deliberate purpose, but by a mere caprice

of fancy, to entertain his audience with a novel while he flouts the

faiths and fears of a more earnest age. For Ariosto, the child of the

Renaissance, there remained nothing to affirm or to deny about the

future of the soul. The Inferno of the middle ages had become a

plaything of romance. Astolfo now pursues his journey, looks in on

Prester John, and scales the mountain of the Earthly Paradise. There

he finds a palace wrought of precious stones, and in the vestibule an

ancient man with venerable beard and snowy hair. This is no other than

S. John the Evangelist, who hastens to feed the knight's horse with

good corn, and sets before him a table spread with fruits which make

the sin of Adam seem excusable:

Con accoglienza grata il cavaliero

Fu dai santi alloggiato in una stanza:

Fu provvisto in un'altra al suo destriero

Di buona biada, che gli fu abbastanza.

De' frutti a lui del paradiso diero,

Di tal sapor, ch'a suo giudicio, sanza

Scusa non sono i duo primi parenti,

Se per quei fur si poco ubbidienti!

S. John, delighted with his courteous guest, discourses many things

about Orlando, his lost wits, and the moon where they have been stored

with other rubbish. At the close of their conversation, he remarks

that it is a fine night for a journey to the moon; and orders out the

fiery chariot which erewhile took Elijah up to heaven. It holds two

passengers with comfort; and after a short voyage through the air,

Astolfo and the Evangelist land upon the lunar shores. The stanzas

which describe the valley of vain things and useless lumber lost to

earth, are justly famous for their satire and their pathos.[12] There

are found the presents made to kings in hope of rich reward, the

flatteries of poets, shameful loves, the services of courtiers, the

false beauties of women, and bottles filled with the lost sense of

men. The list is long; nor was Milton unmindful of it when he wrote

his lines upon the Paradise of Fools.[13] The passage illustrates

certain qualities in Ariosto's imagination. He has no dread of the

prosaic and the simple. Inexhaustibly various alike in thought, in

rhythm, in imagery, and in melody of phrase, he yet keeps close to

reality, and passes without modulation from seriousness to extravagant

fun, returning again to the sadness of profound reflection. His poetry

is like the picture of his own face--a large and handsome man with

sleepy eyes and epicurean mouth, over whose broad forehead and open

features, plowed by no wrinkles of old age or care, float subtle

smiles and misty multitudes of thoughts half lost in dreams. Human

life to Ariosto was a comedy such as Menander put upon the Attic

stage; and the critic may ask of him, too, whether he or nature were

the plagiarist.

[Footnote 12: Canto xxxiv. 76-85.]

[Footnote 13: _Par. Lost_, iii. 440.]

Meanwhile S. John is waiting at Astolfo's elbow to point out the

Fates, spinning their web of human destinies, and Time carrying the

records of history to the river of oblivion. It is a sad picture, did

not Ariosto enliven the most somber matter with his incorrigible

humor. By the river bank of Lethe wait cormorants and swans. The

former aid Time in his labor of destruction. The latter, who symbolize

great poets, save chosen names from undeserved neglect. This leads to

a discourse on the services rendered by writers to their patrons,

which is marked by Ariosto's levity. He has just been penning praises

for Ippolito.[14] Yet here he frankly confesses that the eulogies of

poets are distortions of the truth, that history is a lie, and that

the whole pageant of humanity conceals a sorry sham. S. John is even

made to hint that his good place in Paradise is the guerdon of a

panegyric written on his Master:

Gli scrittori amo, e fo il debito mio;

Ch'al vostro mondo fui scrittore anch'io:

E sopra tutti gli altri io feci acquisto

Che non mi puo levar tempo ne morte;

E ben convenne al mio lodato Cristo

Rendermi guidardon di si gran sorte.

[Footnote 14: Canto xxxv. 4-9.]

The episode of Astolfo's journey to the moon abounds in satire upon

human weakness in general. Another celebrated passage has satire of a

more direct kind, and is, moreover, valuable for illustrating

Ariosto's conduct of his poem. Paris is besieged by the assembled

forces of the Saracens. The chief Paladins are absent, and

Charlemagne, in his sore need addresses a prayer to Heaven.[15] It is

just such a prayer as the Israelites offer up in Rossini's _Mose in

Egitto_--very resonant, very rhetorical, but without sincerity of

feeling. Ariosto selects a number of decorous phrases redolent of

Reniassance humanism, _tolte agl'inimici stigi_, _al maggior tempio_,

_gli occhi al ciel supini_, and combines them with melodramatic

effect. God accepts the Emperor's prayer, and sends Michael down to

earth to find Discord and Silence, in order that the former may sow

strife in the Saracen camp, and the latter lead re-enforcements into

Paris. Michael starts upon his errand:

Dovunque drizza Michelangel l'ale,

Fuggon le nubi, e torna il ciel sereno;

Gli gira intorno un aureo cerchio, quale

Veggiam di notte lampeggiar baleno.

[Footnote 15: Canto xiv. 68-73.]

He flies straight to a monastery, expecting to find Silence there. The

choir, the parlor, the dormitory, the refectory are searched. Wherever

he goes, he sees _Silenzio_ written up: but Silence cannot be found.

Instead of him, Discord presents herself, and is recognized by her

robe of many-colored fluttering ribbons, disheveled hair, and an

armful of law-papers. Fraud, too, accosts the angel with a gentle face

like Gabriel's when he said _Ave!_ To Michael's question after

Silence, Fraud replies: he used to live in convents and the cells of

sages; but now he goes by night with thieves, false coiners and

lovers, and you may find him in the houses of treason and homicide.

Yet if you are very anxious to lay hands on him at once, haste to the

haunt of Sleep. This cavern is described in stanzas that undoubtedly

suggested Spenser's; but Ariosto has nothing so delicate as:

A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,

And ever drizzling rain upon the loft,

Mixed with a murmuring wind much like the sown

Of swarming bees.

Instead, he paints in his peculiar style of realistic imagery, the

corpulent form of Ease, Sloth that cannot walk and scarce can stand,

Forgetfulness who bars the door to messengers, and Silence walking

round the cave with slippers of felt. Silence, summoned by the

archangel, sets forth to meet Rinaldo. Discord also quits the convent

with her comrade Pride, leaving Fraud and Hypocrisy to keep their

places warm till they return. But Discord does her work inadequately;

and the cries of Rodomonte's victims rise to heaven. This rouses

Michael from his slumber of beatitude. He blushes, plumes his pinions,

and shoots down again to earth in search of Discord among the monks.

He finds her sitting in a chapter convened for the election of

officers, and makes her in a moment feel his presence:[16]

Le man le pose l'Angelo nel crine,

E pugna e calci le die senza fine.

Indi le roppe un manico di croce

Per la testa, pel dosso e per le braccia.

Merce grida la misera a gran voce,

E le ginocchia al divin nunzio abbraccia.

[Footnote 16: Canto xxvii. 37.]

This is a good specimen both of Ariosto's peculiar levity and of the

romantic style which in the most serious portion of his poem permitted

such extravagance. The robust archangel tearing Discord's disheveled

hair, kicking her, pounding her with his fists, breaking a cross upon

her back, and sending her about her business with a bee in her bonnet,

presents a picture of drollery which is exceedingly absurd. Nor is

there any impropriety in the picture from the poet's point of view.

Michael and the Evangelist are scarcely serious beings. They both form

part of his machinery and help to make the action move.

Broad fun, untinctured by irony, seasons the _Furioso_--as when

Astolfo creates a fleet by throwing leaves into the sea, and mounts

his Ethiopian cavalry on horses made of stone, and catches the wind in

a bladder; all of which burlesque miracles are told with that keen

relish of their practical utility which formed an element of Ariosto's

sprightliness.[17] Ruggiero's pleasure-trip on Rabicane; Orlando's

achievement of spitting six fat Dutchmen like frogs upon one spear;

the index to Astolfo's magic book; the conceit of the knights who

jousted with the golden lance and ascribed its success to their own

valor; Orlando's feats of prowess with the table in the robber's den;

are other instances of Ariosto's lightheartedness, when he banters

with his subject and takes his readers into confidence with his own

sense of drollery.[18] The donkey race in armor between Marfisa and

Zerbino for a cantankerous old hag, with its courteous ceremonies and

chivalrous conclusion, might be cited as an example of more sustained

humor.[19] And such, too, though in another region, is the novel of

Jocondo.

[Footnote 17: Canto xxxviii. 30, 33, 26. [Transcriber's Note: last

reference should be Canto xxxix. 26.]]

[Footnote 18: Canto x. 72; ix. 68; xxii. 16; xlv. 65; xiii. 36.]

[Footnote 19: Canto xx. 122.]

Ariosto's irony, no less than his romantic method, deprived the

_Furioso_ of that sublimity which only belongs to works of greater

seriousness and deeper conviction. Yet he sometimes touches the

sublime by force of dramatic description or by pathetic intensity. The

climax of Orlando's madness has commonly been cited as an instance of

poetic grandeur. Yet I should be inclined to prefer the gathering of

the storm of discord in Agramante's camp.[20] The whole of this

elaborate scene, where the fiery characters and tempestuous passions

of the Moslem chiefs, of Ruggiero, Rodomonte, Gradasso, Mandricardo,

and Marfisa, are brought successively into play by impulses and

motives natural to each and powerful to produce a clash of adverse

claims and interests, is not only conceived and executed in a truly

dramatic spirit, but is eminently important for the action of the

poem. The thunder-clouds which had been mustering to break in ruin

upon Christendom, rush together and spend their fury in mid air. Thus

the moment is decisive, and nothing has been spared to dignify the

passions that provoke the final crash. They go on accumulating in

complexity, like a fugue of discords, till at last the hyperbole of

this sonorous stanza that seems justified:[21]

Tremo Parigi, e turbidossi Senna

All'alta voce, a quell'orribil grido;

Rimbombo il suon fin alla selva Ardenna

Si che lasciar tutte le fiere il nido.

