PART II

ARIOSTO, SHAKESPEARE AND CORNEILLE

BY

BENEDETTO CROCE

TRANSLATED BY

DOUGLAS AINSLIE

RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.I

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN, LTD.

1920

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

Evviva L'Italia! Italy, Britain's ancient friend and loyal ally, has

been an important factor both in winning the war and in bringing it to

an earlier conclusion. The War! That greatest practical effort that

the world has ever made is now over and we must all work to make it a

better place for all to live in.

Now at the hands of her philosopher-critic, Italy offers us a first

effort at reconstruction of our world-view with this masterly treatise

on the greatest poet of the English-speaking world, so original and so

profound that it will serve as guide to generations yet unborn. And it

will not be only the critics of Shakespeare who should benefit by this

treatise, but all critics and lovers of poetry--including prose--who

go beyond the passive stage of mere admiration. The essays on Ariosto

and Corneille are also unique and the three together should inaugurate

everywhere a new era in literary criticism.

These are the first of Benedetto Croce's literary criticisms to see the

light in English.

They are profound and suggestive, because based upon theory, the

_Theory of Aesthetic,_ with which some readers will be acquainted in

the original, others in the version by the present translator. These

will not need to be told that Croce's theory of the independence and

autonomy of the aesthetic fact, which is intuition-expression, and of

the essentially lyrical character of all art, is the only one that

completely and satisfactorily explains the problem of poetry and the

fine arts.

But this is not the place for philosophical discussion, although

it is important to stress the point, that all criticism is based

upon philosophy, and that therefore if the philosophy upon which it

is based is unsound, the criticism suffers accordingly. Croce has

elsewhere shown that the shortcomings of such critics as Sainte-Beuve,

Taine, Lemaître and Brunetière are due to incorrect or insufficient

philosophical knowledge and a similar criterion can be applied at home

with equal truth.

The translator will be satisfied if the present version receives equal

praise from the author with that accorded to the four translations of

the Philosophy into English, which Croce has often declared to come

more near to his spirit than those in any other language--and he has

been translated into all the great European languages--the _Aesthetic_

even into Japanese. The object adhered to in this translation has been

as close a cleaving as possible to the original, while preserving a

completely idiomatic style and remaining free from all pedantry.

A translation should not in any case be taken as a pouring from the

golden into the silver vessel, as used to be erroneously supposed, for

Croce has proved that in so far as the translator rethinks the original

he is himself a creator. This explains why so many writers have been

addicted to translation--in English we have Pope, Fitzgerald, Rossetti,

to name but three of many--and the author of the Philosophy of the

Spirit, Croce himself, has published a splendid Italian version of

Hegel's _Encyclopaedia of the Philosophic Sciences._

DOUGLAS AINSLIE.

The Athenaeum,

Pall Mall, London,

October, 1920.

CONTENTS

PART I

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO

I A CRITICAL PROBLEM

II THE LIFE OF THE AFFECTIONS IN ARIOSTO, AND THE HEART OF HIS HEART

III THE HIGHEST LOVE: HARMONY

IV THE MATERIAL FOR THE HARMONY

V THE REALISATION OF HARMONY

VI HISTORICAL DISASSOCIATIONS

PART II

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

VII THE PRACTICAL PERSONALITY AND THE POETICAL PERSONALITY

VIII SHAKESPEAREAN SENTIMENT

IX MOTIVES AND DEVELOPMENT OF SHAKESPEARE'S POETRY

X THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE

XI SHAKESPEAREAN CRITICISM

XII SHAKESPEARE AND OURSELVES

PART III

PIERRE CORNEILLE

XIII CRITICISM OF THE CRITICISM

XIV THE IDEAL OF CORNEILLE

XV THE MECHANISM OF THE CORNELIAN TRAGEDY

XVI THE POETRY OF CORNEILLE

INDEX

PART I

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO

CHAPTER I

A CRITICAL PROBLEM[1]

The fortune of the _Orlando Furioso_ may be compared to that of a

graceful, smiling woman, whom all look upon with pleasure, without

experiencing any intellectual embarrassment or perplexity, since it

suffices to have eyes and to direct them to the pleasing object, in

order to admire. Crystal clear as is the poem, polished in every

particular, easily to be understood by whomsoever possesses general

culture, it has never presented serious difficulties of interpretation,

and for that reason has not needed the industry of the commentators,

and has not been injured by their quarrelsome subtleties; nor has it

been subject, more than to a very slight extent, to the intermittences

from which other notable poetical works have suffered, owing to the

varying conditions of culture at different times. Great men and

ordinary readers have been in as complete agreement about it, as, for

instance, about the beauty, let us say, of a Madame Récamier; and

the list of great men, who have experienced its fascination, goes

from Machiavelli and the Galilei, to Voltaire and to Goethe, without

mentioning names more near to our own time.

Yet, however unanimous, simple and unrestrainable be the aesthetic

approbation accorded to the poem of Ariosto, the critical judgments

delivered upon it are just as discordant, complicated and laboured;

and indeed this is one of those cases where the difference of the two

spiritual moments, intuitive or aesthetic, the apprehension or tasting

of the work of art, and intellective, the critical and historical

judgment,--a difference wrongly disputed from one point of view by

sensationalists and from another by intellectualists,--stands out so

clearly as to seem to be almost spatially divided, so that one can

touch it with one's hand. Anyone can easily read and live again the

octaves of Ariosto, caressing them with voice and imagination, as

though passionately in love; but to say whence comes that particular

form of enchantment, to determine that is to say, the character of

the inspiration that moved Ariosto, his dominant poetical motive,

the peculiar effect which became poetry in him, is a very different

undertaking and one of no small difficulty.

The question has tormented the critics from the time when literary

and historical criticism acquired individual prominence and energy,

that is to say at the origin of romantic aestheticism, when works of

art were no longer examined in parts separated from the whole, or in

their external outline, but in the spirit that animated them. Yet we

must not think that earlier times were without all suspicion of this,

for an uncertain suggestion of it is to be found even in the eccentric

enquiries, as to whether the _Furioso_ be a moral poem or not, or

whether it should be looked upon as serious or playful. But intellects

such as Schiller and Goethe, Humboldt and Schelling, Hegel, Ranke,

Gioberti, Quinet and De Sanctis, treated or touched upon it in the last

century, and very many others during and after their times, and the

theme has again been taken up with renewed keenness, in dissertations,

memoirs and articles, some of them foreign, but mostly Italian.

Many of the problems or formulas of problems, which one at one time

critically discussed have been allowed to disappear, like cast-off

clothes as the results of the new conception of art: that is to say,

not only those we have mentioned, as to whether the _Furioso_ were or

were not an epic, whether it were serious or comic, but also a throng

of other problems, such as whether it possessed unity of action, a

protagonist or hero, whether its episodes were linked to the action,

whether it maintained the dignity of history, whether it afforded

an allegory, and if so, of what sort, whether it obeyed the laws of

modesty and morality, or followed good examples, whether it could be

credited with invention, and if so in what measure, whether it were

finer than the _Gerusalemme_ or less fine, and as to what it was finer

or less fine; and so on. All these problems have become obsolete,

because they have been solved in the only suitable way, that is to

say, they have been shown to be fallacious in their theoretical terms;

and to say that they are obsolete does not mean that there have not

been some, both in the nineteenth century and at the present time,

who have set to work to solve them, and have arrived at unfortunate

conclusions in different ways. The unity of action of the _Furioso_

has also been investigated and determined (by Panizzi, for example,

and by Carducci); its immorality has also been blamed (by Cantù, for

instance); the book of the debts of Ariosto to his predecessors has

been re-opened and charged with so very many figures on the debit side

that the final balance-sheet of credit and debit presents an enormous

deficit (Rajna); the comparison with examples from prototypes under

the name of _"Evolutionary History of Romantic Chivalry,"_ in which

the _Furioso,_ according to some, does not represent the summit, but

rather a deviation and decadence from the ideal prototype (Rajna

again); according to others, the _Furioso_ gave final and perfect form

to "The French Epic of Germanic Heroes" (Morf); allegory, contained in

a moral judgment as to Italian life at the time of the Renaissance,

lost in its pursuit of love, like the Christian and Saracen knights in

their pursuit of Angelica (Canello). But whether in their primitive or

in their more modern forms these problems are obsolete, for us who

are aware of the mistakes and errors in aesthetic, from which they

arise; and others of more recent date must also be held obsolete with

these, such theories as these for instance (to quote one of them) which

undertake to study the _Furioso_ in its "formation," understanding by

formation the literary presuppositions of its various parts, beginning

with the title. Decorated with the name of _Scientific Study,_ this is

mere inconclusive or ill-conclusive philology.

