victims, the Carolingian tales, pushed out of the way by the Arthurian
cycle, were not destined to perish. Thrown aside with contempt by the
upper classes, engrossed with the Round Table and the Holy Grail, the
tales of Charlemagne and his paladins, largely adulterated with
Arthurian elements, were apparently cherished by a lower class of
society: burgesses, artizans, and such-like, for whom that Arthurian
world was far too etherial and too delicately immoral; and to this
circumstance is due the fact that the humiliated Carolingian tales
eventually received an artistic embodiment which was not given to the
Arthurian stories. While troubadours and minnesingers were busy with the
court of Arthur, and grave Latinists like Rusticiano of Pisa wrote of
Launcelot and Guenevere; the Carolingian epics seem to have been mainly
sung about by illiterate jongleurs, and to have busied the pens of
prose hackwriters for the benefit of townsfolk. The free towns of the
Netherlands and of Germany appear to have been full of this
unfashionable literature: the Carolingian cycle had become democratic.
And, inasmuch as it was literature no longer for knights and courtiers,
but for artizans and shopkeepers, it went, of course, to the
pre-eminently democratic country of the Middle Ages--Italy. This was at
a time when Italian was not yet a recognized language, and when the men
and women who talked in Tuscan, Lombard, or Venetian dialects, wrote in
Latin and in French; and while Francesca and Paolo read the story of
Launcelot most probably in good mediaeval _langue d'oil_, as befitted
people of high birth; the jongleurs, who collected crowds so large as to
bar the streets and require the interference of the Bolognese
magistrates, sang of Roland and Oliver in a sort of _lingua Franca_ of
French Lombard. French jongleurs singing in impossible French-Italian;
Italian jongleurs singing in impossible French; Paduan penny-a-liners
writing Carolingian cyclical novels in French, not of Paris, assuredly,
but of Padua--a comical and most hideous jabber of hybrid
languages--this was how the Carolingian stories became popular in Italy.
Meanwhile, the day came when the romantic Arthurian tales had to
dislodge in Italy before the invasion of the classic epic. Troy, Rome,
and Thebes had replaced Tintagil and Caerleon in the interest of the
cultured classes long before the beginning of the fifteenth century;
when Poggio, in the very midst of the classic revival, still told of the
comically engrossed audience which surrounded the vagabonds singing of
Orlando and Rinaldo. The effete Arthurian cycle, superseded in Spain and
France by the Amadis romances, was speedily forgotten in Italy; but the
Carolingian stories remained; and when Italian poetry arose once more
after the long interregnum between Petrarch and Lorenzo dei Medici, and
looked about for subjects, it laid its hand upon them. But when, in the
second half of the fifteenth century, those old tales of Charlemagne
received, after so many centuries of alterations and ephemeral
embodiments, that artistic form which the Middle Ages had been unable to
give them, the stories themselves, and the way in which they were
regarded, were totally different from what they had been in the time of
Theroulde, or of the anonymous author of "The Quatre Fils Aymon;" the
Renaissance, with its keen artistic sense, made out of the Carolingian
tales real works of art, but works of art which were playthings. To
begin with, the Carolingian stories had been saturated with Arthurian
colour: they had been furnished with all the knight-rrantry, all the
gallantry, all the enchantments, the fairies, giants, and necromancers
of the Keltic legends; and, moreover, they had lost, by infinite
repetition, all the political realism and meaning so striking in "The
Chanson de Roland" and "The Quatre Fils Aymon;" a confusion and
unreality further increased by the fact that the Italians had no
original connection with those tales, that to them real men and plans
were no better than imaginary ones, and that the minstrels who sang in
the market-place, and the laborious prose-writers who compiled such
collections as that called of the "Reali di Francia," were equally free
in their alterations and adaptations, creating unknown relationships,
inventing new adventures, suppressing essential historical points, with
no object save amusing their audience or readers with new stories about
familiar heroes. Such was the condition of the stories themselves. The
attitude of the public towards them was, by the middle of the fifteenth
century, one of complete incredulity and frivolous amusement; the
paladins were as unreal as the heroes of any granny's fairy tale. The
people wanted to hear of wonderful battles and adventures, of
enchantments and love-makings; but they wanted also to laugh; and,
sceptical, practical, democratic, the artizans and shopkeepers of
Florence--to whom, paying, as they did, expensive mercenaries who stole
poultry and never got wounded on any account, all chivalry or real
military honour was the veriest nursery rubbish--such people as crowded
round the _cantastoria_ of _mercato vecchio_, must indeed have found
much to amuse them in these tales of so different an age.
