glittering, the spirit of romance is in them; a giant Sancho Panza like
Morgante, redolent of sausage and cheese, would never be admitted into
the society of a Ferrarese Orlando. The art of Boiardo and of Ariosto is
eminently pageant art, in which sentiment and heroism are but as one
element among many; there is no pretence at reality (although there is a
good deal of incidental realism), and no thought of the interest in
subject and persons which goes with reality. It is a masquerade, and one
whose men and women must, I think, be imagined in a kind of artistic
fancy costume: a mixture of the Renaissance dress and of the antique, as
we see it in the prints of contemporary pageants, and in Venetian and
Ferrarese pictures; that Circe of Dosso's, in the Borghese gallery of
Rome, seated in her stately wine-lees and gold half-heraldically and
half-cabalistically patterned brocade, before the rose-bushes of the
little mysterious wood, is the very ideal of the Falerinas and Alcinas,
of the enchantresses of Boiardo and Ariosto. Pageant people, these of
the Ferrarese poets; they only play at being in forests and deserts, as
children play at being on volcanoes or in Green-land by the nursery
fire. It is a kind of dressing up, a masquerading of the fancy; not
disguising in order to deceive, but rather laying hold of any pretty or
brilliant impressive garb that comes to hand, and putting that on in
conjunction with many odds and ends, as an artist's guests might do with
the silks and velvets and Oriental properties of a studio. These knights
and ladies, for ever tearing about from Scotland to India, never, in
point of fact, get any further than the Apennine slopes where Boiardo
was born, where Ariosto governed the Garfagnana. They ride for ever
(while supposed to be in the Ardennes or in Egypt) across the velvet
moss turf, all patterned with minute starry clovers and the fallen white
ropy chestnut blossom, amidst the bracken beneath the slender chestnut
trees, the pale blue sky looking in between their spreading branches; at
most they lose their way in the intricacies of some seaside pineta,
where the feet slip on the fallen needles, and the sun slants along the
vistas of serried, red, scaly trunks, among the juniper and gorse and
dry grass and flowers growing in the sea sand. Into the vast mediaeval
forests of Germany and France, Boiardo and Ariosto's fancy never
penetrated.
Such is the school: a school represented in its typical character only
by Boiardo and Ariosto, but to which belong, nevertheless, with whatever
differences, Tasso, Spenser, Camoens, all the poets of Renaissance
romance. Now of the two leaders thereof. Here I feel that I can speak
only personally; tell only of my own personal impressions and
preferences. Comparing together Boiardo and Ariosto, I am, of course,
aware of the infinite advantages of the latter. Ariosto is a man of far
more varied genius; he is an artist, while Boiardo is an amateur; he is
learned in arranging and ornamenting; he knows how to alternate various
styles, how to begin and how to end. Moreover, he is a scholarly person
of a more scholarly time: he is familiar with the classics, and, what is
more important, he is familiar with the language in which he is writing.
He writes exquisitely harmonious, supple, and brilliant Tuscan verse,
with an infinite richness of diction; while poor Boiardo jogs along in a
language which is not the Lombard dialect in which he speaks, and which
is very uncouth and awkward, as is every pure language for a provincial;
indeed, so much so, that the pedantic Tuscans require Berni to make
Tuscan, elegant, to _ingentilire_, with infinite loss to quaintness and
charm, the "Orlando Innamorato" of poor Ferrarese Boiardo. Moreover,
Ariosto has many qualities unknown to Boiardo; wit, malice, stateliness,
decided eloquence and power of simile and apostrophe; he is a symphony
for full orchestra, and Boiardo a mere melody played on a single fiddle,
which good authorities (and no one dare contest with Italians when they
condemn anything not Tuscan as jargon) pronounce to be no Cremona. All
these advantages Ariosto certainly has; and I do not quarrel with those
who prefer him for them. But many of them distinctly take away from my
pleasure. I confess that I am bored by the beautifully written moral and
allegorical preludes of Ariosto's cantos; I would willingly give all his
aphorism and all his mythology to get quickly to the story. Also, I
resent his admirable rhetorical flourishes about his patrons, his
Ercoles, Ippolitos, and Isabellas they ring false, dreadfully false and
studied; and Boiardo's quickly despatched friendly greeting of his
friends, his courteous knights and gentle ladies, pleases me much
better. Moreover, the all-pervading consciousness of the existence of
Homer, Virgil, nay, Statius and Lucan, every trumpery antique
epic-monger, annoys me, giving an uncomfortable doubt as to whether
Ariosto did not try to make all this nonsense serious, and this romance
into an epic; all this occasional Virgilian stateliness, alternated with
a kind of polished Decameronian gossipy cynicism, diverts my attention,
turns paladins and princesses too much into tutor-educated gentlemen,
into Bandello and Cinthio-reading ladies of the sixteenth century. The
picture painted by Ariosto is finer, but you see too much of the
painter; he and his patrons take up nearly the whole foreground, and
they have affected, idealized faces and would-be dignified and
senatorial poses. For these and many other reasons, I personally prefer
Boiardo; and perhaps the best reason for my preference is the
irrational one that he gives me more pleasure. My preferences, my
impressions, I have said, are in this matter, much less critical than
personal. Hence I can speak of Boiardo only as he affects me.