The work of modern criticism does not restrict itself to the clearing

away of these idle and unnecessary enquiries, but also includes a

varied and thorough investigation into the poetry of Ariosto, whose

every aspect we may claim to have illuminated in turn, and to have

given all the solutions as to the true character of the problem that

can be suggested. And it almost seems now that anyone who wishes

to form an idea upon the subject needs but select from the various

existing solutions, that one which shows itself to be clearly superior

to all others, owing to its being supported by the most valid

arguments, after he has possessed himself of the critical literature

relating to Ariosto. It seems impossible to suggest a new solution,

and as though the argument were one of those of which it may be said

that "there is no hope of finding anything new in connection with it."

And this is very nearly true, but only very nearly, for a

non-superficial examination of those various solutions leads to

the result that none of them is valid in the way it is presented,

that is to say, with the arguments that support it. It is therefore

advisable to indicate some of these arguments, which have already been

given, and to deduce from them other consequences, though we may not

succeed in framing others which shall shine with amazing novelty. But

upon consideration, this will be nothing less than providing a new

solution, just because the problem has been differently presented and

differently argued: a novelty of that serious sort which is a step

forward upon what has already been observed and acquired, not that sort

of extravagant novelty agreeable to false originality and to sterile

subtlety.

There are two fundamental types of reply to the question as to the

character of Ariosto's poetry; of these the more important is the

first, either because, as will be seen, really here near to the truth,

or because supported with the supreme authority of De Sanctis. Prior

to De Sanctis, it is only to be vaguely discerned as suggested by the

eighteenth century writer, Sulzer, and more clearly in the German

aesthetic writer, Vischer; it was afterwards repeated, prevailed and

was accepted, among others by Carducci. According to De Sanctis and

to his precursors and followers, in the _Furioso_ Ariosto has no

subjective content to express, no sentimental or passionate motive,

no idea become sentiment or passion, but pursues the sole end of art,

singing for singing's sake, representing for representation's sake,

elaborating pure form, and satisfying the one end of realising his own

dreams.

This affirmation is not to be taken in a general sense, the words in

which it is formulated must not be construed literally, for in that

case it would be easy to raise the reasonable objection, that not only

Ariosto, but every artist, just because he is an artist, never has any

end but that of art, of singing for singing's sake, representing for

representation's sake, of elaborating pure form, and of satisfying

the need that he feels to realise his own dreams: woe to the artist,

who has an eye to any other ends, and tries to teach, to persuade,

to shock, to move, to make a hit or an effect, or anything else

extraneous to art. The theory of art for art, opposed by many, is

incontestable from this point of view, it is indeed indubitable and

altogether obvious. The critics who attribute that end as a character

of Ariosto's poetry, mean rather to affirm, that the author of the

_Furioso_ proceeded in his own individual proper manner with respect

to other poets; and they then proceed to determine their thoughts upon

the subject in two ways, differing somewhat from one another. Both of

these are to be found mingled and confused in the pages of De Sanctis.

Ariosto is held to have allowed to pass in defile within him the chain

of romantic figures of knights and ladies and the stories of their arms

and audacious undertakings, of their loves and their love-making, with

the one object of _delighting the imagination._ Ariosto is held to have

depicted that various human world without interposing anything between

himself and things, without reflecting himself in things, without

sinking them in himself or in his own feelings. He is held to have

been solely an _objective observer._ Now, taking the first case, that

is to say, if the work of Ariosto be really resolved into a plaything

of the imagination, although he might have pleased himself by doing

something agreeable to himself and to others, yet he would not have

been a poet, "the divine Ariosto," because the pleasure of the fancy

belongs to the order of practical acts, to what are called games or

diversion. And in the second case, when he has been praised for being

perfectly objective, this is not only at variance with the actual

creation of the poet, but is also in contradiction to it--and indeed

in contradiction to every form of spiritual production. As though

things existed outside the spirit and it were possible to take them up

in their supposed objectivity and to externalise them by putting them

on paper or canvas. The theory of art for art, when taken as a theory

of merely fanciful pleasure or of indifferent objective reproduction

of things, should be firmly rejected, because it is at variance with

and contradicts the nature of art and of the universal spirit. At the

most, these two paradigms,--art as mere fancy and art as extrinsic

objectivity,--might be of avail as designating two artistic forms of

deficiency and ugliness, _futile_ art and _material_ art, that is to

say, in both cases, non-art; and in like manner the theory of art for

art's sake would in those cases be the definition of one or more forms

of artistic perversion.

Owing to the impossibility of denying to Ariosto any content, and

at the same time of enjoying him and of acclaiming him a poet,--an

impossibility more or less obscurely felt by some, although without

discovering and demonstrating it as has been done above,--it has

come about that not only other critics, but those very critics who,

like De Sanctis, had described him as a poet of pure fancy or pure

objectivity, have been led to recognise in him a content, and sometimes

several contents, one upon the top of the other, in a heap. One of

such contents, perhaps that most generally admitted, is without doubt

the _dissolution of the world of chivalry,_ brought about by Ariosto

through irony: a historical position conferred upon him by Hegel, and

amply illustrated by De Sanctis. But what do they mean by saying that

Ariosto expresses the dissolution of the world of chivalry? Certainly

not simply that in his poem are to be found documents concerning

the passing of the ideals of chivalry, because whether this be true

or not, it does not concern the concrete artistic form, but its

abstract material, considered and treated as a source of historical

documentation. Nor can it mean that he was inspired with aversion to

the ideals of chivalry and in favour of new ideals, because polemic

and criticism, negation and affirmation, are not art. So what was

really meant was (although those who maintain this interpretation often

understand it in one or other of those meanings, which are external to

art), that Ariosto was animated with a true and real feeling toward

the ideals of the life of chivalry, and that this feeling supplied

the lyrical motive for his poem. This motive has been disputed in

its details in various ways, some holding it to have been aversion,

others a mixture of aversion and of love, others of admiration and of

pleasure; but before we engage in further investigation, we must first

ascertain if there exist, that is to say, if Ariosto really endowed

with his own feeling--whatever it be, prevailing aversion or prevailing

inclination or a prevalent alternation of the two,--the material of

chivalry, rendering it serious and emotional, through the seriousness

and emotion of his own feeling. And this does not exist at all, for

what all feel and see as chivalry in Ariosto's mode of treatment, is

on the contrary a sort of aloofness and superiority, owing to which

he never engages himself up to the hilt in admiration or in scorn or

in passionate disagreement with one or the other; and this impression

which his narratives of sieges and combats, of duels and feats of

arms produce upon us, has afforded the ground for the above-mentioned

opposed theories as to his objective attitude and as to his cultivation

of a mere pastime of the imagination. Had Ariosto really aimed, as is

said, at an exaltation or a semi-exaltation or at an ironisation of

chivalry, he would clearly have missed the mark, and this failure would

have been the failure of his art.