Udiron l'Alpi e il monte di Gebenna,

Di Blaia e d'Arli e di Roano il lido;

Rodano e Sonna udi, Garonna e il Reno:

Si strinsero le madri i figli al seno.

[Footnote 20: Canto xxvii.]

[Footnote 21: _Ibid._ 101.]

His pathos also has its own sublimity. Imogen stretched lifeless on

the corpse of Cloten; the Duchess of Malfi telling Cariola to see that

her daughter says her prayers; Bellario describing his own sacrifice

as a mere piece of boyhood flung away--these are instances from our

own drama, in which the pathetic is sublime. Ariosto's method is

different, and the effect is more rhetorical. Yet he can produce

passages of almost equal poignancy, prolonged situations of

overmastering emotion, worthy to be set side by side with the

Euripidean pictures of Polyxena, Alcestis, or Iphigenia.[22] The death

of Zerbino; the death of Brandimarte with half of Fiordeligi's name

upon his lips; the constancy of Isabella offering her neck to

Rodomonte's sword; the anguish of Olimpia upon the desert island; are

instances of sublime poetry wrung from pathos by the force of

highly-wrought impassioned oratory. Zerbino is one of the most

sympathetic creations of the poet's fancy. Of him Ariosto wrote the

famous line:[23]

Natura il fece, e poi ruppe la stampa.

[Footnote 22: The comparison of Ariosto and Euripides is not wholly

fanciful. Both were supreme artists in an age of incipient decadence,

lacking the convictions of their predecessors, and depending for

effect upon rhetorical devices. Both were [Greek: tragikotatoi] in

Aristotle's sense of the phrase, and both were romantic rather than

heroic poets.]

[Footnote 23: Canto x. 84.]

He is killed by the Tartar Mandricardo before his lady Isabella's

eyes:[24]

A questo la mestissima Isabella,

Declinando la faccia lacrimosa,

E congiungendo la sua bocca a quella

Di Zerbin, languidetta, come rosa,

Rosa non colta in sua stagion, si ch'ella

Impallidisca in su la siepe ombrosa,

Disse: Non vi pensate gia, mia vita,

Far senza me quest'ultima partita.

[Footnote 24: The whole scene, with all its gradations of emotion, is

too long to quote. But see xxiv. 74-87.]

With stanzas like this the poet cheats the sorrow he has stirred in

us. Their imagery is too beautiful to admit of painful feeling while

we read; and thus, though the passion of the scene is tragic, its

anguish is brought by touches of pure art into harmony with the

romantic tone of the whole poem. So also when Isabella, kneeling

before Rodomonte's sword, like S. Catherine in Luini's fresco at

Milan, has met her own death, Ariosto heals the wound he has inflicted

on our sensibility by lines of exquisitely cadenced melody:[25]

Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella.

Cosi i miei versi avesson forza, come

Ben m'affaticherei con tutta quella

Arte che tanto il parlar orna e come,

Perche mille e mill'anni, e piu, novella

Sentisse il mondo del tuo chiaro nome.

Vattene in pace alla superna sede,

E lascia all'altre esempio di tua fede.

[Footnote 25: Canto xxix. 27.]

But it is in the situations, the elegiac lamentations, the unexpected

vicissitudes, and the strong pictorial beauties of Olimpia's novel,

that Ariosto strains his power over pathos to the utmost. Olimpia has

lost her kingdom and spent her substance for her husband, Bireno.

Orlando aids her in her sore distress, and frees Bireno from his

prison. Bireno proves faithless, and deserts her on an island. She is

taken by corsairs, exposed like Andromeda on a rock to a sea-monster,

and is finally rescued by Orlando. Each of these touching incidents is

developed with consummate skill; and the pathos reaches its height

when Olimpia, who had risked all for her husband, wakes at dawn to

find herself abandoned by him on a desolate sea-beach.[26] In this

passage Ariosto comes into competition with two poets of a different

stamp--with Catullus, who thus describes Ariadne:

Saxea ut effigies Bacchantis prospicit:

and with Fletcher, who makes Aspatia in the _Maid's Tragedy_ dramatize

the situation. Catullus in a single felicitous simile, Fletcher by the

agony of passionate declamation, surpass Ariosto's detailed picture.

The one is more restrained, the other more tragic. But Ariosto goes

straight to our heart by the natural touch of Olimpia feeling for

Bireno in the darkness, and by the suggestion of pallid moonlight and

a shivering dawn. The numerous prosaic details with which he has

charged his picture, add to its reality, and enhance the Euripidean

quality we admire in it.

[Footnote 26: Canto x. 20-34.]

In the case of a poet whose imagination was invariably balanced by

practical sound sense, the personal experience he acquired of the

female sex could not fail to influence his delineation of women. He

was not a man to cherish illusion or to romance in verse about

perfection he had never found in fact. He did not place a Beatrice or

Laura on the pedestal of his heart; nor was it till he reached the age

of forty-seven, when the _Furioso_ had lain for six years finished on

his desk, that he married Alessandra Strozzi. His great poem,

completed in 1515, must have been written under the influence of those

more volatile amours he celebrated in his Latin verses. Therefore we

are not surprised to find that the female characters of the _Orlando_

illustrate his epistle on the choice of a wife.[27] His highest ideal

of woman is presented to us in Bradamante, whose virtues are a loyal

attachment to Ruggiero and a modest submission to the will of her

parents. Yet even in Bradamante he has painted a virago from whom the

more delicate humanity of Shakspere would have recoiled. The scene in

which she quarrels with Marfisa about Ruggiero degrades her in our

eyes, and makes us feel that such a termagant might prove a sorry

wife.[28] It was almost impossible to combine true feminine qualities

with the blood-thirst of an Amazon. Consequently when, just before her

marriage, she snuffs the carnage of the Saracens from afar, and

regrets that she must withhold her hand from "such rich spoil of

slaughter in a spacious field," a painful sense of incongruity is left

upon our mind.[29] Marfisa, who remains a warrior to the last, and who

in her first girlhood had preserved her virginity by slaughtering a

palace-full of Pagans,[30] is artistically justified as a romantic

heroine. But Bradamante, destined to become a mother, gentle in her

home affections, obedient to her father's wishes, tremulous in her

attachment to Ruggiero, cannot with any propriety be compared to a

leopard loosed from the leash upon defenseless gazelles.[31] Between

the Amazonian virgin and the mother of a race of kings to be, the

outline of her character wavers.

[Footnote 27: See above, Part i. p. 510.]

[Footnote 28: Canto xxxvi., especially stanza 50.]

[Footnote 29: Canto xxxix. 10-15; cp. _ib._ 67-72.]

[Footnote 30: Canto xxxvii. 15.]

[Footnote 31: Canto xxxix. 69.]

After the more finished portrait of Bradamante, we find in Isabella

and Fiordeligi, the lovers of Zerbino and Brandimarte, Ariosto's

purest types of feminine affection. The cardinal virtue of woman in

his eyes was self-devotion--loyalty to the death, unhesitating

sacrifice of wealth, ease, reputation, life, to the one object of

passionate attachment. And this self-devotion he has painted in

Olimpia no less romantically than in Isabella and Fiordeligi. Still it

must be remembered that Isabella had eloped with Zerbino from her

father's palace, that Fiordeligi was only a wife in name, and that

Olimpia murdered her first husband and consoled herself very rapidly

for Bireno's loss in the arms of Oberto. The poet has not cared to

interweave with either portrait such threads of piety and purity as

harmonize the self-abandonment of Juliet. Fiordespina's ready credence

of the absurd story by which Ricciardetto persuades her that he is

Bradamante metamorphosed by a water-fairy to a man, and her love

longings, so frankly confessed, so unblushingly indulged, illustrate

the passion Ariosto delighted to describe. He feels a tender sympathy

for feminine frailty, and in more than one exquisitely written passage

claims for women a similar license in love to that of men.[32]

Indeed, he never judges a woman severely, unless she adds to her want

of chastity the spitefulness of Gabrina or the treachery of Orrigille

or the cupidity of Argia or the heartlessness of Angelica. Angelica,

who in the _Innamorato_ touches our feelings by her tenderness for

Rinaldo, in the _Furioso_ becomes a mere coquette, and is well

punished by her insane passion for the first pretty fellow that takes

her fancy. The common faults for which Ariosto taxes women are

cupidity, infidelity, and fraud.[33] The indulgence due to them from

men is almost cynically illustrated by the story of Adonio and the

magic virtues of Merlin's goblet.[34] In the preface to the fifth

canto he condemns the brutality of husbands, and in the tenth he

recommends ladies to be free of their favors to none but middle-aged

lovers.[35]

[Footnote 32: See especially iv. 63-67.]

[Footnote 33: Introductions to cantos xliii. xxviii. xxix. xxii.

xxvi.; cp. xxvii. 123.]

[Footnote 34: Canto xlii.]