When first I read Boiardo, I was conscious of a curious phenomenon in
myself. I must confess to reading books usually in a very ardent or
rather weary manner, either way in a hurry to finish them. As it
happened, when I borrowed Boiardo, I had a great many other things on
hand which required my time and attention; yet I could not make up my
mind to return the book until I had finished it, though my intention had
been merely to satisfy my curiosity by a dip into it. I went on, without
that eager desire to know what follows which one has in a novel;
drowsily with absolute reluctance to leave off, like the reluctance to
rise from the grass beneath the trees with only butterflies and shadows
to watch, or the reluctance to put aside some fairy book of Walter
Crane's. It was like strolling in some quaint, ill-trimmed, old garden,
finding fresh flowers, fresh bits of lichened walls, fresh fragments of
broken earthenware ornaments; or, rather, more like a morning in the
Cathedral Library at Siena, the place where the gorgeous choir books are
kept, itself illuminated like missal pages by Pinturicchio: amused,
delighted, not moved nor fascinated; finding every moment something new,
some charming piece of gilding, some sweet plumed head, some quaint
little tree or town; making a journey of lazy discovery in a sort of
world of Prince Charmings, the real realm of the "Faery Queen," quite
different in enchantment from the country of Spenser's Gloriana, with
its pale allegoric ladies and knights, half-human, half-metaphysical,
and its make-believe allegorical ogres and giants. This is the real
Fairyland, this of Boiardo: no mere outskirts of Ferrara, with real,
playfully cynical Ferrarese men and women tricked out as paladins and
Amazons, and making fun of their disguise, as in Ariosto; no wonderland
of Tasso, with enchanted gardens copied out of Bolognese pictures and
miraculous forests learned from theatre mechanicians, wonders imitated
by a great poet from the cardboard and firework wonders of Bianca
Cappello's wedding feasts. This is the real fairyland, the wonderland of
mediaeval romance and of Persian and Arabian tales, no longer solemn or
awful, but brilliant, sunny, only half believed in; the fairyland of the
Renaissance, superficially artistic, with its lightest, brightest
fancies, and its charming realities; its cloistered and painted courts
with plashing fountains, its tapestried and inlaid rooms, its towered
and belvedered villas, its quaint clipped gardens full of strange
Oriental plants and beasts; and all this transported into a country of
wonders, where are the gardens of the Hesperides, the fountain of
Merlin, the tomb of Narcissus, the castle of Morgan-le-Fay; every quaint
and beautiful fancy, antique and mediaeval, mixed up together, as in some
Renaissance picture of Botticelli or Rosselli or Filippino, where
knights in armour descend from Pegasus before Roman temples, where
swarthy white-turbaned Turks, with oddly bunched-up trousers and
jewelled caftans, and half-naked, oak-crowned youths, like genii
descended, pensive and wondering, from some antique sarcophagus, and
dapper princelets and stalwart knights, and citizens and monks, all
crowd round the altar of some wonder-working Macone or Apolline or
Trevigante; some comic, dreadful, apish figure, mummed up in
half-antique, half-oriental garb. Or else we are led into some dainty,
pale-tinted panel of Botticelli, where the maidens dance in white
clinging clothes, strewing flowers on to the flower-freaked turf; or
into some of Poliphilo's vignettes, where the gentle ladies, seated with
lute and viol under vine-trellises, welcome the young gallant, or poet,
or knight.