And into such crowds there penetrated to listen and watch (even as the
Magnificent Lorenzo had elbowed among the carnival ragamuffins of
Florence, and had slid in among the holiday-making peasants of Poggio a
Caiano) a learned man, a poet, an intimate of the Medicis, of Politian,
Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, Messer Luigi Pulci, the same who had
written the semi-allegorical, semi-realistic poem about Lorenzo dei
Medici's gala tournament. There was a taste in the house of the Medici,
together with those for platonic philosophy, classical erudition,
religious hymns, and Hebrew kabbala, for a certain kind of realism, for
the language and mode of thinking of the lower classes, as a reaction
from Petrarchesque conventionality. As the Magnificent Lorenzo had had
the fancy to string together in more artistic shape the quaint and
graceful love poems, hyperbolical, realistic, tender, and abusive, of
the Tuscan peasantry; so also Messer Luigi Pulci appears to have been
smitten with the notion of trying his hand at a chivalric poem like
those to which he and his friends had listened among the butchers and
pork-shops, the fishmongers and frying booths of the market, and giving
an impression, in its ideas and language, of the people to whom such
strains were sung. But Luigi Pulci was vastly less gifted as a poet than
Lorenzo dei Medici; Florentine prentices are less aesthetically pleasing
than Tuscan peasants, and the "Morgante Maggiore" is a piece of work of
a sort utterly inferior to the "Nencia da Barberino." Still the
"Morgante Maggiore" remains, and will remain, as a very remarkable
production of grotesque art. Just as Lorenzo dei Medici was certainly
not without a deliberate purpose of selecting the quaintness and
gracefulness of peasant life; even so, and perhaps more, Luigi Pulci
must have had a deliberate intention of producing a ludicrous effect; in
both cases the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the
"Nencia da Barberino" from the genius of Lorenzo, in the "Morgante
Maggiore" from the stolidity of Pulci. The "Morgante," of which parts
were probably written as a mere sample to amuse a supper party, became
interesting to Pulci, in the mere matter of inventing and stringing
together new incidents; and despite its ludicrous passages, it must have
been more seriously written by him, and more seriously listened to by
his friends, than would a similar production now-a-days. For the men of
the Renaissance, no matter how philosophized and cultured, retained the
pleasure in mere incident, which we moderns seem to have given over to
children and savages; and Lorenzo, Ficino, and Politian probably
listened to the adventures of Luigi Pulci's paladins and giants with
much the same interest, and only a little more conscious sense of
grotesqueness, with which the crowd in the market listened to Cristofano
dell' Altissimo and similar story-tellers. The "Morgante Maggiore,"
therefore, is neither really comic nor really serious. It is not a piece
of realistic grotesqueness like "Gargantua" or "Pantagruel," any more
than it is a serious ideal work like "Amadis de Gaula:" the proportion
of deliberately sought effects is small; the great bulk, serious or
comic, seems to have come quite at random. It is not a caricatured
reproduction of the poems of chivalry sung in the market, for they were
probably serious, stately, and bald, with at most an occasional joke; it
is the reproduction of the joint impression received from the absurd,