[Footnote 35: Stanzas 6-9.]

Ariosto's morality was clearly on a level with that of the novelists

from Boccaccio to Bandello; and his apology is that he was not

inferior to the standard of his age. Still it is not much to his

credit to plead that his cantos are less impure than the _Capitoli_ of

Monsignore La Casa or the prurient comedies of Aretino. Even allowing

for the laxity of Renaissance manners, it must be conceded that he

combined vulgar emotions and a coarse-fibered nature with the most

refined artistic genius.[36] Our Elizabethan drama, in spite of moral

crudity, contains nothing so cynical as Ariosto's novel of Jocondo.

The beauty of its style, the absence of tragedy in its situations or

of passion in its characters, and the humorous smile with which the

poet acts as showman to the secrets of the alcove, render this tale

one of the most licentious in literature. Nor is this licentiousness

balanced by any sublimer spiritual quality. His ideal of manliness is

physical force and animal courage. Cruelty and bloodshed for the sake

of slaughter stain his heroes.[37] The noblest conflict of emotion he

portrays is the struggle between love and honor in Ruggiero,[38] and

the contest of courtesy between Ruggiero and Leone.[39] In the few

passages where he celebrates the chivalrous ideal, he dwells chiefly

on the scorn of gain and the contempt for ease which characterized the

errant knighthood.[40]

[Footnote 36: If this seems over-stated, I might refer the reader to

the prologue of the _Suppositi_, where the worst vice of the

Renaissance is treated with a flippant relish; or, again, to the

prologue of the _Lena_, where the _double entendre_ is worthy of the

grossest _Capitolo_. The plots of all Ariosto's comedies are of a

vulgar, obscene, _bourgeois_ type.]

[Footnote 37: See xxxix. 10-72, xx. 113, xlvi. 137, and _passim_, for

the carnage wrought by knights cased in enchanted armor with

invulnerable bodies upon defenseless Saracens or unarmed peasants. It

was partly this that made Shelley shrink with loathing from the

_Furioso_.]

[Footnote 38: Cantos xxi. 1-3, xx. 143, xxxviii. introduction, xlv.

57, xxv. introduction.]

[Footnote 39: Cantos xliv. xlv.]

[Footnote 40: Canto vi. 80, vii. 41-44. The sentiments, though

superficial, are exquisitely uttered.]

The style of the _Furioso_ is said to have taught Galileo how to write

Italian. This style won from him for Ariosto the title of _divine_. As

the luminous and flowing octave stanzas pass before us, we are almost

tempted to forget that they are products of deliberate art. The beauty

of their form consists in its limpidity and naturalness. Ariosto has

no mannerism. He always finds exactly the expression needed to give

clearness to the object he presents. Whether the mood be elegiac or

satiric, humorous or heroic, idyllic or rhetorical, this absolute

sincerity and directness of language maintains him at an even level.

In each case he has given the right, the best, the natural investiture

to thought, and his phrases have the self-evidence of crystals. Just

as he collected the materials of his poem from all sources, so he

appropriated every word that seemed to serve his need. The vocabulary

of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the racy terms of popular poetry,

together with Latinisms and Lombardisms, were alike laid under

contribution. Yet these diverse elements were so fused together and

brought into a common toning by his taste that, though the language of

his poem was new, it was at once accepted as classical. When we

remember the difficulties which in his days beset Italian composition,

when we call to mind the frigid experiments of Bembo in Tuscan

diction, the meticulous proprieties of critics like Speron Speroni,

and the warfare waged around the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, we know not

whether to wonder at Ariosto's happy audacities in language or at

their still happier success. His triumph was not won without severe

labor. He spent ten years in the composition of the _Furioso_ and

sixteen in its polishing. The autograph at Ferrara shows page upon

page of alteration, transposition, and refinement on the first

draught, proving that the Homeric limpidity and ease we now admire,

were gained by assiduous self-criticism. The result of this long toil

is that there cannot be found a rough or languid or inharmonious

passage in an epic of 50,000 lines. If we do not discern in Ariosto

the inexhaustible freshness of Homer, the sublime music of Milton,

the sculpturesque brevity of Dante, the purity of Petrarch, or the

majestic sweetness of Virgilian cadences, it can fairly be said that

no other poet is so varied. None mingles strength, sweetness,

subtlety, rapidity, rhetoric, breadth of effect and delicacy of

suggestion, in a harmony so perfect. None combines workmanship so

artistic with a facility that precludes all weariness. Whether we read

him simply to enjoy his story or to taste the most exquisite flavors

of poetic diction, we shall be equally satisfied. Language in his

hands is like a soft and yielding paste, which takes all forms beneath

the molder's hand, and then, when it has hardened, stays for ever

sharp in outline, glittering as adamant.

While following the romantic method of Boiardo and borrowing the

polished numbers of Poliziano, Ariosto refined the stanzas of the

former poet without losing rapidity, and avoided the stationary pomp

of the latter without sacrificing richness. He thus effected a

combination of the two chief currents of Italian versification, and

brought the octave to its final perfection. When we study the passage

which describes the entrance of Ruggiero into the island home of

Alcina, we feel the advance in melody and movement that he made. We

are reminded of the gardens of Morgana and Venus; but both are

surpassed in their own qualities of beauty, while the fluidity that

springs from complete command of the material, is added. Such touches

as the following:[41]

Pensier canuto ne molto ne poco

Si puo quivi albergare in alcun core:

are wholly beyond the scope of Boiardo's style. Again, this stanza,

without the brocaded splendor of Poliziano, contains all that he

derived from Claudian:[42]

Per le cime dei pini e degli allori,

Degli alti faggi e degli irsuti abeti,

Volan scherzando i pargoletti Amori;

Di lor vittorie altri godendo lieti,

Altri pigliando a saettare i cori

La mira quindi, altri tendendo reti:

Chi tempra dardi ad un ruscel piu basso,

E chi gli aguzza ad un volubil sasso.

[Footnote 41: Canto vi. 73.]

[Footnote 42: Canto vi. 75.]

Raphael, Correggio and Titian have succeeded to Botticelli and

Mantegna; and as those supreme painters fused the several excellences

of their predecessors in a fully-developed work of art, so has Ariosto

passed beyond his masters in the art of poetry. Nor was the process

one of mere eclecticism. Intent upon similar aims, the final artists

of the early sixteenth century brought the same profound sentiment for

reality, the same firm grasp on truth, the same vivid imagination as

their precursors to the task. But they possessed surer hands and a

more accomplished method. They stood above their subject and surveyed

it from the height of conscious power.

After the island of Alcina, it only remained for Tasso to produce

novelty in his description of Armida's gardens by pushing one of

Ariosto's qualities to exaggeration. The _dolcezza_, which in Tasso is

too sugared, has in Ariosto the fine flavor of wild honeycombs. In the

tropical magnificence of Tasso's stanzas there is a sultry stupor

which the fresh sunlight of the _Furioso_ never sheds. This wilding

grace of the Ferrarese Homer is due to the lightness of his touch--to

the blending of humorous with luxurious images in a style that passes

swiftly over all it paints.[43] After a like fashion, the idyl of

Angelica among the shepherds surpasses the celebrated episode of

Erminia in the _Gerusalemme_. It is not that Tasso has not invented a

new music and wrung a novel effect from the situation by the

impassioned fervor of his sympathy and by the majestic languor of his

cadences. But we feel that what Tasso relies on for his main effect,

Ariosto had already suggested in combination with other and still

subtler qualities. The one has the overpowering perfume of a hothouse

jasmine; the other has the mingled scents of a garden where roses and

carnations are in bloom.

[Footnote 43: Notice, for example, the irony of the seventh line in

vi. 71, and of the third and fourth in the next stanza.]

Ariosto's pictorial faculty has already formed the topic of a

paragraph, nor is it necessary to adduce instances of what determines

the whole character of the _Orlando Furioso_. Otherwise it would be

easy to form a gallery of portraits and landscapes; to compare the

double treatment of Andromeda exposed to the sea monster in the tenth

and eleventh cantos,[44] to set a pageant in the style of Mantegna by

the side of a Correggiesque vignette,[45] or to enlarge upon the

beauty of those magical Renaissance buildings which the poet dreamed

of in the midst of verdant lawns and flowery wildernesses.[46] True to

the spirit of Italian art, he had no strong sentiment for nature

except in connection with humanity. Therefore we find but little of

landscape-painting for its own sake and small sympathy with the wilder

and uncultivated beauties of the world. His scenery recalls the

backgrounds to Carpaccio's pictures or the idyllic gardens of the

Giorgionesque school. Sometimes there is a magnificent drawing in the

style of Titian's purple mountain ranges, and here and there we come

upon minutely finished studies that imply deep feeling for the moods

of nature. Of this sort is the description of autumn[47];

Tra il fin d'ottobre e il capo di novembre,

Nella stagion che la frondosa vesta

Vede levarsi, e discoprir le membre,

Trepida pianta, finche nuda resta,

E van gli augelli a strette schiere insembre.

[Footnote 44: Canto x. 95, 96, xi. 65, 66. The one is Angelica, the

other Olimpia.]

[Footnote 45: Canto vi. 62, 63, 75.]

[Footnote 46: Canto vi. 71, xxxiv. 51-53.]

[Footnote 47: Canto ix. 7.]