What has been remarked concerning the content of chivalry is to be

repeated for all the other contents which have been proposed in turn,

each one or all of them together as the true and proper leading

motive; and of these (leaving out the least likely, because we are

not here concerned with collecting curious trifles of Ariostesque

criticism, but are resuming the essential lines of this criticism

with the intention of cutting into it more deeply and with greater

certainty), the next thing to mention, immediately after chivalrous

ideality or anti-ideality, is the philosophy of life, the _wisdom,_

which Ariosto is supposed to have administered and counselled. This

wisdom is supposed to have embraced love, friendship, politics,

religion, public and private life, and to have been directed with

great moderation and good sense, noble without fanaticism, courageous

and patient, dignified and modest. We admit that these things are to

be found in the _Furioso,_ just as chivalrous things are to be found

there also; but they are there in almost the same way, that is to

say, with the not doubtful accent of aloofness and remoteness, which

at once places a great chasm between Ariosto and the true poets of

wisdom, such as were for instance, Manzoni and Goethe. The latter of

these, in the fine verses (of the _Tasso)_ in praise of Ariosto,--who

is held to have there draped in the garb of fable all that can render

man dear and honoured, to have exhibited experience, intelligence,

good taste, the pure sense of good, as living persons, crowned with

roses and surrounded with a magic winged presence of Amorini,--somewhat

transfigured the subject of his eulogy, by approaching him to himself:

although, as we perceive from the images that he employed, it did not

escape him that in the case of the lovable singer of the _Furioso,_

the wisdom was covered, and as it were smothered beneath a cloud

of many coloured flowers. Thus the two principal solutions hitherto

given of the critical problem presented by Ariosto, the only two which

appear thinkable,--that the _Furioso_ has no content; that it has this

or that content,--each finds countenance in the other and arguments

in its favour. This means that they confute one another in turn. And

since it is impossible that there should be no content in Ariosto,

and on the other hand, since all those to which attention was first

directed (admiration or contempt of chivalry, wisdom of life) turn out

to be without existence, it is clear that there is no way out of the

difficulty, save that of seeking another content, and such an one as

shall show how the truth has been improperly symbolised in the formulas

of "mere imagination," of "indifferent objectivity" and of "art for

art's sake."

[Footnote 1: In the preparation of this essay, I believe that I have

examined all, or almost all, the literature of erudition and criticism,

old and new, in connection with Ariosto; this will not escape the

expert reader, although particular discussions and quotation of

titles and pages of books have seemed to me to be superfluous on this

occasion. But in judging this work, the reader should have present

in his mind above all the chapter of De Sanctis on the _Furioso_

(illustrated with fragments from his lectures at Zurich upon the poetry

of chivalry), which forms the point of departure for these later

investigations and conclusions.]

CHAPTER II

THE LIFE OF THE AFFECTIONS IN ARIOSTO,

AND THE HEART OF HIS HEART

Ariosto had ordinary emotional experiences in life, and this has

been shown to be true, not so much through the biographies of his

contemporaries and documents which have later come to light, as

through his own words, because he took great pleasure, if not exactly

in confessing himself, at any rate in giving vent to his feelings.

It is well known that he was without profound intellectual passions,

religious or political, free from longing for riches and honours,

simple and frugal in his mode of life, seeking above all things peace

and tranquillity and freedom to follow his own imagination, to give

himself over to the studies that he loved. Rarely or only for brief

spaces of time was it given to him to live in his own way, owing to

the necessity, always on his shoulders, for providing for his younger

brothers and sisters and for his mother, and also the necessity

of obtaining bread for himself. All these circumstances together

constrained him to undertake the hard work and the annoyances of a

court life. He was admirable in the fulfilment of family duties,

perfectly honest and reliable on every occasion, full of good, just and

generous sentiments, and therefore the recipient of universal esteem

and confidence. Owing to reasons connected with his office, he was

obliged to associate with greedy, violent, unscrupulous men, but he

did not allow himself to be stained by their contact, preserving the

attitude of an honest employee towards his patrons, attentive to the

formal duties with which he was charged. He is discreet, but pure and

dignified, refraining from taking part whatever in the secret plots and

machinations of those whose orders he obeys. He was thus enabled to

carry out the instructions of his superiors, whom he regarded solely

as filling a certain lofty rank, idealising them in conformity with

their rank, praising them, that is to say, for their attainments,

their ability and their noble undertakings, either because they really

possessed them and really accomplished the things for which he praised

them, or because they should have possessed them and accomplished the

feats in question, as attributes inherent to their social station.

Among these duties and labours one single passion ran like an ever warm

stream through his brain: love, or rather the need of woman's society,

to have with him a beloved woman, to enjoy her beauty, her laughter,

her speech: and although he frequently alludes to this passion, it

is as one ashamed of a weakness, but aware that he can by no means

dispense with the sweetness that it procures for him and which is a

vital element of his being. But even his love for woman, however strong

it may have been, found its correct framework in his idyllic ideal and

in his reflective and temperate spirit: it contained nothing of the

fantastic, the adventurous, the Donjuanesque; and after the customary

evil and evanescent adventures of youth, he took refuge in her "for

whom he trembled with amorous zeal" and (as his friend Hercules

Bentivoglio tells us in verse): in that Alexandra, who was his friend

for twenty years, and finally his more or less legal wife. United to

his desire for quietude, there was thus a potent stimulus not to remove

himself at all, or if at all, then as little as possible, from her

who was warmth and comfort for him, and to whom he clung like a child

to the bosom of its mother. His latter years, in which, recalled from

his severe sojourn at Garfagnana, he occupied himself with correcting

his poems at Ferrara, with the woman he loved at his side, were perhaps

the happiest he knew; and he passed away in that peace for which he had

sighed, ere attaining to old age.

Such tendencies of soul and the life which resulted from them, have

sometimes been admired and envied, as for instance by the sixteenth

century English translator of the _Furioso,_ Harrington. After having

described them, and having disclaimed certain sins, indeed as he said,

the single _pecadillo of love,_ he concludes with a sigh: "_Sic me

contingat vivere, Sicque mori._" Sometimes too they have been looked

upon from above and almost with compassion, as by De Sanctis and

others, who have insisted upon the negative aspects of the character

of Ariosto. These negative aspects are however nothing but the

limits, which are found in everyone, for we are not all capable of

everything; and really Italian critics, especially in the period of the

Risorgimento, were often wrong in laying down as a single measure for

everyone, civil, political, patriotic, religious, excellence, forgetful

that judgment of an individual's character should depend upon his

natural disposition, his temperament. Certainly, the life of Ariosto

was not rich and intense, nor does it present important problems in

respect of social and moral history; and the industry of the learned,

although it has been able to increase its collections and conjectures

as to his economic and family conditions, as to his official duties

as courtier, as ambassador and administrator for the Duke of Ferrara,

as to his loves and as to the names and persons of the women whom he

loved, as to the house which he built and inhabited, and other similar

particulars, anecdotes and curiosities concerning him (the collection

of which shows with how much religion or superstition a great man is

surrounded, and also sometimes the futility of the searcher), has not

added anything substantial to what the poet tells us himself, far less

has been able to furnish materials for a really new biography, which

should be at once profound and dramatic.

Nevertheless, such as it was, the life of a good and of a poor man,

of one tenaciously devoted to love and poetry, it found literary

expression in the minor works of the author: in the Latin songs, in the

Italian verses, and in the satires.