Such is the world of Boiardo. Spenser has once or twice peeped in,
painted it, and given us exquisite little pictures, as that of
Malecasta's castle, all hung with mythological tapestries, that of the
enchanted chamber of Britomart, and those of Sir Calidore meeting the
Graces and of Hellenore dancing with the Satyrs; but Spenser has done it
rarely, trembling to return to his dreary allegories. Equal to these
single pictures by Spenser, Boiardo has only one or two, but he keeps us
permanently in the world where such pictures are painted. Boiardo is not
a great artist like Spenser: but he is a wizard, which is better. He
leads us, unceasingly, through the little dreamy laurelwoods, where we
meet crisp-haired damsels tied to pine-trees, or terrible dragons, or
enchanted wells, through whose translucent green waters we see brocaded
rooms full of fair ladies; he ferries us ever and anon across shallow
streams, to the castles where _gentil donzelle_ wave their kerchiefs
from the pillared belvedere; he slips us unseen into the camps and
council-rooms of the splendidly trapped Saracens, like so many figures
out of Filippino's frescoes; he conducts us across the bridges where
giants stand warders, to the mysterious carved tombs whence issue green
and crested snakes, who, kissed by a paladin, turn into lovely
enchantresses; he takes us beneath the beds of rivers and through the
bowels of the earth where kings and knights turned into statues of gold,
sit round tables covered with jewels, illumined by carbuncles more
wonderful than that of Jamschid; or through the mazes of fairy gardens,
where every ear of corn, cut off, turns into a wild beast, and every
fallen leaf into a bird, where hydras watch in the waters and lamias
rear themselves in the grass, where Orlando must fill his helmet with
roses lest he hear the voice of the sirens; where all the wonders of
Antiquity--the snake-women, the Circes, the sirens, the hydras and fauns
live, strangely changed into something infinitely quaint and graceful,
still half-antique, yet already half-Arabian or Keltic, in the midst of
the fairyland of Merlin and of Oberon--live, move, transform themselves
afresh; where the golden-haired damsels and the stripling knights,
delicate like Pinturicchio's Prince Charmings, gallop for ever on their
enchanted coursers, within enchanted armour, invincible, invulnerable,
under a sky always blue, and through an unceasing spring, ever onwards
to new adventures. Adventures which the noble, gentle Castellan of
Scandiano, poet and knight and humorist, philanthropical philosopher
almost from sheer goodness of heart, yet a little crazy, and capable of
setting all the church bells ringing in honour of the invention of the
name of Rodomonte relates not to some dully ungrateful Alfonso or
Ippolito, but to his own guests, his own brilliant knights and ladies,
with ever and anon an effort to make them feel, through his verse, some
of those joyous spring-tide feelings which bubble up in himself; as when
he remembers how, "Once did I wander on a May morning in a fair
flower-adorned field on a hillside overlooking the sea, which was all
tremulous with light; and there, among the roses of a green thorn-brake,
a damsel was singing of love; singing so sweetly that the sweetness
still touches my heart; touches my heart, and makes me think of the
great delight it was to listen;" and how he would fain repeat that song,
and indeed an echo of its sweetness runs through his verse. Meanwhile,
stanza pours out after stanza, adventure grows out of adventure, each
more wonderful, more gorgeous than its predecessor. To which listen the
ladies, with their white, girdled dresses and crimped golden locks; the
youths, with their soft beardless faces framed in combed-out hair, with
their daggers on their hips and their plumed hats between their fingers;
and the serious bearded men, in silken robes; drawing nearer the poet,
letting go lute or violin or music-book as they listen on the villa
terrace or in some darkened room, where the sunset sky turns green-blue
behind the pillared window, and the roses hang over the trellise of the
cloister. And as they did four hundred years ago, so do we now, rejoice.
The great stalwart naked forms of Greece no longer leap and wrestle or
carry their well-poised baskets of washed linen before us; the mailed
and vizored knights of the Nibelungen no longer clash their armour to
the sound of Volker's red fiddle-bow; the glorified souls of Dante no
longer move in mystic mazes of light before the eyes of our fancy. All
that is gone. But here is the fairyland of the Renaissance. And thus
Matteo Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, goes on, adding adventure to
adventure, stanza to stanza, in his castle villa, or his palace at
Ferrara. But suddenly he stops and his bright fiddle and lute music jars
and ends: "While I am singing, O Redeeming God, I see all Italy set on
fire by these Gauls, coming to ravage I know not what fresh place."