The illuminative force of his similes is quite extraordinary. He uses

them not only as occasions for painting cabinet pictures of exquisite

richness, but also for casting strong imaginative light upon the

object under treatment. In the earlier part of the _Furioso_ he

describes two battles with a huge sea monster. The Orc is a kind of

romantic whale, such as Piero di Cosimo painted in his tale of

Andromeda; and Ruggiero has to fight it first, while riding on the

Hippogriff. It is therefore necessary for Ariosto to image forth a

battle between behemoth and a mighty bird. He does so by elaborately

painting the more familiar struggles of an eagle who has caught a

snake, and of a mastiff snapping at a fly.[48] At the same time he

adds realistic touches like the following:

L'orca, che vede sotto le grandi ale

L'ombra di qua e di la correr su l'onda,

Lascia la preda certa littorale,

E quella vana segue furibonda.

[Footnote 48: Canto x. 102-106.]

Or, again, when Ruggiero is afraid of wetting his aerial courser's

wings:

Che se lo sprazzo in tal modo ha a durare,

Teme si l'ale innaffi all'Ippogrifo,

Che brami invano avere o zucca o schifo.

The mixture of imagery with prosaic detail brings the whole scene

distinctly before our eyes. When Orlando engages the same monster, he

is in a boat, and the conditions of the contest are altered.

Accordingly we have a different set of similes. A cloud that fills a

valley, rolling to and fro between the mountain sides, describes the

movement of the Orc upon the waters; and when Orlando thrusts his

anchor in between its jaws to keep them open, he is compared to miners

propping up their galleries with beams in order that they may pursue

their work in safety.[49] In this way we realize the formidable nature

of the beast, and comprehend the stratagem that tames it to Orlando's

will.

[Footnote 49: Canto xi. 34-38.]

The same nice adaptation of images may be noticed in the similes

showered on Rodomonte. The giant is alone inside the walls of Paris,

and the poet is bound to make us feel that a whole city may have cause

to tremble before a single man. Therefore he never leaves our fancy

for a moment in repose. At one time it is a castle shaken by a storm;

at another a lion retreating before the hunters; again, a tigress

deprived of her cubs, or a bull that has broken from the

baiting-pole, or the whelps of a lioness attacking a fierce young

steer.[50] Image succeeds image with dazzling rapidity, all tending to

render a strained situation possible.

[Footnote 50: Canto xviii. 11, 14, 19, 22, 35.]

Some of Ariosto's illustrations--like the plowman and the thunderbolt,

the two dogs fighting, the powder magazine struck by lightning, the

house on fire at night, the leaves of autumn, the pine that braves a

tempest, the forest bending beneath mighty winds, the April avalanche

of suddenly dissolving snow--though wrought with energy and spirit,

have not more than the usual excellences of carefully developed

Homeric imitation.[51] Framed in single octave stanzas, they are

pictures for the mind to rest on. Others illuminate the matter they

are used to illustrate, with the radiance of subtle and remote fancy.

Of this sort is the brief image by which the Paladins in Charlemagne's

army are likened to jewels in a cloth of gold:[52]

Ed hanno i paladin sparsi tra loro,

Come le gemme in un ricamo d'oro.

[Footnote 51: Canto i. 65, ii. 5, ix. 78, xx. 89, xxi. 15, 16, xxiv.

63, xxxvi. 40.]

[Footnote 52: Canto xxxix. 17.]

A common metaphor takes new beauty by its handling in this simile[53];

Pallido come colto al mattutino

E da sera il ligustro o il molle acanto.

[Footnote 53: Canto xliii. 169.]

Homer had compared the wound of Menelaus to ivory stained by a Maeonian

woman with crimson.[54] Ariosto refines on this conceit:[55]

Cosi talora un bel purpureo nastro

Ho veduto partir tela d'argento

Da quella bianca man piu ch'alabastro.

Da cui partire il cor spesso mi sento.

[Footnote 54: _Iliad_, iv. 140.]

[Footnote 55: Canto xxiv. 66.]

Both Homer and Virgil likened their dying heroes to flowers cut down

by the tempest or the plow. The following passage will bear comparison

even with the death of Euphorbus:[56]

Come purpureo fior languendo muore,

Che 'l vomere al passar tagliato lassa,

O come carco di superchio umore

Il papaver nell'orto il capo abbassa:

Cosi, giu della faccia ogni colore

Cadendo, Dardinel di vita passa;

Passa di vita, e fa passar con lui

L'ardire e la virtu di tutti i sui.

[Footnote 56: Canto xviii. 153.]

One more example may be chosen where Ariosto has borrowed nothing from

any model. He uses the perfume that clings to the hair or dress of

youth or maiden, as a metaphor for the aroma of noble ancestry:[57]

L'odor ch'e sparso in ben notrita e bella

O chioma o barba o delicata vesta

Di giovene leggiadro o di donzella,

Ch'amor sovente sospirando desta;

Se spira, e fa sentir di se novella,

E dopo molti giorni ancora resta,

Mostra con chiaro ed evidente effetto,

Come a principio buono era e perfetto.

[Footnote 57: Canto xli. 1.]

The unique importance of Ariosto in the history of Renaissance poetry

justifies a lengthy examination of his masterpiece. In him the chief

artistic forces of the age were so combined that he remains its best

interpreter. Painting, the cardinal art of Italy, determined his

method; and the tide of his narrative carried with it the idyl, the

elegy, and the _novella_. In these forms the genius of the Renaissance

found fittest literary expression; for the epic and the drama lay

beyond the scope of the Italians at this period. The defect of deep

passion and serious thought, the absence of enthusiasm, combined with

rare analytic powers and an acute insight into human nature, placed

Ariosto in close relation to his age. Free from illusions, struggling

after no high-set ideal, accepting the world as he found it, without

the impulse to affirm or to deny, without hate, scorn, indignation or

revolt, he represented the spirit of the sixteenth century in those

qualities which were the source of moral and political decay to the

Italians. But he also embodied the strong points of his

epoch--especially that sustained pursuit of beauty in form, that width

of intellectual sympathy, that urbanity of tone and delicacy of

perception, which rendered Italy the mistress of the arts, the

propagator of culture for the rest of Europe.

CHAPTER X.

THE NOVELLIERI.

Boccaccio's Legacy--Social Conditions of Literature in

Italy--Importance of the _Novella_--Definition of the

_Novella_--Method of the Novelists--Their Style--Materials

used--Large Numbers of _Novelle_ in Print--Lombard and

Tuscan Species--Introductions to Il Lasca's _Cene_,

Parabosco's _Diporti_--Bandello's Dedications--Life of

Bandello--His Moral Attitude--Bandello as an

Artist--Comparison of Bandello and Fletcher--The Tale of

_Gerardo and Elena_--_Romeo and Juliet_--The Tale of

_Nicuola_--The _Countess of Salisbury_--Bandello's Apology

for his Morals and his Style--Il Lasca--Mixture of Cruelty

and Lust--Extravagant Situations--Treatment of the

_Parisina_ Motive--The Florentine _Burla_--Apology for Il

Lasca's Repulsiveness--Firenzuola--His Life--His Satires on

the Clergy--His Dialogue on Beauty--Novelettes and

Poems--Doni's Career--His Bizarre Humor--Bohemian Life at

Venice--The Pellegrini--His _Novelle_--Miscellaneous

Works--The _Marmi_--The Novelists of Siena--Their specific

Character--Sermini--Fortini--Bargagli's Description of the

Siege of Siena--Illicini's Novel of _Angelica_--The

_Proverbi_ of Cornazano--The _Notti Piacevoli_ of

Straparola--The Novel of _Belphegor_--Straparola and

Machiavelli--Giraldi Cinthio's _Hecatommithi_--Description

of the Sack of Rome--Plan of the Collection--The Legend of

the Borgias--Comparison of Italian Novels and English Plays.

Of Boccaccio's legacy the most considerable portion, and the one that

bore the richest fruit, was the Decameron. During the sixteenth

century the _Novella_, as he shaped it, continued to be a popular and

widely practiced form of literature. In Italy the keynote of the

Renaissance was struck by the _Novella_, as in England by the Drama.

Nor is this predominance of what must be reckoned a subordinate branch

of fiction, altogether singular; for the _Novella_ was in a special

sense adapted to the public which during the Age of the Despots grew

up in Italy. Since the fourteenth century the conditions of social

life had undergone a thorough revolution. Under the influence of

dynastic rulers stationed in great cities, merchants and manufacturers

were confounded with the old nobility; and in commonwealths like

Florence the _bourgeoisie_ gave their tone to society. At the same

time the community thus formed was separated from the people by the

bar of humanistic culture. Literature felt this social transformation.

Its products were shaped to suit the taste of the middle classes, and

at the same time to amuse the leisure of the aristocracy. The

_Novella_ was the natural outcome of these circumstances. Its

qualities and its defects alike betray the ascendency of the

_bourgeois_ element.

When a whole nation is addressed in drama or epic, it is necessary for

the poet to strike a lofty and noble note. He appeals to collective

humanity, and there is no room for aught that savors of the trivial

and base. Homer and Sophocles, Dante and Shakspere, owed their

grandeur in no slight measure to the audience for whom they labored.

The case is altered when a nation comes to be divided into orders,

each of which has its own peculiar virtues and its own besetting sins.