harum-scarum, unpractical world of chivalry of the poet, and the real
world of prose, of good-humoured buffoonish coarseness with which the
itinerant poet was surrounded. The paladins are no Don Quixotes, the
princesses no Dulcineas, the battles are real battles; but the language
is that of Florentine wool-workers, housewives, cheese-sellers, and
ragamuffins, crammed with the slang of the market-place, its heavy jokes
and perpetual sententious aphorism. Moreover the prominence given to
food and eating is unrivalled except by Rabelais: the poet must have
lounged with delight through the narrow mediaeval lanes, crowded with
booths and barrows, sniffing with rapture the mingled scents of cheese,
pork, fish, spices, and a hundred strange concomitant market smells. And
the market, that classic _mercato vecchio_ (alas, finally condemned and
destroyed by modern sanitary prudishness, and which only those who have
seen can conceive in its full barbarous, nay, barbaric Pantagruelian
splendour of food, blood, and stenches) of Florence, is what we think of
throughout the poem. And, when Messer Luigi comes to narrate, with real
gravity and after the due invocation of the Virgin, the Trinity, and
the saints, the tremendous disaster of Roncevaux, he uses such words and
such similes, that above the neighing of horses and the clash of
hurtling armour and the yells of the combatants we suddenly hear the
nasal sing-song of Florentine tripe-vendors and pumpkin-pod-sellers, the
chaffer and oaths and laughter of the gluttonous crowd pouring through
the lanes of Calimala and Pellicceria; nay (horrible and grotesque
miracle), there seems to rise out of the confused darkness of the
battle-filled valley, there seems to disengage itself (as out of a mist)
from the chaos of heaped bodies, and the flash of steel among the
whirlwinds of dust, a vision, more and more distinct and familiar, of
the crowded square with its black rough-hewn, smoke-stained houses,
ornamented with Robbia-ware angels and lilies or painted madonnas; of
its black butchers dens, outside which hang the ghastly disembowelled
sheep with blood-stained fleeces, the huge red-veined hearts and livers;
of the piles of cabbage and cauli-flowers, the rows of tin ware and
copper saucepans, the heaps of maccaroni and pastes, of spices and
drugs; the garlands of onions and red peppers and piles of apples; the
fetid sliminess of the fish tressels; the rough pavement oozy and black,
slippery with cabbage-stalks, puddled with bullock's blood, strewn with
plucked feathers--all under the bright blue sky, with Giotto's
dove-coloured belfry soaring high above; a vision, finally, of one of
those deep dens, with walls, all covered with majolica plates and
dishes and flashing brass-embossed trenchers, in the dark depths of
which crackles perennially a ruddy fire, while a huge spit revolves,
offering to the flames now one now the other side of scores of legs of
mutton, rounds of beef, and larded chickens, trickling with the butter
unceasingly ladled by the white-dressed cooks. Roncisvalle, Charlemagne,
the paladins, paganism, Christendom--what of them? "I believe in capon,
roast or boiled, and sometimes done in butter; in mead and in must; and
I believe in the pasty and the pastykins, mother and children; but above
all things I believe in good wine "--as Margutte snuffles out in his
catechism; and as to Saracens and paladins, past, present, and future, a
fig for them!