And thus, with the earlier and more hopeful Renaissance of the fifteenth
century, Matteo Boiardo broke off with his "Orlando Innamorato." The
perfect light-heartedness, the delight in play of a gentle, serious,
eminently kindly nature, which gives half the charm to Boiardo's work,
seems to have become impossible after the ruin of Italian liberty and
prosperity the frightful showing up of Italy's moral and social and
political insignificance at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Lombardy especially became a permanent battle-field, and its towns mere
garrison places of French, German, Spanish, and Swiss barbarians, whose
presence meant slaughter and pillage and every foulest outrage; and
then, between the horrors of the unresisted invasions and the unresisted
exactions, came plague and famine, and industry and commerce gradually
died out. A few princes, subsidised and guarded by French or
Imperialists, kept up an appearance of cheerfulness, but the courts even
grew more gloomy as the people grew more miserable. There is more
joking, more resonant laughter in Ariosto than in Boiardo, but there is
very much less serenity and cheerfulness; ever and anon a sort of
bitterness, a dreary moralizing tendency, a still more dreary fit of
prophesying future good in which he has no belief, comes over Ariosto.
Berni, who rewrote the "Orlando Innamorato" in choice Tuscan, and who
underlined every faintly marked jest of Boiardo's, with evident
preoccupation of the ludicrous effects of the "Morgante Maggiore"--Berni
even could not keep up his spirits; into the middle of Boiardo's serene
fairyland adventures he inserted a description of the sack of Rome which
is simply harrowing. All real cheerfulness departed from the people, to
be replaced only by pleasure in the debaucheries of the buffoonish
obscenity of Aretino, Bandello, and so forth, to which the men of the
dying Italy of the Renaissance listened as the roysterers of the plague
of Florence, with the mortal sickness almost upon them, may have
listened to the filthy songs which they trolled out in their
drunkenness. Or at best, the poor starved, bruised, battered, humiliated
nation may have tried to be cheerful on the principle of its harlequin
playwright Beolco, who, more honest than the Ariostos and Bibbienas, and
Aretines, came forward on his stage of planks at Padua, and after
describing the ruin and wretchedness of the country, the sense of
dreariness and desolation, which made young folk careless of marriage,
and the very nightingales (he thought) careless of song, recommended his
audience, since they could not even cry thoroughly and to feel any the
better for it, to laugh, if they still were able. Boiardo was forgotten;
his spirit was unsuited to the depression, gloomy brutality, gloomy
sentimentality, which grew every day as Italy settled down after its
Renaissance-Shrovetide in the cinders and fasting of the long Lent of
Spanish and Jesuit rule.
Still the style of Boiardo was not yet exhausted; the peculiar kind of
fairy epic, the peculiar combination of chivalric and classic elements
of which the "Orlando Innamorato" and the "Orlando Furioso," had been
the great examples, still fascinated poets and public. The Renaissance,
or what remained of it, was now no longer confined to Italy; it had
spread, paler, more diluted, shallower, over the rest of Europe. To
follow the filiation of schools, to understand the intellectual
relationships of individuals, of the latter half of the sixteenth
century, it becomes necessary to move from one country to another. And
thus the two brother poets of the family of Boiardo, its two last and
much saddened representatives, came to write in very different languages
and under very different circumstances. These two are Tasso and our own
Spenser. They are both poets of the school of the "Orlando Innamorato,"
both poets of a reaction, of a kind of purified Renaissance: the one of
the late Italian Renaissance emasculated by the Council of Trent and by
Spain; the other of the English Renaissance, in its youth truly, but, in
the individual case of Spenser, timidly drawn aside from the excesses of
buoyant life around. In the days of the semi-atheist dramatists, all
flesh and blood and democracy, Spenser steeps himself in Christianity
and chivalry, even as Tasso does, following on the fleshly levity and
scepticism of Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto. There is in both poets a
paleness, a certain diaphanous weakness, an absence of strong tint or
fibre or perfume; in Tasso the pallor of autumn, in Spenser the paleness
of spring: autumn left sad and leafless by the too voluptuous heat and
fruitfulness of summer; spring still pale and pinched by winter, with
timid nipped grass and unripe stiff buds and catkins, which never
suggest the tangle of bush, grasses, and magnificent flowers and fruits,
sweet, splendid, or poisonous, which the sun will make out of them. The
Renaissance, in the past for Tasso, in the proximate and very visible
future for Spenser, has frightened both; the cynicism and bestiality of