Limitations are of necessity introduced and deflections from the canon

of universality are welcomed. If the poet, for example, writes for the

lowest classes of society, he can afford to be coarse, but he must be

natural. An aristocracy, taken by itself, is apt, on the contrary, to

demand from literature the refinements of fashionable vice and the

subtleties of artificial sentiment. Under such influence we obtain

the Arthurian legends of the later middle ages, which contrast

unfavorably, in all points of simplicity and directness, with the

earlier Niebelungen and Carolingian Cycles. The middle classes, for

their part, delight in pictures of daily life, presented with realism,

and flavored with satire that touches on the points of their

experience. Literature produced to please the _bourgeois_, must be

sensible and positive; and its success will greatly depend upon the

piquancy of its appeal to ordinary unidealized appetites. The Italians

lacked such means of addressing the aggregated masses of the nation as

the panhellenic festivals of Greece afforded. The public, which gave

its scale of grandeur and sincerity to the Attic and Elizabethan

drama, was wanting. The literature of the _cinque cento_, though it

owed much to the justice of perception and simple taste of the true

people, was composed for the most part by men of middle rank for the

amusement of citizens and nobles. It partook of those qualities which

characterise the upper and middle classes. It was deficient in the

breadth, the magnitude, the purity, which an audience composed of the

whole nation can alone communicate. We find it cynical, satirical,

ingenious in sly appeals to appetite, and oftentimes superfluously

naughty. Above all it was emphatically the literature of a society

confined to cities.

It may be difficult to decide what special quality of the Italian

temperament was satisfied with the _Novella_. Yet the fact remains

that this species of composition largely governed their production,

not only in the field of narrative, but also in the associated region

of poetry and in the plastic arts. So powerful was the attraction it

possessed, that even the legends of the saints assumed this character.

A notable portion of the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ were dramatized

_Novelle_. The romantic poets interwove _Novelle_ with their main

theme, and the charm of the _Orlando Furioso_ is due in no small

measure to such episodes. Popular poems of the type represented by

_Ginevra degli Almieri_ were versified _Novelle_. Celebrated trials,

like that of the Countess of Cellant, Vittoria Accoramboni, or the

Cenci, were offered to the people in the form of _Novelle_. The

humanists--Pontano, Poggio, AEneas Sylvius--wrote _Novelle_ in Latin.

The best serial pictures of the secondary painters--whether we select

Benozzo Gozzoli's legend of S. Augustine at San Gemignano, or

Carpaccio's legend of S. Ursula at Venice, or Sodoma's legend of S.

Benedict at Monte Oliveto, or Lippo Lippi's legend of S. John at

Prato--are executed in the spirit of the novelists. They are _Novelle_

painted in their salient incidents for the laity to study on the walls

of church and oratory.

The term _Novella_ requires definition, lest the thing in question

should be confounded with our modern novel. Although they bear the

same name, these species have less in common than might be supposed.

Both, indeed, are narratives; but while the novel is a history

extending over a considerable space of time, embracing a complicated

tissue of events, and necessitating a study of character, the

_Novella_ is invariably brief and sketchy. It does not aim at

presenting a detailed picture of human life within certain

artistically chosen limitations, but confines itself to a striking

situation, or tells an anecdote illustrative of some moral quality.

This is shown by the headings of the sections into which Italian

_Novellieri_ divided their collections. We read such rubrics as the

following: "On the magnanimity of princes"; "Concerning those who have

been fortunate in love"; "Of sudden changes from prosperity to evil

fortune"; "The guiles of women practiced on their husbands." A theme

is proposed, and the _Novelle_ are intended to exemplify it. The

_Novelle_ were descended in a direct line from the anecdotes embedded

in medieval Treasuries, Bestiaries, and similar collections. The

novel, on the other hand, as Cervantes, Richardson, and Fielding

formed it for the modern nations, is an expansion and prose digest of

the drama. It implies the drama as a previous condition of its being,

and flourishes among races gifted with the dramatic faculty.

Furthermore, the _Novelle_ were composed for the amusement of mixed

companies, who met together and passed their time in conversation. All

the _Novellieri_ pretend that their stories were originally recited

and then written down, nor is there the least doubt that in a large

majority of cases they were really read aloud or improvised upon

occasions similar to those invented by their authors. These

circumstances determined the length and ruled the mechanism of the

_Novella_. It was impossible within the short space of a spoken tale

to attempt any minute analysis of character, or to weave the meshes of

a complicated plot. The narrator went straight to his object, which

was to arrest the attention, stimulate the curiosity, gratify the

sensual instincts, excite the laughter, or stir the tender emotions

of his audience by some fantastic, extraordinary, voluptuous, comic,

or pathetic incident. He sketched his personages with a few swift

touches, set forth their circumstances with pungent brevity, and

expended his force upon the painting of the central motive. Sometimes

he contented himself with a bare narrative, leaving its details to the

fancy. Many _Novelle_ are the mere skeletons of stories, short notes,

and epitomes of tales. At another time he indulged in descriptive

passages of great verbal beauty, when it was his purpose to delight

the ideal audience with pictures, or to arouse their sympathy for his

characters in a situation of peculiar vividness. Or he introduced

digressions upon moral themes suggested by the passion of the moment,

discoursing with the easy flow of one who raises points of casuistry

in a drawing-room. Again, he heightened the effects of his anecdote by

elaborate rhetorical development of the main emotions, placing

carefully-studied speeches into the mouth of heroine or hero, and

using every artifice for appealing directly to the feelings of his

hearers. Thus, while the several _Novellieri_ pursue different methods

at different times according to their purpose, their styles are all

determined by the fact that recitation was essential to the species.

All of them, moreover, have a common object in amusement. Though the

_Novellieri_ profess to teach morality by precept, and though some of

them prefix prayers to their most impudent debauches of the fancy,[58]

it is clear that entertainment was their one sole end in view. For

their success they relied on the novelty and strangeness of their

incidents; on obscenity, sometimes veiled beneath the innuendoes and

suggestive metaphors of Italian convention, but more often unabashed

and naked to the view; on startling horrors, acts of insane passion,

or the ingenuities of diabolical cruelty. The humor of _beffe_ and

_burle_, jests played by rogues on simpletons, practical jokes, and

the various devices whereby wives and lovers fooled confiding

husbands, supplied abundant material for relieving the more tragic

stories. Lastly, the wide realm of pathos, the spectacle of beauty in

distress, young lovers overwhelmed by undeserved calamity, sudden

reverses of fortune, and accidents of travel upon land and sea,

provided the narrator with plentiful matter for working on the

sympathy of his readers. Of moral purpose in any strict sense of the

phrase the _Novelle_ have none. This does not mean that they are

invariably immoral; on the contrary, the theme of a considerable

number is such that the tale can be agreeably told without violence to

the most sensitive taste. But the novelist had no ethical intention;

therefore he brought every motive into use that might amuse or

stimulate, with business-like indifference. He felt no qualm of

conscience at provoking the cruder animal instincts, at dragging the

sanctities of domestic life in the mire of his buffoonery, or at

playing on the appetite for monstrous vice, the thirst for abnormal

sensations, in his audience. So long as he could excite attention, he

was satisfied. We cannot but wonder at the customs of a society which

derived its entertainment from these tales, when we know that noble

ladies listened to them without blushing, and that bishops composed

them as a graceful compliment to the daughter of a reigning duke.[59]

[Footnote 58: See Bandello's Introduction to _Nov._ xxxv. of Part i.,

where a most disgusting story is ushered in with ethical reflections;

and take this passage from the opening of one of Il Lasca's least

presentable novels: "Prima che al novellare di questa sera si dia

principio, mi rivolgo a te, Dio ottimo e grandissimo, che solo tutto

sai e tutto puoi, pregandoti divotamente e di cuore, che per la tua

infinita bonta e clemenza mi conceda, e a tutti questi altri che dopo

me diranno, tanto del tuo ajuto e della tua grazia, che la mia lingua

e la loro non dica cosa niuna, se non a tua lode e a nostra

consolazione."--_Le Cene_ (Firenze, Lemonnier, 1857), p. 7.]

[Footnote 59: It may be mentioned that not _all_ stories were recited

before women. Bandello introduces one of his tales with the remark

that in the absence of the ladies men may be less careful in their

choice of themes (_Nov._ xxx. pt. i.). The exception is singular, as

illustrating what was thought unfit for female ears. The _Novella_

itself consists of a few jokes upon a disgusting subject; but it is

less immodest than many which he dedicated to noble women.]

In style the _Novelle_ are, as might be expected, very unequal.

Everybody tried his hand at them: some wrote sparkling Tuscan, others

a dense Lombard dialect; some were witty, others dull. Yet all

affected to be following Boccaccio. His artificial periods and

rhetorical amplifications, ill-managed by men of imperfect literary

training, who could not free themselves from local jargons, produced

an awkward mixture of discordant faults. Yet the public expected

little from the novelist in diction. What they required was movement,

stimulus, excitement of their passions. So long as the tale-maker kept

curiosity awake, it was a matter of comparative indifference what sort

of words he used. The _Novella_ was a literary no-man's-land, where

the critic exercised a feeble sway, and amateurs or artists did what

each found suited to his powers. It held its ground under conditions

similar to those which determined the supply of plays among us in the

seventeenth century, or of magazine novels in this.