In saying this, we shall set aside the comedies, which seem to be the

most important of those minor works and are notwithstanding the least

significant, so that they might be almost excluded from the history

of his poetical development, connected rather with his doings as a

courtier, as an arranger of spectacles and plays, for which purpose he

decided to imitate the Latin comedy, for he did not believe there was

anything new to be done in that field, since the Latins had already

imitated the Greeks. No doubt Ariosto's comedies stand for an important

date in the history of the Italian theatre and of the Latin imitation

which prevailed there, that is to say, the history of culture, but not

in that of poetry. There they are mute. They are works of adaptation

and combination, and therefore executed with effort; there is nothing

new, even about their form, and a proof of this is that Ariosto, after

he had made a first attempt to write them in prose, finally put them

into monotonous and tiresome ante-penultimate hendecasyllabics, which

have never pleased anyone's ear, because they were not born, but

constructed according to design, with evident artifice and with a view

to giving to Italy the metre of comedy, analogous to the Roman iambic.

Whoever (to cite an instance from the same period and "style") calls

to memory the _Mandragola_ of Machiavelli, instinct with the energetic

spirit, the bitter disdain of the great thinker, or even the sketches

thrown upon paper anyhow by the ne'er-do-well Pietro Aretino, is at

once sensible of the difference between dead ability and living force,

or at any rate careless vigour. Nor does the dead material come alive,

as some easily contented critics maintain, from the fact that Ariosto

introduced, especially into the later of those comedies, allusions to

persons, places and customs of Ferrara, or satirical gibes at the vices

of the time; all these things are light as straws and quite indifferent

when original inspiration lacks, as in the present case.

On the other hand, there are many pure and spontaneous parts in the

minor works: even the imitations of Horace, of Catullus, of Tibullus

in the Latin poems, do not produce a sense of coldness, because we

feel that they are inspired with devotion of the humanists for the

Latins, for "my Latins," as he affectionately called them; and the

heart of the poet often beats with theirs, whether he be lamenting

the death of a friend and companion, or drawing the portrait of some

fair lady, or describing the delights of the country, or inveighing

against some treacherous and venal woman. In like manner, we observe

some fine traits of lofty emotion among the Italian poems, such as the

two songs for Philiberta of Savoy; and the true accents of his love

find their way to utterance among the Petrarchan, the madrigalesque and

the courtly qualities of others. Such is the song celebrating their

first meeting, in which he records the Florentine _festa,_ where he

saw her who was to become his mistress, and who immediately occupied a

place above all other women in his eyes, her whose fair, dense hair,

as it shaded her cheeks and neck and fell upon her shoulders, whose

rich silken robe adorned with scarlet and gold, became part of his

soul; and the elegy which is an outburst of joy upon having attained

the desired felicity; and that other which records the lovers' meeting

at night; then too the chapter upon the visit to Florence, where all

the attractions of the sweet city failed to secure fer him a moment's

respite, eager as he was to return to the longed-for presence of

the loved one, whom he describes poetically in her absence as a fair

magician:

"Oltra acque, monti, a ripa l'onda vaga

Del re de' fiumi, in bianca e pura stola,

Cantando ferma il sol la bella maga,

Che con sua vista può sanarmi sola."

and in the sonnet which ends:

"Ma benigne accoglienze, ma complessi

Licenziosi, ma parole sciolte

D'ogni freno, ma risi, vezzi e giuochi."

They are often echoes of the erotic Latin poets, refreshed by the true

condition of his own spirit which, in the passion of love, never went

beyond a tender and somewhat slight degree of sensuality. It would be

vain to seek in him what he does not possess--that suave imagining,

those cosmical analogies, those moral finesses and lofty thoughts,

which are to be found in other poets of love.

For this reason, reflections upon himself and upon the society in

which it was his fate to live, confidences about his own various ways

of feeling and the recital of his adventures, follow and accompany

the brief lyrical effusions of this eroticism. When Ariosto limits

himself to the thoughts and happenings of his daily life, it is

rather a question of narrating than creating, and the culmination

of the minor works are known as the _Satires,_ which must not be

limited to the seven which bear this title in the printed editions,

but should be extended to include other compositions of like tone and

content, to be found among the elegies and the capitals, and even

among the odes, such as the elegy _De diversis amoribus._ In all of

these, Ariosto is writing his autobiography in fragments, or rather

as a series of confidential letters to his friends, such as he did

not write in prose, at least none are to be found among those of his

that remain. These are all connected with business, dry, summary,

and written in haste, only here and there revealing the personality

of the writer; whereas, when he expressed himself in verse, he made

his own soul the subject, paying attention to the vivacity of the

representation and the precise accuracy of what he said. This is a

most pleasing versified correspondence, where we hear him lamenting,

losing patience, telling us what he wants, forming projects, refusing,

begging a favour, candidly laying bare for us his true disposition, his

lack of docility, his volubility and his caprices, discussing life

and the world, smiling at others and at himself; we converse with an

Ariosto in his dressing-gown, who experiences great pleasure and has

no compunction about showing us himself as he is, and we know how he

abhorred any sort of restraint. But these letters in verse, although

perfect in quality, vivacious and eloquent as only the writings of a

man who speaks of things that concern himself can be, yet are letters,

confessions, autobiography: they are not pure poetry; their metrical

form is to them something of a delicate pleasing whim, in harmony

with such a definition of the soul. In saying this, we do not wish

to detract in any way from their value, which is great, but only to

prevent their true character from escaping us.

It is no marvel then if a connection, such as prevails between hills

and valleys, seems to run between these lesser works, the odes, the

verses of the satires, and the _Furioso._ It is sufficient to read

an octave or two of the poem to discover at once the difference in

altitude separating it from the most delicious of the love-songs, from

the most nimble and picturesque of the satires, which express the

feelings of the author far more directly than does the _Furioso._

It is further to be noted that Ariosto never wished to publish, and

certainly never would have had published a great number of them, with

the exception of the comedies, even after his death, except perhaps the

satires; but since the minor works are nevertheless the expression of

his feelings in real and ordinary life, it follows that if we wish to

discover the inspiration of the _Furioso,_ the passion which informed

and gave to it its proper content, we must seek for this beyond his

ordinary life, not in the heart which we know as that of a son, a

brother, a poor man, a lover: it is something hidden yet more deeply

within him, the heart of his heart.

That there really was a hidden affection; that Ariosto really had a

heart of his heart shut up within himself; that beyond and above the

beloved woman he worshipped another woman or goddess, with whom he

daily held religious converse, is apparent from his whole habit of

life. Why had he so lofty a disdain for practical ambitions, why was

life at court and business so wearisome to him, why did he renounce so

much, sigh so often and so often pray for leisure and rest and freedom,

save to celebrate that cult, to give himself over to that converse,

to work upon the _Furioso,_ which was its altar, or the statue which

he had sculptured for it and was perfecting with his chisel? What was

the origin of his well-known "distraction," that mind of his so aloof

from his surroundings, ever dwelling upon something else, which his

contemporaries observe and about which curious anecdotes are preserved?

His need of love and of feminine caresses did not present itself to him

as a supreme end, as with people desirous of ease and pleasure, but

seemed to him to be rather a means to an end: as though it were the

surrounding of serene joy, of tumult appeased, which he prepared for

himself and for that other more lofty love. Carducci has successfully

defined this psychological situation in his sonnet on the portrait of

Ariosto, where he says that the only longed for and accepted "prize

for his poems" was for the great dreamer "a lovely mouth--which should

appease the burning of his Apollonian brow--with kisses ..."