But meanwhile, for all that Florentine burgesses, artizans, and
humorists may think, there is in this Italy of the Renaissance something
besides Florence; there is a school of poetry, disconnected with the
realisms of Lorenzo and Pulci, with the Ovidian Petrarchisms of
Politian. There is Ferrara. Lying, as they do, between the Northern
Apennine slopes of Modena and the Euganean hills, the dominions of the
House of Este appear at first sight merely as part and parcel of
Lombardy, and we should expect from them nothing very different from
that which we expect from Milan or Bologna or Padua. But the truth is
different; all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness of
Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly as they produce
their sacks of grain and tuns of wine and heaps of silk cocoon, the
intellectual and social equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy:
industry, wealth, comfort, scepticism, art. But on either side, into the
defiles of the Euganean hills to the north, into the widening torrent
valleys of the Modenese Apennines to the south, the Marquisate of Este
stretches up into feudalism, into chivalry, into the imaginative kingdom
of the Middle Ages. Mediaevalism, feudalism, chivalry, indeed, of a very
modified sort; and as different from that of France and Germany as
differ from the poverty-stricken plains and forests and and moors of the
north these Italian mountain slopes, along which the vines crawl in long
trellises, and the chestnuts rise in endlessly superposed tiers of
terraces, cultivated by a peasant who is not the serf, but the equal
sharer in profits with the master of the soil. And on one of those
fertile hill-sides, looking down upon a narrow valley all a green-blue
shimmer with corn and vine-bearing elms, was born, in the year 1434,
Matteo Maria Boiardo, in the village which gave him the title, one of
the highest in the Estensian dominions, of Count of Scandiano. Here, in
the Apennines, Scandiano is a fortified village, also a castle,
doubtless half turned into a Renaissance villa, but mediaeval and feudal
nevertheless; but the name of Scandiano belongs also, I know not for
what reason, to a certain little red-brick palace on the outskirts of
Ferrara, beautifully painted with half-allegorical, half-realistic
pageant frescoes by Cosimo Tura, and enclosing a sweet tangled
orchard-garden; to all of which, being the place to which Duke Borso and
Duke Ercole were wont to retire for amusement, the Ferrarese have given
the further name of Schifanoia, which means, "fly from cares." This
little coincidence of Scandiano the feudal castle in the Apennines, and
Scandiano the little pleasure palace at Ferrara, seems to give, by
accidental allegory, a fair idea of the double nature of Matteo Boiardo,
of the Ferrarese court to which he belonged, and of the school of poetry
(including the more notable but less original work of Ariosto) which the
genius of the man and the character of the court succeeded together in
producing.
To understand Boiardo we must compare him with Ariosto; and to
understand Ariosto we must compare him with Boiardo; both belong to the
same school, and are men of very similar genius, and where the one
leaves off the other begins. But first, in order to understand the
character of this poetry which, in the main, is identical in Boiardo and
in his more successful but less fascinating pupil Ariosto, let us
understand Ferrara. It was, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, a chivalric town of Ariostesque chivalry: feudalism turned
courtly and elegant, and moreover, very liberal and comfortable by
preponderance of democratic and industrial habits; a military court, of
brave mercenary captains full of dash and adventure, not mere brigands
and marauders having studied strategy, like the little Umbrian
chieftains; a court orderly, elegant, and brilliant: a prince not risen
from behind a counter like Medicis and Petruccis, nor out of blood like
Baglionis and Sforzas, but of a noble old house whose beginnings are
lost in the mist of real chivalry and real paladinism; a duke with a
pretence of feudal honour and decorum, at whose court men were all brave
and ladies all chaste--with the little licenses of baseness and
gallantry admitted by Renaissance chivalry. A bright, brilliant court at
the close of the fifteenth century; and more stable than the only one
which might have rivalled it, the Feltrian court of Urbino, too small
and lost among the Umbrian bandits. A bright, brilliant town, also, this
Ferrara: not mercantile like Florence, not mere barracks like Perugia; a
capital, essentially, in its rich green plain by the widened Po, with
its broad handsome streets (so different from the mediaeval exchanges of
Bologna, and the feudal alleys of Perugia), its well-built houses, so
safe and modern, needing neither _bravi_ nor iron window bars, protected
(except against some stray murder by one of the Estensi themselves), by
the duke's well-organized police; houses with well-trimmed gardens, like
so many Paris hotels; and with the grand russet brick castle, military
with its moat and towers, urban with its belvederes and balconies, in
the middle, well placed to sweep away with its guns (the wonderful guns
of the duke's own making) any riot, tidily, cleanly, without a nasty
heap of bodies and slop of blood as in the narrow streets of other
towns Imagine this bright capital, placed, moreover, in the richest
centre of Lombardy, with glitter of chivalry from the Euganean hills and
Apennines (castellated with Este, Monselice, Canossa, and Boiardo's own
Scandiano); with gorgeous rarities of commerce from Venice and Milan--a
central, unique spot. It is the natural home of the chivalrous poets of
the Renaissance, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso; as Florence is of the
Politians and Pulcis (Hellenism and back-shopery); and Venice of the
literature of lust, jests, cynicism, and adventure, Aretine, Beolco,
Calmo, and Poliphilo-Colonna. In that garden, where the white
butterflies crowd among the fruit trees bowed down to the tall grass of
the palace of Schifanoia--a garden neither grand nor classic, but
elegiac and charming--we can imagine Boiardo or Ariosto reading their
poems to just such a goodly company as Giraldi Cinthio (a Ferrarese, and
fond of romance, too) describes in the prologue of his "Ecatomiti:"
gentle and sprightful ladies, with the splendid brocaded robes, and the
gold-filleted golden hair of Dosso Dossi's wonderful Alcina Circe;
graceful youths like the princely St. John of Benvenuto Garofalo;
jesters like Dosso's at Modena; brilliant captains like his St. George
and St. Michael; and a little crowd of pages with doublets and sleeves
laced with gold tags, of sedate magistrates in fur robes and scarlet
caps, of white-dressed maids with instruments of music and embroidery
frames and hand looms, like those which Cosimo Tura painted for Duke
Borso on the walls of this same Schifanoia palace. Such is the audience;
now for the poems.