In their material the _Novelle_ embraced the whole of Italian society,

furnishing pictures of its life and manners from the palaces of

princes to the cottages of _contadini_. Every class is represented--the

man of books, the soldier, the parish priest, the cardinal, the

counter-jumper, the confessor, the peasant, the duke, the merchant,

the noble lady, the village maiden, the serving-man, the artisan, the

actor, the beggar, the courtesan, the cut-throat, the astrologer, the

lawyer, the physician, the midwife, the thief, the preacher, the nun,

the pander, the fop, the witch, the saint, the galley-slave, the

friar--they move before us in a motley multitude like the masquerade

figures of carnival time, jostling each other in a whirl of merriment

and passion, mixing together in the frank democracy of vice. Though

these pictures of life are brightly colored and various beyond

description, they are superficial. It is only the surface of existence

that the _Novelliere_ touches. He leaves its depths unanalyzed, except

when he plunges a sinister glance into some horrible abyss of cruelty

or lust, or, stirred by gentler feeling, paints an innocent unhappy

youthful love. The student of contemporary Italian customs will glean

abundant information from these pages; the student of human nature

gathers little except reflections on the morals of sixteenth-century

society. It was perhaps this prodigal superfluity of striking

incident, in combination with poverty of intellectual content, which

made the _Novelle_ so precious to our playwrights. The tales of

Cinthio and Bandello supplied them with the outlines of tragedies,

leaving the poet free to exercise his analytic and imaginative powers

upon the creation of character and the elaboration of motive. But

that in spite of all their faults, the _Novelle_ fascinate the fancy

and stimulate the mental energies, will be admitted by all who have

made them the subject of careful study.

To render an adequate account of the _Novellieri_ and their works is

very difficult.[60] The printing-press poured novels forth in every

town in Italy, and authors of all districts vied with one another in

their composition. At Florence Firenzuola penned stories with the

golden fluency and dazzling wealth of phrase peculiar to him. Il

Lasca's _Cene_ rank among the most considerable literary products of

the age. At Florence again, Machiavelli wrote _Belphegor_, and

Scipione Bargagli printed his _Trattenimenti_. Gentile Sermini, Pietro

Fortini and Giustiniano Nelli were the novelists of Siena; Masuccio

and Antonio Mariconda, of Naples. At Rome the Modenese Francesco Maria

Molza rivaled the purity of Tuscan in his _Decamerone_. But it was

chiefly in the North of Italy that novelists abounded. Giraldi's

hundred tales, entitled _Hecatommithi_, issued from Ferrara. They were

heavy in style, and prosaic; yet their matter made them widely

popular. Sabadino wrote his _Porretane_ at Bologna, and Francesco

Straparola of Caravaggio published his _Tredici piacevoli Notti_ at

Venice. There also appeared the _Diporti_ of Girolamo Parabosco, the

_Sei Giornate_ of Sebastiano Erizzo, Celio Malespini's _Ducento

Novelle_, and the _Proverbi_ of Antonio Cornazano. Cademosto of Lodi,

Monsignor Brevio of Venice, Ascanio de' Mori of Mantua, Luigi da

Porto of Vicenza, and, last not least, the illustrious Matteo

Bandello, proved how rich in this species of literature were the

northern provinces. The Lombards displayed a special faculty for tales

in which romance predominated. Venice, notorious for her

pleasure-marts of luxury, became the emporium of publications which

supplied her courtesans and rufflers with appropriate mental food. The

Tuscans showed more comic humor, and, of course, a purer style. But in

point of matter, intellectual and moral, there is not much to choose

between the works of Florentine and Lombard authors.

[Footnote 60: _I Novellieri in Prosa_, by Giambattista Passano

(Milano, Schiepatti, 1864), will be found an excellent dictionary of

reference.]

Following the precedent of Boccaccio, it was usual for the

_Novellieri_ to invent a framework for their stories, making it appear

that a polite society of men and women (called in Italy a _lieta

brigata_) had by some chance accident been thrown upon their own

resources in circumstances of piquant novelty. One of the party

suggests that they should spend their time in telling tales, and a

captain is chosen who sets the theme and determines the order of the

story-tellers. These introductions are not unfrequently the most

carefully written portion of the collection, and abound in charming

sketches of Italian life. Thus Il Lasca at the opening of _Le Cene_

feigns that a company of young men and women went in winter time to

visit at a friend's house in Florence. It was snowing, and the youths

amused themselves by a snow-ball match in the inner courtyard of the

palace. The ladies watched them from a _loggia_, till it came into

their heads to join the game. Snow was brought them from the roofs,

and they began to pelt the young men from their balcony.[61] The fire

was returned; and when the _brigata_ had enough of this fun, they

entered the house together, dried their clothes, and, sitting round a

blazing hearth, formed a plan for telling stories at supper. Girolamo

Parabosco places the scene of his _Diporti_ on the Venetian lagoons. A

party of gentlemen have left the city to live in huts of wood and

straw upon the islands, with the intention of fowling and fishing. The

weather proves too bad for sport, and they while away the hours of

idleness with anecdotes. Bandello follows a different method, which

had been suggested by Masuccio. He dedicates his _Novelle_ to the

distinguished people of his acquaintance, in prefaces not devoid of

flattery, but highly interesting to a student of those times. Princes,

poets, warriors, men of state, illustrious women, and humanists pass

before us in these dedications, proving that polite society in Italy,

the society of the learned and the noble, was a republic of wit and

culture. Alessandro Bentivoglio and Ippolita Sforza, the leaders of

fashion and Bandello's special patrons, take the first rank.[62] Then

we have the Gonzaga family of Mantua, Lancinus Curtius, Aldus

Manutius, Machiavelli, Molsa, Guicciardini, Castiglione, the Duchess

of Urbino, Giovanni de' Medici, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Bernardo Tasso,

Prospero Colonna, Julius II., Porcellio, Pontano, Berni, the Milanese

Visconti, the Neapolitan Sanseverini, the Adorni of Genoa, the Foscari

of Venice, the Estensi of Ferrara. Either directly addressed in

prefaces or mentioned with familiar allusion in the course of the

narratives, these historic names remind us that the author lived at

the center of civilization, and that his _Novelle_ were intended for

the entertainment of the great world. What Castiglione presents

abstractedly and in theory as a critique of noble society, is set

before us by Bandello in the concrete form of every-day occurrence.

Nor does the author forget that he is speaking to this company. His

words are framed to suit their prejudices; his allusions have

reference to their sentiments and predilections. The whole work of art

breathes the air of good manners and is tuned to a certain pitch-note

of fashionable tone. We may be astounded that ladies and gentlemen of

the highest birth and breeding could tolerate the licenses of language

and suggestion furnished by Bandello for their delectation. We may

draw conclusions as to their corruption and essential coarseness in

the midst of refined living and external gallantries[63]. Yet the fact

remains that these _Novelle_ were a customary adjunct to the courtly

pleasures of the sixteenth century; and it was only through the

printing-press that they passed into the taverns and the brothels,

where perhaps they found their fittest audience.

[Footnote 61: This motive may have been suggested by Folgore da S.

Gemignano's sonnet on the month of January.]

[Footnote 62: These are the pair so nobly painted by Luini above the

high-altar of S. Maurizio at Milan. See my _Sketches and Studies in

Italy_.]

[Footnote 63: What we know about manners at the Courts of our

Elizabeth and James, and the gossip of the French Court in Brantome's

_Dames Galantes_, remind us that this blending of grossness and luxury

was not peculiar to Italy.]

Matteo Bandello was a member of the petty Lombard nobility, born at

Castelnuovo in Tortona. His uncle was General of the Dominicans, and

this circumstance determined Matteo's career. After spending some

years of his youth at Rome, he entered the order of the Predicatori in

the Convent delle Grazie at Milan. He was not, however, destined to

the seclusion of a convent; for he attended his uncle, in the

character apparently of a companion or familiar secretary, when the

General visited the chief Dominican establishments of Italy, Spain,

France and Germany. A considerable portion of Bandello's manhood was

passed at Mantua, where he became the tutor and the platonic lover of

Lucrezia Gonzaga. Before the date 1525, when French and Spaniards

contested the Duchy of Milan, he had already formed a collection of

_Novelle_ in manuscript--the fruits of all that he had heard and seen

upon his frequent travels. These were dispersed when the Spaniards

entered Milan and pillaged the house of the Bandello family.[64]

Matteo, after numerous adventures as an exile, succeeded in recovering

a portion of his papers, and retired with Cesare Fregoso to the Court

of France. He now set himself seriously to the task of preparing his

_Novelle_ for the press; nor was this occupation interrupted by the

duties of the see of Agen, conferred upon him in 1550 by Henry II. The

new bishop allowed his colleague of Grasse to administer the see,

drawing enough of its emoluments for his private needs, and attending

till his death, about the year 1560, to study and composition.

[Footnote 64: See Dedication to _Nov._ xi. of second part.]

Bandello's life was itself a _novella_. The scion of a noble house,

early dedicated to the order of S. Dominic, but with the General of

that order for his uncle, he enjoyed rare opportunities of studying

men and manners in all parts of Europe. His good abilities and active

mind enabled him to master the essentials of scholarship, and

introduced him as tutor to one of the most fascinating learned women

of his age. These privileges he put to use by carrying on a courtly

flirtation with his interesting pupil, at the same time that he penned

his celebrated novels. The disasters of the Milanese Duchy deprived

him of his literary collections and probably injured his fortune. But

he found advancement on a foreign soil, and died a bishop at the

moment when Europe was ringing with the scandals of his too licentious

tales. These tales furnished the Reformers with a weapon in their war

against the Church; nor would it have been easy to devise one better

to their purpose. Even now it moves astonishment to think that a monk

should have written, and a bishop should have published, the _facetiae_

with which Bandello's books are filled.