The proof of the scrupulous attention which he devoted to the

_Furioso,_ is to be found in the twelve years, during which he worked

upon it in the flower of his age, "with long vigils and labours," as he

wrote to the Doge of Venice, when requesting the privilege of printing

the first edition of 1516; and in his having always returned to it,

to chisel smooth and to soften it in innumerable delicate details,

or to amplify it, or in the throwing away of five cantos, which he

had written by way of amplification, but which did not go well with

the general design, and finally failed to content him. For these he

substituted as many more, and personally superintended the edition of

1532, which also failed to content him altogether, so that he began

to work upon it again during the few months which separated him from

death. His son Virginio attests that he "was never satisfied with

his verses, that he kept changing them again and again, and for this

reason never remembered any of them ..."; and contemporaries never

cease marvelling at his diligence as a corrector and a maker of perfect

things: Giraldi Cinzio, to mention but one witness, says that after

the first edition, "not a single day passed," during sixteen years,

"that he was not occupied upon it with pen and with thought," and that

he was also desirous of obtaining the opinions and impressions of the

greatest men of letters and humanists in Italy as to every part of it,

men such as Bembo, Molza, Navagero; and as Apelles with his paintings,

Ariosto kept his work for two years "in the hall of his house, leaving

it there that it might be criticised by everyone"; and he particularly

said that he wished his critics merely to mark with a stroke of the pen

those parts which did not please them, without giving any reason for so

doing, that he might find it out for himself, and then discuss it with

them, and so arrive at a decision and a solution in his own way. He

pushed his minute delicacy of taste so far as to be preoccupied about

the choice of modes of spelling, refusing, for instance, to remove the

"h" from those words which possessed it by tradition, thus opposing the

suggestion of Tolomei and the new fashion of the illiterate crowd, by

jocosely replying that "He who removes the _h_ from _Huomo,_ does not

know _Huomo_ (man), and he who removes it from _Honore,_ is not worthy

of honour."

What then was the passion which he thus expressed, who was the goddess,

for whom, since he could not raise a temple and a marble statue in the

little house which he longed for and built in the Via Mirasole, he

constructed the architecture, the forms and the poetical adornments of

the _Furioso? _ He never uttered her name, because none of the other

great Italian poets was so little a theorist or critic as Ariosto. He

never discussed his art or art in general, limiting himself to saying

very simply, and indeed very inadequately, that what he meant by art

was "A work containing pleasing and delightful things"; nor, as we have

seen, have the critics told us who she was, since they have at the most

indicated vaguely and indirectly in their illogical formula that "his

Goddess was Art."

CHAPTER III

THE HIGHEST LOVE: HARMONY

But we on the other hand shall name her, and we shall call her Harmony,

and we shall prove that those who assign a simple aim to Ariosto in the

_Furioso,_ Art or Pure Form, were gazing at her and seeing her as it

were through a veil of clouds. In doing this, we shall at the same time

define the concept of Harmony. We cannot avoid entering upon certain

theoretical explanations in relation to this matter; but it would be

wrong to look upon them as digressions, since it is only by their means

that the way can be cleared to the understanding of the spirit which

animates the _Furioso._ There is something comic or at least ironic in

this necessity in which we find ourselves, of weighting with philosophy

a discourse relating to so transparent a poet as Ariosto; but we have

already warned the reader at the beginning that it is one thing to read

and let sing to him the verses of a poet, and another to understand

him, and that what is easy to learn may sometimes be very difficult to

understand.

It is therefore without doubt contradictory to state that an artist has

for his special and particular end or content, art itself, art which

is the general end of every artist: as contradictory as to say that an

individual has for his concrete and proper end, not this or that work

and profession, but life. And there is also no doubt that since every

error contains in it an element of truth, those erroneous theories

aimed at something effectively existing: a particular content, which

they were not able to define, and which could never be in any case art

for art. Two sorts of judgments of that formula have nevertheless been

expressed in relation to two different groups of works of art: those

relating to works which seemed to be inspired by a particular form of

art, and those which seem to be inspired by the idea of Art itself, by

Art in universal; and for this reason our rapid investigation must be

divided and directed first to the one and then to the other case.

The first case includes the poetry which may be called "humanistic"

or "classicistic": not the classicism and humanism of pedants without

talent or taste, but that lively humanism and classicism which we

are wont to admire and enjoy in several poets of our Renaissance in

the Latin language, such as Sannazaro, Politian and Pontano, and also

in later times those extremely lettered writers in Italian, of whom

Monti, in his best work, may be said to be the greatest representative

and we might add to him Canova, although he has not poetised in verse.

What is there that pleases us in them, in their imitations, their

re-writing, their cantos of classical phrases and measures? And what

was it that warmed and carried them away, so that they were able to

transmit their emotion to us and obtain our delighted sympathy? It

has been answered that this was due to their remaining faithful to

the already sacred traditions of beautiful form, handed down by the

school; but this answer is not satisfactory, because pedants also can

be mechanically faithful in repeating; we have alluded to these and

shown that on the contrary they weary and annoy us. The truth is that

the former hold to those forms of art, because they are the suitable

symbol, the satisfactory expression of their feeling, which is one

of affection for the _past,_ as being venerable, glorious, decorous,

national or super-national and cultural; and their content is not

literary form by itself, but love for that past, love for some one or

other _historical_ age of art. And if this be true, we must place those

romantic archaisers in the same class of art with the humanists or

classicists, when considering the substantial nature of things. For the

former nourish the same feeling and employ the same procedure, not in

relation to the Greek and Roman past, but in relation to the Christian

and medieval past, particularly in Germany, where they let us hear

again the rude accent of the medieval epic, and represent the ingenuous

forms of pious legends and sacred dramatic representations, and make

themselves the echo of ancient popular songs: this re-writing has often

something in it of the pastiche (as the humanists and classicists also

have something of the pastiche, which with them is pedantry), yet

sometimes produce passages of delicate art, which if not profound, were

certainly agreeable to the heart that remembers, to the eternal heart

of childhood which is in us.

Ariosto was also a more or less successful humanist in certain of his

minor works, as we have said, but in the _Furioso,_ although he took

many schemes and details from Latin poets, he stands essentially

outside their line of inspiration, for instead of directing his spirit

towards the past, he always draws the past towards his spirit, and

there is no observable trace in it of Latin-Augustan archaism, or of

the archaism of medieval chivalry. For this reason, the view that he

had Art itself as his content must be taken as applicable without doubt

in the other sense to him and to certain other artists: as devotion to

Art as universal, to Art in its Idea, a devotion which is bodied forth

in his narratives, his figures and his verse.

Now it must be remembered that Art in its Idea is nothing but

expression or--representation of the real,--of the real which is

conflict and strife, but a conflict and a strife that are always being

settled; that it is multiplicity and diversity, but at the same time

unity, dialectic and development, and also and through that, cosmos and

Harmony. And since Art cannot be the content of Art, that is to say,

it is impossible to represent representation (as it is impossible to

think thought, so that if thought is made the object of thought, it is

always itself and the other, that is to say, the whole), by eliding

the term which is superfluous and has been unduly retained, we obtain

the result that when it is stated of Ariosto or of other artists

that they have for content pure Art or pure Form, it is really to be

understood that they have for content devotion to the pure rhythm of

the universe, for the dialectic which is unity, for the development

which is _Harmony._ Thus, if humanistic or otherwise archaistic artists

do not as is generally believed love beautiful forms, but rather the

past and history, it may be said of those others that they do not love

pure Art, but the _pure and universal content_ of Art, not this or that

particular strife and Harmony (erotic, political, moral, religious, and

so on), but strife and _Harmony_ in idea and eternal.