men like Machiavelli and Aretino; the godless, muscular lustiness of
Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, seen in a glimpse by Tasso and Spenser, have
given a shock to their sensitive nature, have made them turn away and
hide themselves from a second sight of it. They both take refuge in a
land of fiction, of romance, from the realities into which they dread to
splash; a world unsubstantial, diaphanous, faint-hued, almost
passionless, which they make out of beauty and heroism and purity, which
they alembicize and refine, but into which there never enters any vital
element, anything to give it flesh and bone and pulsing life: it is a
mere soap bubble. And beautiful as is this world of their own making, it
is too negative even for them; they move in it only in imagination,
calm, serene, vacant, almost sad. There is in it, and in themselves, a
something wanting; and the remembrance of that unholy-life of reality
which jostled and splashed their delicate souls, comes back and haunts
them with its evil thought. There is no laugh--what is worse, no smile
--in these men. Incipient puritanism, not yet the terrible brawny
reality of Bunyan, but a vague, grey spectre, haunts Spenser; and the
puritanism of Don Quixote, the vague, melancholy, fantastic reverting
from the evil world of to-day to an impossible world of chivalry, is
troubling the sight of Tasso. He cannot go crazy like Don Quixote, and
instead he grows melancholy; he cannot believe in his own ideals; he
cannot give them life, any more than can Spenser give life to his
allegoric knights and ladies, because the life would have to be fetched
by Tasso out of the flesh of Ariosto, and by Spenser out of the blood of
Marlowe; and both Tasso and Spenser shrink at the thought of what might
with it be inoculated or transfused; and they rest satisfied with
phantoms. The phantoms of Spenser are more shadowy much more utterly
devoid of human character; they are almost metaphysical abstractions,
and they do not therefore sadden us: they are too unlike living things
to seem very lifeless. But the phantoms of Tasso, he would fain make
realities; he works at every detail of character, history, or geography,
which may make his people real; they are not, as with Spenser, elves and
wizards flitting about in a nameless fairyland, characterless and
passionless; they are historical creatures, captains and soldiers in a
country mapped out by the geographer; but they are phantoms all the more
melancholy, these beautiful and heroic Clorindas and Erminias and
Tancreds and Godfreys--why? because the real world around Tasso is
peopled with Brachianos and Corombonas, and Annabellas and Giovannis,
creatures for Webster and Ford; and because this world of chivalry is,
in his Italy, as false as the world of Amadis and Esplandian in Toboso
and Barcelona for poor Don Quixote. Melancholy therefore, and dreamy,
both Tasso and Spenser, with nothing they can fully love in reality,
because they see it tainted with reality and evil; without the cheerful
falling back upon everyday life of Ariosto and Shakespeare, and with a
strange fancy for fairyland, for the distant, for the Happy Islands, the
St. Brandan's Isles, the country of the fountain of youth, the country
of which vague reports have come back with the ships of Raleigh and
Ponce de Leon. Tasso and Spenser are happiest, in their calm, melancholy
way, when they can let themselves go in day-dreams, and talk of things
in which they do not believe, of diamond shields which stun monsters of
ointments which cure all ills of body and of soul of enchanted groves
whose trees sound with voices, and lutes, of boats in which, steered by
fairies, we can glide across the scarcely rippled summer sea, and
watching the ruins of the past, time and reality left behind, set sail
for some strange land of bliss. And there is in the very sensuousness
and love of beauty-of these men a vagueness and melancholy, a constant:
sense of the fleeting and of the eternal, as in that passage, translated
from the languidly sweet Italian perfection of Tasso into the timid,
almost scentless, English of Spenser--"Cosi trapassa al trapassar d'un
giorno."
So passeth, in the passing of a day,
Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre
No more doth florish after first decay,
That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre
Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre.
Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime,
For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre;
Gather the Rose of love whitest yet is time,
Whitest loving thou mayest loved be withe equall crime.
A sense of evanescence, of dreamlikeness, quite different from the
thoughtless enjoyment of Boiardo, from the bold and manly facing of the
future, the solemn, strong sense of life and death as of waking
realities, of the Elizabethan dramatists, even of weaklings like
Massinger and Beaumont. In Tasso and in Spenser there is no such
joyousness, no such solemnity; only a dreamy watching, a regret which is
scarcely a regret, at the evanescence of pale beauty and pale life, of
joys feebly felt and evils meekly borne.