Bandello paints a society in dissolution, bound together by no

monarchical or feudal principles, without patriotism, without piety,

united by none of the common spiritual enthusiasms that make a people

powerful. The word honor is on everybody's lips; but the thing is

nowhere: and when the story-teller seeks to present its ideal image to

his audience, he proves by the absurdity of his exaggeration that he

has no clear conception of its meaning.[65] The virtues which

inspired an earlier and less corrupt civility, have become occasions

for insipid rhetoric. The vice that formerly stirred indignation, is

now the subject of mirth. There is no satire, because there is no

moral sense. Bandello's revelations of clerical and monastic

immorality supplied the enemies of Rome with a full brief; but it is

obvious that Bandello and his audience regarded the monstrous tale of

profligacy with amusement. His frankness upon the very eve of the

Council of Trent has something at once cynical and sinister. It makes

us feel that the hypocrisy engendered by the German Reformation, the

_si non caste tamen caute_ of the new ecclesiastical _regime_, was the

last resort of a system so debased that vital regeneration had become

impossible. This does not necessarily mean that the Italian Church had

no worthy ministers in the sixteenth century. But when her dealing

with the people ended in a humorous acceptance of such sin, we

perceive that the rottenness had reached the core. To present the

details of Bandello's clerical stories would be impossible in pages

meant for modern readers. It is enough to say that he spares no rank

or order of the Roman priesthood. The prelate, the parish curate, the

abbot and the prioress, the monk and nun, are made the subject of

impartial ribaldry.[66] The secrets of convents abandoned to

debauchery are revealed with good-humored candor, as though the

scandal was too common to need special comment.[67] Sometimes

Bandello extracts comedy from the contrast between the hypocritical

pretensions of his clerical ruffians and their lawless conduct, as in

the story of the priest who for his own ends persuaded his

parishioners that the village was haunted by a griffin.[68] Sometimes

he succeeds in drawing a satirical portrait, like that of the

Franciscan friar who domesticated himself as chaplain in the castle of

a noble Norman family.[69] But the majority of these tales are simply

obscene, with no point but a coarse picture or a shockingly painful

climax.[70]

[Footnote 65: Read, for example, the _Novella_ of Zilia, who imposed

silence on her lover because he kissed her, and the whole sequel to

his preposterous obedience (iii. 17); or the tale of Don Giovanni

Emmanuel in the lion's den (iii. 39); or the rambling story of Don

Diego and Ginevra la Bionda (i. 27). The two latter have a touch of

Spanish extravagance, but without the glowing Spanish passion. In

quoting Bandello, I shall refer to _Part_ and _Novel_ by two numerals.

References are made to the Milanese edition, _Novellieri Italiani_,

1813-1816.]

[Footnote 66: For instance, Parte ii. _Nov._ 14; ii. xlv.; iii. 2, 3,

4, 7, 20.]

[Footnote 67: See the description in ii. 36 (vol. v. p. 270); and

again, iii. 61; ii. 45.]

[Footnote 68: ii. 2.]

[Footnote 69: ii. 24.]

[Footnote 70: See, for instance, ii. 20; ii. 7.]

The same judgment may be passed upon a large portion of the _Novelle_

which deal with secular characters. They are indecent anecdotes, and

do not illustrate any specific quality in the author or in the temper

of his times.[71] The seasoning of horror only serves to render their

licentiousness more loathsome. As Bandello lacked the indignation of

Masuccio, so he failed to touch Masuccio's tragic chord. When he

attempted it, as in the ghastly story of Violante, who revenged

herself upon a faithless lover by tearing him to pieces with pincers,

or in the disgusting novel of Pandora, or again in the tale of the

husband who forced his wife to strangle her lover with her own hands,

he only rouses physical repulsion.[72] He makes our flesh creep, and

produces literature analogous to that of the _Police Times_. Nor does

he succeed better with subjects that require the handling of a

profound psychologist. His Rosmunda and Tarquin, his Faustina and

Seleucus, leave an impression of failure through defect of imaginative

force[73]; while the incestuous theme of one tale, treated as it is

with frigid levity, can claim no justification on the score of

dramatic handling or high-wrought spiritual agony.[74]

[Footnote 71: I need not give any references to the _Novelle_ of this

groveling type. But I may call attention to i. 35; ii. 11; iv. 34, 35.

These tales are not exceptionally obscene; they illustrate to what

extent mere filth of the Swiftian sort passed for fun in the Italy of

Bembo and Castiglione.]

[Footnote 72: i. 42; iii. 21; iii. 52; ii. 12.]

[Footnote 73: iii. 18; ii. 21; i. 36; iii. 55.]

[Footnote 74: ii. 35; cp. i. 37.]

It was not in this region of tragic terror that Bandello's genius

moved with freedom. In describing the luxury of Milan or the manners

of the Venetian courtesans, in bringing before us scenes from the

_demi-monde_ of Rome or painting the life of a _grisette_, he shows

acute knowledge of society, studied under its more superficial

aspects, and produces pictures that are valuable for the

antiquarian.[75] The same merit of freshness belongs to many minor

anecdotes, like the romance of the girl who drowned herself in the

Oglio to save her honor, or the pretty episode of Costantino Boccali

who swam the Adige in winter at a thoughtless lady's behest.[76] Yet

in Bandello's versions of contemporary histories which taxed the

imaginative powers or demanded deeper insight into human passions, we

miss the true dramatic ring. It was only when it fell into the hands

of Webster, that his dull narrative of the Duchess of Amalfi revealed

its capacities for artistic treatment.[77] Nor is the story of the

Countess of Cellant, though full of striking details, so presented as

to leave the impression of tragedy upon our minds.[78] We only feel

what Webster, dealing with it as he dealt with Vittoria Corombona's

crime, might have made out of this poor material.

[Footnote 75: The pictures of Milanese luxury before the Spanish

occupation are particularly interesting. See i. 9, and the beginning

of ii. 8. It seems that then, as now, Milan was famous for her

equipages and horses. The tale of the two fops who always dressed in

white (iii. 11) brings that life before us. For the Venetian and Roman

_demi-monde_, iii. 31; i. 19; i. 42; ii. 51, may be consulted. These

passages have the value of authentic studies from contemporary life,

and are told about persons whom the author knew at least by name.]

[Footnote 76: i. 8; i. 47.]

[Footnote 77: i. 26.]

[Footnote 78: i. 108.]

It may be asked, if this is all, why any one should take the pains to

read through the two hundred and fourteen _Novelle_ of Bandello, and,

having done so, should think it worth his while to write about them.

Ought they not rather to be left among the things the world would

willingly let die? The answer to this question is twofold. In the

first place they fairly represent the whole class of novels which were

produced so abundantly in Italy that the historian of Renaissance

literature cannot pass them by in silence. Secondly, Bandello at his

best is a great artist in the story-teller's craft. The conditions

under which he displayed his powers to true advantage, require some

definition. Once only did he successfully handle a really comic

situation. That was in his tale of the monkey who dressed himself up

in a dead woman's clothes, and frightened her family when they

returned from the funeral, by mimicking her movement.[79] He was never

truly tragic. But in the intermediate region between tragedy and

comedy, where situations of romantic beauty offer themselves to the

sympathetic imagination--in that realm of pathos and adventure, where

pictures of eventful living can be painted, and the conflicts of

tender emotion have to be described, Bandello proved himself a master.

It would make the orthodox Italian critics shudder in their graves to

hear that he had been compared to Ariosto. Yet a foreigner, gifted

with obtuser sensibility to the refinements of Italian diction, may

venture the remark that Bandello was a kind of prose Ariosto--in the

same sense as Heywood seemed a prose Shakspere to Charles Lamb. Judged

by the high standard of Athenian or Elizabethan art, neither Ariosto

nor Bandello was a first-rate dramatist. But both commanded the

material of which romantic tragedies can be constructed. Bandello's

best _Novelle_ abound in the situations which delighted our

playwrights of the Jacobean age--in the thrilling incidents and scenes

of high-wrought passion we are wont to deem the special property of

Fletcher. He puts them before us with a force of realistic coloring,

and develops them with a warmth of feeling, that leave no doubt of his

artistic skill. Composition and style may fail him, but his sympathy

with the poetic situation, and his power to express it are

unmistakable. In support of this opinion I might point to his vigorous

but repulsive presentation of Parisina's legend, where the gradual

yielding of a sensitive young man to the seductions of a sensual

woman, is painted with touches of terrible veracity.[80] Or the tale

of the Venetian lovers might be chosen.[81] Gerardo and Elena were

secretly married; but in his absence on a voyage, she was plighted by

her father to another husband. Before the consummation of this second

marriage, Elena fell through misery into a death-like trance, and was

taken by her kindred to be buried at Castello on the shores of the

lagoons. At the moment when the funeral procession was crossing the

waters by the light of many torches, the ship of Gerardo cast anchor

in the port of Venice, and the young man heard that his wife was dead.

Attended by a single friend, he went under cover of the night to where

she had been laid in a sarcophagus outside the church. This he opened,

and, frantic between grief and joy, bore the corpse of his beloved to

his boat. He kissed her lips, and laid himself beside her lifeless

body, wildly refusing to listen to his friend's expostulations. Then

while the gondola rocked on the waves of the lagoons and the sea-wind

freshened before daybreak, Elena awoke. It is needless to add that the

story ends in happiness. This brief sketch conveys no notion of the

picturesque beauty of the incidents described, or of the intimate

acquaintance with Venetian customs displayed in the _Novella_. To one

who knows Venice, it is full of delicate suggestions, and the reader

illuminates the margin with illustrations in the manner of Carpaccio.