The concept of cosmic Harmony, which has also been called pure

Beauty or absolute Beauty, and indeed God, has been much employed in

old philosophy, and notably in the old aesthetic (old always being

understood in its logical-historical sense, which is still tenacious of

life and reappears in our own day, where it might be least expected),

and has made an elaboration of the new theory, which conceives of art

as lyrical intuition or expression, very laborious. For many reasons

that it would occupy too much time and be out of place to detail

here, Harmony or Beauty came to be considered as the true essence of

Art; hence the impossibility of accounting, not only for many works

of art, but for art in general, and the artificial attempts made by

the upholders of this doctrine and by criticism to pervert facts in

support of a partial and incorrect principle. For the reasons given

above, it is easy for us to discern the origin of the error, which

lay in transferring one of the classes of particular contents which

Art is able to elaborate, to serve as the end and essence of Art. And

the one selected was precisely that which owing to its religious and

philosophical dignity, appeared to have the power to absorb Art into

itself together with everything else and to dissolve the whole in a

sort of mysticism. This is confirmed by the historical course of the

doctrine, the first conspicuous form of which was Neoplatonism, which

reappeared on several occasions in the Middle Ages, at the time of the

Renaissance and during the Romantic period. De Sanctis himself, owing

to the romantic origins of his thought, was never altogether free from

it; and his judgment upon Ariosto bears traces of the transcendental

conception of Art as an actualisation of pure Beauty.

Similar traces are to be found in another& doctrine to which De

Sanctis held and formulated as the distinction and opposition between

the _poet_ and the _artist:_ a doctrine which it is desirable to make

clear, not only with a view of strengthening the concept to which

we have had recourse, but also because Ariosto himself is numbered

among the poets to whom the distinction has been chiefly applied, as

he has been held to be distinct and opposed, along with Politian and

Petrarch, and perhaps others, as artists, to Dante or to Shakespeare,

as poets. The doctrine appears to be endorsed by facts, and therefore

looks plausible and is readily accepted and continually reproduced,

as on several occasions in the history of aesthetic ideas. It was

not altogether unknown in the days of Ariosto himself, if Giraldo

Cinzio can be held to have suggested it, when in his description of an

allegorical picture, in which were to be seen the two great Tuscans

"in a green and flowery meadow upon a hill of Helicon," Dante, with

his robe fastened at the knees, "manipulated the circular scythe,

cutting all the grass that his scythe met with," while Petrarch,

"robed in senatorial robe, lay there selecting among the noble

herbs and the delicate flowers." In spite of this, it is altogether

unsustainable as an exact theory, because it introduces an unjustified

and unjustifiable dualism, which it is altogether impossible to

mediate, since each of the two distinct terms contains in itself the

other and nothing else, thus demonstrating their identity: the poet

is poet because he is an artist, that is to say, he gives artistic

form to feeling, and the artist would not be an artist, if he were

not a poet, that is to say, if he had not a feeling to elaborate. The

apparent confirmation of this theory by facts arises from this, that

there are as we know, artists who have a devotion for cosmic Harmony

as their chief content, and others who have other devotions: and this

proves that it is advisable to make a very moderate and restrained

use of the distinction between poets and artists, between those who

represent the beautiful and those who represent the real, as is the

case with all empirical distinctions. Sometimes the same distinction,

taken from the bosom of poetry or of some other special art, has been

thrown into the midst of the series of the so-called arts, severing

those arts which have cosmic Harmony, absolute Beauty, ideal Beauty,

the rhythm of the Universe for their object, from others which have

for their object individual feelings and life. Among the former were

numbered (as in the school of Winckelmann) the art of sculpture and

certain sorts of painting at least, and among the latter, poetry; or

(according to Schelling and Schopenhauer) bestowing upon music alone

the whole of the first field. Music would thus be opposed to the other

arts and would possess the value of an unconscious Metaphysic, in so

far as it directly portrayed the rhythm of the Universe itself. A

clumsy doctrine, which we only mention here, because Ariosto would

furnish the best example of all among the poets, against the exclusion

of poetry from among the arts which alone were able to portray the

rhythm of the Universe or Harmony: Ariosto, who, if he had seemed to

an Italian philologist to be nothing less than "a poet who was an

excellent observer and reasoner," has yet appeared to Humboldt, whose

ear was more sensitive to the especially "musical" _musikalisch,_ and

to Vischer more especially as one who developed his fables of chivalry

41 in a melodious labyrinth of images, which produced in its sensual

serenity the same enjoyment as the rocking and dying of the Italian

"canzone," thus giving the reader "the pure pleasure of moving without

matter." When empirical classifications are not handled with caution

and with a consciousness of their limits, not only do they deprive the

principles of science of their rigour and vigour, but also carry with

them the unfortunate result of making it seem possible to distinguish

concretely what has been roughly divided for the purpose of aiding

the creation of images. The double class of poets and of artists, the

one moved by particular affections, the other by universal Harmony,

does not hold as a logical duality, because the love of Harmony is

itself one of many particular affections, and forms part of the

series comprising the comic, tragic, humorous, melancholy, jocose,

pessimistic, passionate, realistic, classicistic poets, and so on. But

even when it has been reduced to the level of the others, there is no

necessity, either in its case or in that of the others, to fall into

the illusion that there really exist poets who are only tragic or only

comic, only realistic or only classicistic, singers only of Harmony,

without the other passions, or solely passionate without the passion

for Harmony. The love of traditional forms, for example, which we have

seen to be the base of classicism, exists in a certain measure in every

poet, for the reason that every poet employs, re-lives and renews the

words of a given language, which has been historically formed, and is

therefore charged with a literary tradition and full of historical

meaning. And the love of Harmony exists also in every poet worthy of

the name, since he cannot represent his drama of the affections, save

as a particular mode of drama and of the dramatic or dialectic cosmic

Harmony, which is therefore contained and dwells in it as the universal

in the particular.

Are we ourselves overthrowing our own distinctions, immediately after

asserting them? We are not overthrowing the principles which we had

established in connection with the nature of Art, and with the nature

of Harmony and Beauty in the super-aesthetic and cosmical sense; but

it was necessary clearly to state and to overthrow the definition of

Ariosto as poet of Harmony, because in doing so, we cease to preserve

it in its abstractness, but make use of it as a living principle. In

other words, by thus defining him, we have attained the first object

of our quest, which was no longer to leave him hidden beneath the

nebulous description of a poet of art for art's sake, nor beneath

that other equally fallacious description of him as a satirical and

ironical poet, or as a poet of prudence and wisdom, and so on; and

we have pointed out _where the principal accent of his art falls._

Passing now to other determinations, in order to show in what matter

and in what way or tone that accent is realised, maintained and

developed, even when it happens that we can do this in the best

possible manner, we shall not allow ourselves to be ensnared by the

fatuous belief, in vogue with certain critics of the day, that we

have supplied an equivalent to Ariosto's poetry with our aesthetic

formulas: such an equivalent would not only be an arrogance, but it

would also be useless, because Ariosto's poetry is there, and anyone

can see it for himself. The new determinations must however also be

asserted and refuted, only the new results being preserved, analogous

to those already obtained, by means of which we shall dispose of other

false ideas circulated by the critics concerning Ariosto and point

out the salient characteristics of the material which he selected for

treatment, together with the mode and the tone of his poem. The poetry

of the _Furioso,_ as for that matter all poetry, is an _individuum

ineffabile,_ and Ariosto, the poet of Harmony, limited in this

direction and that, never at any time exactly coincides with Ariosto,

the Ariostesque poet, the poet of Harmony, and not only of Harmony as

denned in the way we have defined it, but also in other ways understood

or indefinable. We do not propose to exhaust or to take the place of

the concrete living Ariosto; he is indeed present to the imagination

of our readers as to our own and forms the perpetual criterion of

our critical explanations, which without this criterion would be

unintelligible.