The stuff of Boiardo and Ariosto is the same: that old mediaeval stuff of
the Carolingian poems, coloured, scented with Arthurian chivalry and
wonder. The knight-errantry of the Keltic tales is cleverly blended with
the pseudo-historical military organization of the Carolingian cycle.
Paladins and Saracens are ingeniously manoeuvred about, now scattered in
little groups of twos and threes, to encounter adventures in the style
of Sir Launcelot or Amadis; now gathered into a compact army to crash
upon each other as at Roncevaux; or else wildly flung up by the poet to
alight in fairyland, to find themselves in the caverns of Jamschid, in
the isles where Oberon's mother kept Caesar, and Morgana kept Ogier, in
the boats, entering subterranean channels, of Sindbad and Huon of
Bordeaux; a constant alternation of individual adventure and wholesale
organized campaigns, conceived and carried out with admirable ingenuity.
So much for the deeds of arms. The deeds of love are also compounded of
Carolingian and Arthurian, but flavoured with special Renaissance
feeling. There is a great deal of rapid love-making between too gallant
knights and too impressionable ladies; licentious amours which we
moderns lay at the door of Boiardo and Ariosto, not knowing that the
licentiousness of the Olivers and Ogiers and Guerins and Huons of
mediaeval poetry, of the sentimental Amadises, Galaors, and Lisvarts of
the fourteenth century, whom the Renaissance has toned down in Rogers
and Rinaldos and Ricciardettos, is by many degrees worse. A moral
improvement also (for all the immorality of the Renaissance) in the
eschewing of the never-failing adultery of the Arthurian romances, and
the appropriation to legitimately faithful love of the poetical devotion
which Tristram and Launcelot bear to other men's wives. To this are
added, and more by Ariosto than by Boiardo, two essentially Italian
elements: something of the nobility of passion of the Platonic
sonneteers; and a good dose of the ironical, scurrilous, moralizing
immoral anecdote gossiping of Boccaccio and Sacchetti. Such is the
stuff. The conception, though rarely comic, and sometimes _bond fide_
serious, is never earnest. All this is a purely artistic world, a world
of decorative arabesque incident, intended to please, scarcely ever to
move, or to move, at most, like some Decameronian tale of Isabella and
the Basil Plant, or Constance and Martuccio. On the other hand, there is
none of the grotesque irreverence of Pulci. Boiardo and Ariosto are not
in earnest; they are well aware that their heroes and heroines are mere
modern men and women tricked out in pretty chivalric trappings, driven
wildly about from Paris to Cathay, and from Spain to the Orkneys--on
Tony Lumpkin's principle of driving his mother round and round the
garden plot till she thought herself on a heath six miles off--without
ever really changing place. But they do not, like Pulci, make fun of
their characters. They write chivalry romances not for Florentine
pork-butchers and wool-carders, but for gallant ladies and gentlemen, to
whom, with duels, tournaments, serenades, and fine speeches, chivalry is
an admired name, though no longer a respected reality.