[Footnote 79: iii. 65.]

[Footnote 80: i. 44.]

[Footnote 81: ii. 41.]

There is a point of Romeo and Juliet in the tale of Gerardo and Elena.

Bandello's own treatment of the Veronese romance deserves comparison

with Shakspere's.[82] The evolution of the tragedy is nearly the same

in all its leading incidents; for we hear of Romeo's earlier love, and

the friar who dealt in simples is there, and so are the nurse and

apothecary. Bandello has anticipated Shakspere even in Juliet's

soliloquy before she drinks the potion, when the dreadful thought

occurs to her that she may wake too soon, and find herself alone among

the dry bones of her ancestors, with Tybalt festering in his shroud.

But the prose version exhibits one motive which Shakspere missed.

When Romeo opens the tomb, he rouses Juliet from her slumber, and in

his joy forgets that he has drunk the poison. For a while the lovers

are in paradise together in that region of the dead; and it is only

when the chill of coming death assails him, that Romeo remembers what

he has done. He dies, and Juliet stabs herself with his sword. Had

Shakspere chosen to develop this catastrophe, instead of making Romeo

perish before the waking of Juliet, he might have wrought the most

pathetically tragic scene in poetry. Reading the climax in Bandello,

where it is overpoweringly affecting, we feel what we have lost.

[Footnote 82: ii. 37. It is clear that both followed the earlier

version of Da Porto.]

Another _Novella_ which provokes comparison with our dramatic

literature--with the _Twelfth Night_ or with Fletcher's

_Philaster_--is the tale of Nicuola.[83] She and her brother Paolo

were twins, so like in height and form and feature that it was

difficult even for friends to know them apart. They were living with

their father at Rome, when the siege of 1527 dispersed the family.

Paolo was taken prisoner by Spaniards, and Nicuola went to dwell at

Jesi. The _Novella_ goes on to relate how she fell in love with a

nobleman of Jesi, and entering his service disguised as a page, was

sent by him to woo the lady of his heart; and how this lady loved her

in her page's dress. Then her brother, Paolo, returned, attired like

her in white, and recognitions were made, and both couples, Paolo and

the lady, Nicuola and the nobleman, were happily married in the end.

It will be seen that these situations, involving confusions of

identity and sex, unexpected discoveries, and cross-play of passions,

offered opportunities for rhetorical and picturesque development in

the style of a modern Euripides; nor did Bandello fail to utilize

them.

[Footnote 83: ii. 36. This tale was fashionable in Italy. It forms the

basis of that rare comedy, _Gli Ingannati_, performed by the Academy

degli Intronati at Siena, and printed in 1538. The scene in this play

is laid at Modena; the main plot is interwoven with two

intrigues--between Isabella's father and Lelia, the heroine; and

between Isabella's maid and a Spaniard. In spite of these

complications the action is lucid, and the comedy is one of the best

we possess. There is an excellent humorous scene of two innkeepers

touting against each other for travelers (Act iii. 2). That Shakspere

knew the _Novella_ or the comedy before he wrote his _Twelfth Night_

is more than probable.]

Of a higher type is the _Novella_ which narrates the love of Edward

III. for the virtuous Alice of Salisbury.[84] Here the interest

centers in four characters--the King, Alice, and her father and

mother, the Earl and Countess of Salisbury. There is no action beyond

the conflict of motives and emotions caused by Edward's passion, and

its successive phases. But that conflict is so vigorously presented

that attention never flags; and, though the tale is long, we are drawn

without weariness by finely-modulated transitions to the point where a

felicitous catastrophe is not only natural but necessary. What is at

first a mere desire in Edward, passes through graduated moods of

confident, despairing, soul-absorbing love. The ordinary artifices of

a seducer are replaced by the powerful compulsion of a monarch, who

strives to corrupt the daughter by working on her father's ambition

and her mother's weakness. Thwarted by the girl's constancy at every

turn, he sinks into love-melancholy, then rouses himself with the

furious resolve to attempt force, and lastly, yielding to his nobler

nature, offers his crown to Alice. These several moments in the

King's passion are exhibited with a descriptive wealth and exuberance

of resource that remind us forcibly of our own stage. The contrasts

between the girl's invincible honor and her lover's ungovernable

impulse, between her firmness and her mother's feebler nature, and

again between the sovereign's overbearing willfulness and the Earl's

stubborn but respectful resistance, suggest a series of high-wrought

situations, which only need to be versified and divided into acts to

make a drama. Fletcher himself might have proudly owned the scene in

which Edward discovers his love to the Earl, begs him to plead with

his daughter, and has to hear his reproaches, so courteously and yet

unflinchingly expressed. What follows is equally dramatic. The Earl

explains to Alice his own ideal of honor; still he fairly sets before

her the King's lawless offer, and then receives the assurance of her

unconquerable chastity. Her mother, moved to feebler issues by the

same pressure, attempts to break her daughter's resolve, and at last

extorts a reluctant consent by her own physical agony. Finally, the

girl, when left alone with her royal lover, demands from him or death

or honor, and wins her cause by the nobility of her carriage in this

hour of trial. The whole _Novella_ in its choice of motives, method of

treatment, and ethical tone, challenges comparison with Beaumont and

Fletcher's serious plays. Nor is the style unlike theirs; for the

situations are worked out in copious and colored language, hasty and

diffuse, but charged and surcharged with the passion of the thing to

be portrayed. Bandello, like Fletcher, strikes out images at every

turn, enlarges in rhetorical digressions, and pours forth floods of

voluble eloquence.[85] The morality, though romantic, is above his

usual level; for while he paints a dissolute and willful prince in

Edward, he contrives to make us feel that the very force of passion,

when purified to true love by the constancy of Alice, has brought the

monarch to a knowledge of his better self. Nor is the type of honor in

Alice and the Earl exaggerated. They act and speak as subjects,

conscious of their duty to the King, but resolved to preserve their

self-respect at any cost, should speak and act. The compliance of the

Countess, who is willing to sacrifice her daughter's honor under the

impulse of blind terror, cannot be called unnatural. The consequent

struggle between a mother's frailty and a daughter's firmness, though

painful enough, is not so disagreeably presented as in Tourneur's

_Revenger's Tragedy_. If all Bandello's novels had been conceived in

the same spirit as this, he would have ranked among the best romantic

writers of the modern age. As it is, we English may perhaps take

credit to ourselves for the superior inspiration of the legend he here

handled. The moral fiber of the tale is rather English than Italian.

[Footnote 84: ii. 37. Historians will not look for accuracy in what is

an Italian love-tale founded on an English legend.]

[Footnote 85: Take the description of the King's love-sickness (_Nov.

It._ vol. v. p. 352), the incident of the King's offer to the Earl

(pp. 353, 354), Edward's musings (p. 364), Alice alone in London (p.

376), the King's defiance of opinion (p. 379), the people's verdict

against Alice (p. 380), Alice arming herself with the dagger (p. 398),

the garden scene upon the Thames (p. 399). Then the discourses upon

love and temperament (p. 325), on discreet conduct in love affairs

(pp. 334-338), on real and false courtiers (pp. 382-388). Compare the

descriptive passages on pp. 352, 354, 369, 393, 395, 398, with similar

passages in Beaumont and Fletcher.]

Bandello was not unaware that his _Novelle_ lay under censure for

licentiousness. His apology deserves to be considered, since it places

the Italian conscience on this point in a clear light. In the preface

to the eleventh _Novella_ of the second part, he attacks the question

boldly.[86] "They say that my stories are not honest. In this I am

with them, if they rightly apprehend honesty. I do not deny that some

are not only not honest, but I affirm and confess that they are most

dishonest; for if I write that a maiden grants favors to a lover, I

cannot pretend that the fact is not in the highest sense immoral. So

also of many things I have narrated. No sane person will fail to blame

incest, theft, homicide, and other vicious actions; and I concede that

my _Novelle_ set forth these and similar enormous crimes. But I do not

admit that I deserve to be therefore blamed. The world ought to blame

and stigmatize those who commit such crimes, and not the man who

writes about them." He then affirms that he has written his stories

down as he heard them from the lips of the narrators, that he has

clothed them in decent language, and that he has always been careful

to condemn vice and to praise virtue. In the twenty-fourth novel of

the same part he returns to the charge.[87] Hypocrites, he argues,

complain that the Decameron and similar collections corrupt the

morality of women and teach vice; "but I was always of opinion that to

commit crimes rather than to know about them was vicious. Ignorance is

never good, and it is better to be instructed in the wickedness of

the world than to fall into error through defect of knowledge." This

apology, when read by the light of Bandello's own _Novelle_, is an

impudent evasion of the accusation. They are a school of profligacy;

and the author was at pains to make his pictures of sensuality

attractive. That he should plume himself upon the decorum of his

language, is simply comic. Such simulation of a conscience was all

that remained at an epoch when the sense of shame had been

extinguished, while acquiescence in the doctrines of a corrupt Church

had not ceased to be fashionable.

[Footnote 86: _Nov. It._ vol. iv. p. 226. Compare the peroration of

his Preface to the third part (vol. vii. p. 13).]

[Footnote 87: Vol. v. p. 38.]