CHAPTER IV

THE MATERIAL FOR THE HARMONY

Had Ariosto been a philosopher or a poet-philosopher, he would have

given us a hymn to Harmony, similar to a good many others which are to

be found in the history of literature, celebrating that lofty Idea,

which enabled him to understand the discordant concord of things and

while satisfying his intellect, filled his soul with peace and joy. But

Ariosto was the opposite of a philosopher, and certainly, were he able

to read what we are now investigating and discovering in him, first he

would be astonished, then he would smile and finally he would comment

upon our work with some good-natured jest.

His love for Harmony never took the form of a concept, it was not

love of the concept and of the intelligence, that is to say of things

answering to a need which he did not experience: it was love for

Harmony directly and ingenuously perceived, for sensible Harmony: a

harmony, therefore, which did not arise from a loss of his humanity and

an abandonment of all particular sentiments, a religious mounting up

to the world of the ideas, but existed for him rather as a sentiment

among sentiments, a dominant sentiment, surrounding all the others and

assigning to each its place. In this respect, he really belonged to one

of the chief spiritual currents of the period of the Renaissance, or

more accurately, of the early Cinquecento: to the period, that is to

say, when Leonardo, Raphael, Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto, with

their beautiful, harmonious decorum and majestic forms, had succeeded

to Ghirlandaio, to Botticelli, to Lippi, when it seemed (in the words

of Wölfflin, a historian of art) "as though new bodies had suddenly

grown up in Italy," a new and magnificent population, resplendent

in painting and sculpture, which was indeed the reflection of a new

psychical attitude, of a different direction and of a new centre of

interest.

Now if we undertake to consider the sentiments which form part of the

_Furioso,_ if we disassociate them from the connection established

among them by the harmonising sentiment of Harmony, and therefore in

their particularity, disaggregation and materiality, we shall have

before us the _material_ of the _Furioso._ For the "material" of Art

is nothing but this, when ideally distinguished from the _content,_ in

which the sentiments themselves are fused in the dominant sentiment,

whether it be called the leading motive or the lyrical motive: a

content which in its turn can be only ideally distinguished from the

_form,_ in which it expresses itself or is possessed and present

in the spirit. Philological criticism, deprived of philosophical

enlightenment, philology in its bad sense or philologism, means rather

by "material" or "sources," as they are also called, external things,

such as the books which the poet had read or the stories that he had

heard told, and on the pretext of supplying in this way the genesis of

a work of art _ab ovo,_ it penetrates to the sources of the sources,

let us say to the origins of warrior women, of the ogress and the

hippogryph of Ariosto. Their procedure suggests that of one who when

asked what language a poet found in circulation in his time, should

open for that purpose an etymological dictionary of the Italian

language, or of the romance languages, or of Indo-European languages,

which expound formative ideological processes, either forgotten or

thrown into the background of the speaker's consciousness when engaged

in speaking. But even if we do not lose our way in such learned and

interminable dissertations, if we escape the error referred to above,

of forming judgments as to merit upon them, philologistic search

for sources and for material becomes capricious and ends by being

impossible; because it takes as sources only certain literary lumber

scattered here and there, and were we to unite this with the whole

of the rest of literature, with the figurative and musical arts, and

with other external things which actually surround the poet, public

and private events, scientific teachings and disputes, beliefs,

customs, and so on, we should find ourselves involved in all endless

and infinite enumeration, convincing proof of the illogical nature

of such an inquiry. Nor do we make any progress in the determination

of the material by limiting it to more modest terms, that is to say,

only to certain things which the poet had before him (even if they be

documents and information, not without use for certain ends), because

the true _material_ of art, as has been said, is not _things_ but

the _sentiments_ of the poet, which determine and explain one another,

why and for what reason he turns to certain things and not to others, to

these things rather than to those. Since we have already described

Ariosto's character and shown its reflection in his minor works, now

that we are examining the material of the _Furioso,_ we shall find the

same character, that is to say, the same complex of sentiments which

it will be desirable to illustrate and to distinguish in a somewhat

different manner, with an eye no longer directed to the psychology of

the man or to the minor works, but just to the _Furioso._

And we shall find above all _an amorous_ Ariosto, Ariosto perpetually

in love, whom we already know: an Ariosto for whom love and woman are

an important affair, a great pleasure which he is not able to renounce,

a great torment from which he cannot set himself free. That love is

always altogether sensual, love for a beautiful bodily form, shining

forth in the luminous eyes, seductive, charming; virtuous too, but

relatively virtuous, just as much as avails to prevent too much poison

entering into the delicate linked tenderness of love; and for this

reason, all ethical or speculative idealisation, in the new or Platonic

style, is excluded "Not love of a lady of theology ...": here too,

Carducci saw clearly and spoke well. Absent too or extraneous are the

consecration and purification of love in "matrimony"; the choice of a

wife, the treatment of a wife, are for Ariosto, things differing but

slightly from the choice and the breaking in of a horse, and matrimony

in its noble ethical sense belongs at the most to his intellect, and

to his intellect in so far as it is passive: in the _Furioso_ are

to be found the politics and not the poetry of matrimony, and among

innumerable ties of free love, the chaste sighing of Bradamante alone

aims at "the conjugal tie" with Ruggiero. But the love of Ariosto is

healthy and natural in its warm sensuality; it is not sophisticated

with luxurious images, it is conscious of its own limits; nor does it

suffer from mad or inextinguishable desires, but only from that which

was known in the language of the time as the "cruelty" of woman, her

refusal or her coldness; but it tortures itself yet more with jealousy

and the anxious working of the imagination. The Ferrarese Garofalo,

a contemporary biographer, bears witness to the very lively jealousy

of Ariosto, saying that since he loved "with a great vehemence," he

was "above measure jealous," and "always carried on his love affairs

in secret and with great solicitude, accompanied with much modesty";

but this is evident in the matter of the poem itself, being exhibited

in many of his personages, descriptions and situations, and finding

complete expression in the verse which closes on so pathetic a note:

"believe one who has had experience of it." Cruelty on the one side and

jealousy on the other, although they torture, do not make him sad or

cause him to give vent to desperate utterances, because, since he had

not too lofty nor too madly an intransigent idea of love, although it

greatly delighted him, he is not apt to expect too much from it, and

knowing the infidelity and the fragility of man, a sort of sense of

justice forbids him from bringing his hand down too heavily upon the

infidelity and the fragility of woman. Hence comes, not forgiveness,

but resignation and indulgence. "My lady is a lady, and every lady

is weak"; remarks Rinaldo wisely. Ariosto's is an indulgence without

moral elevation, but also without cynicism and inspired with a certain

element of goodness and humanity. Reciprocal deception and illusion

are inherent to love affairs; but how can they be done away with,

without also doing away at the same time with the charm of that bitter

but amiable sport? The lover takes care to preserve the illusion by

his very passion, which blinds him to what is visible and makes the

invisible visible, leading him to believe what he desires, to believe

the person who fascinates him, as does Brandimarte with his Fiordiligi,

wandering about the world and returning to him uncontaminated: "To

fair Fiordiligi, of whom I had believed greater things." Thus the

imagination of Ariosto, as these various equal and conflicting

sentiments wove their own images, became quite filled with marvellous

seductive beauties, perfect of limb, and with voluptuous forms and

scenes (Alcina and her arts, Angelica in the arms of Ruggiero who had

set her free, Fiordispina); of others which oscillate between the

passionate and the comic (Gicondo and Fiametta, the knight who tests

the wife he loves too much, the judge Anselmo and his Argia): of others

whose love was unworthy or criminal (Origille, whom Griffone strives

to save from the punishment that she deserves, notwithstanding her

wickedness proved on several occasions and her known treachery; the

sons of King Marganorre; Gabrina, who did receive punishment, perhaps

because her depraved old age was so repulsive); and above all of the

woman who symbolises Woman, for whom the bravest knights sustain every

sort of labour and danger, and because of whom a big strong man loses

control of himself, and who, herself slave of a love which owns no

law outside itself, ends by bestowing her hand upon a "poor servant"

(Angelica, Orlando and Medoro). These are but a few instances of the

many places in the _Furioso,_ bearing upon love in its various modes

of presentation, in addition to the introductions to the cantos and

the digressions into which Ariosto pours his whole store of feeling

or sets forth his reflections. And the love matter is of so great a

volume as to dominate all the rest, possibly in extent, certainly in

relief and intensity; so much so, that it is a marvel that among the

many attempts to establish the true motive and argument of the poem, by

abstracting it from its subject matter, and to determine its design and

unity in the same way, no one has yet insisted upon considering it, or

has been able to consider it as "the poem of love," of the casuistry

of love, to which knightly and warlike life should but provide the

decorative background. This theory would certainly seem to be less

unlikely than the other, which assigns to it as its end and unity the

war between Carlo and Agramante. In any case, this motive is placed

second in the protasis to the _Furioso,_ where the first word is not by

chance "women," and the first verse ends with "loves" (and in the first

edition we even read: "The ancient loves of ladies and of knights");

and the scene with which the poem opens is the flight of Angelica, who

is immediately met by Sacripante and Rinaldo who are in love with her,

and that with which it concludes is the marriage feast of Ruggiero and

Bradamante, disturbed yet heightened in its solemnity of celebration by

the incident of the duel with Rodomonte.

Love matter dominates in the _Furioso,_ because it dominated in the

heart of Ariosto, where it easily passed over into more noble feelings,

into piety that goes beyond the tomb, into justice rendered to

calumniated innocence, into kindness ill-recompensed, into admiration

for the sacred tie of friendship. Hence, in marked contrast to the

beautiful Doralice, so crudely sensual, that when her lover's body is

still warm, she is capable of looking with desire upon his slayer, the

valiant Ruggiero, Isabella deliberately decides upon putting herself

to death that she may keep faith with her dead lover; and Fiordiligi,

whose pretty little face, upon which still flitters something of the

impudence attributed to her by Boiardo, becomes furrowed with anguish

and sublime with sorrow, when she apprehends the loss of Brandimarte.

And Olympia stands by the side of Ginevra, trapped and drawn to the

brink of ruin by a wicked man, and is rescued by Rinaldo, the righter

of wrongs, Olympia whom Orlando twice saves, the second time not only

from death, but from desperation at the desertion of her most thankless

husband. Zerbino, brother of Ginevra and lover of Isabella, is a flower

of nobility among the knights. He alone understands and pities the

affectionate deed of Medoro, careless of his own life and absorbed in

the anxiety to obtain burial for the body of his lord. When his former

friend who has shown himself to be a most infamous traitor, is dragged

before him in chains, he cannot find it in him to inflict upon him the

death he deserves, for he remembers their long and close friendship.

Devoted to the greatness of Orlando and in gratitude for what he had

done in saving and taking care of Isabella, he collects the arms of

the Paladin, scattered at the outbreak of his madness, and sustains a

combat with Mandricardo for these arms, dying rather for sorrow at

not having been able to defend them than from his wound. Cloridano

and Medoro, Orlando and Brandimarte, are other idealisations of a

friendship which lasts beyond the tomb; and anyone searching the poem

for motives of commiseration and indignation for oppressed virtue,

for unhappy peoples trodden beneath the heel of the tyrant, robbed,

tortured and allowed to perish like cattle and goats, would find other

instances of the goodness and generosity which burned in the mild

Ariosto.

Goodness and generosity were also the substance of his political

sentiment, which was that of the honest man of all times, who laments

the misfortunes of his country, loathes the domination of foreigners,

judges the oppression of the nobles with severity, is scandalised by

the corruption and hypocrisy of the priests and of the Church, regrets

that the united arms of Europe cannot prevail against the Turks, that

barbarian "of ill omen"; but it does not go beyond this superficial

impressionability, and ends by accepting his own times and respecting

the powerful personages who have finally prevailed. For this reason

there is but slight interest in noting (and it can be noted in the

_Furioso_ itself) the variety of the political ideas of Ariosto,

first hostile to the Spaniards, as we see from several references to

them, and from certain attributes given to the Spaniard Ferraù, and

finally to the French, who had lost the game in Italy, and we find him

extolling the Spanish-Imperial Carlo V., and those who maintain his

cause in Italy, whether they were Andrea Doria or the Avalos. But on

the other hand, as Ave have already said, it is unjust to reprove him

for not having been a champion of italianity and of rebellion against

tyrants and foreigners,--such existed in those days, although they were

rare--or a passionate political thinker and prophet, like Machiavelli.

The famous invective against firearms suffices to indicate the quality

of Ariosto's politics: for him politics were morality, private

morality, a morality but little combative and very idyllic, although

not vulgar, disdainful indeed of the vulgar of all sorts, however

fortunate and highly placed. Thus it was not such as to create figures

and scenes in the poem, like love and human piety; suffice that if it

insinuated itself here and there among the reflective, exclamatory and

hortatory octaves.

His feeling towards his own sovereign lords, the Estes, has not, as

we have suggested, either in his soul or in the _Furioso,_ anything

in it of the specifically political, although he admired them for the

splendour of art and letters, which they and their predecessors had

conferred upon the country, and for the strength of their rule. And

he praised them with words and comparisons, which he introduced into

his poem on a large scale, and into the general scheme itself. These

have at times been held to be base adulation or a subtle form of irony

almost amounting to sarcasm; they were however neither, being serious

celebrations of glorious military enterprises and of magnanimous acts

(it does not matter whether they really were so or seemed so and were

bound to seem so to him); and for the rest, and especially as far as

concerned Cardinal Hippolyto, they resemble the madrigals addressed

to ladies or their attendants, which always contain a vein of mockery

mingled with the hyperbole of their compliments. In fact he treated

this material as an imaginative theme, now decorous and grave, now

elegant and polished as by a courtier; and he would have been still

more inclined to treat the Estes in this way, had they in return for

his words and "works of ink" dispensed him from the duties of his

post, and particularly from those which obliged him to run hither and

thither, to behave like a "teamster." Like many peaceful individuals,

who have no taste for finding themselves in the midst of battles, or

for changing the place of their abode, or for travelling to see foreign

races, or for voyages, or for rapid ups and downs and adventures, or

for anything of an upsetting and extraordinary nature that happens

unexpectedly, he was quite ready to accept all these things in his

imagination, where he preserved, caressed and made idols of them. His

inclination imaginatively to decorate the Estes, the nobles of Italy,

great ladies, artists, good or bad men of letters of any sort, to make

radiant statues of them, had the same root as his inclination for

stories of knightly romance.

These stories were the favourite reading, the "pleasant literature" of

good society, especially in Ferrara, where the Estes possessed a fine

collection in their library, whence had come the majority of Italian

poets, who had versified them during the previous century, setting them

free from plebeian prose and verse. Ariosto must have read very many

of these in his youth, and must have delighted in them, and we know

that he himself translated some from French and Spanish. Here were to

be found terrible and tremendous battles, duels of hard knocks and of

masterly blows, combats with giants and monsters, tragical situations,

magnanimous deeds, proofs of steadfast faith, a vying together of

loyalty and courtesy, persecutions and favours and aid afforded by

prodigious beings, by fairies and magicians, travels in distant lands,

by sea or by flight, enchanted gardens and palaces, knights of immense

strength, Christian and Saracen, warlike women and women who were

women, royally: all this gave him the desirable and agreeable pleasure

of one who looks on at a variously coloured exhibition of fireworks,

and owing to this pleasure they gave, he incorporated a great number

of them in the _Furioso._ It is superfluous to inquire whether the

material of chivalry appeared to him to be serious or burlesque, when

we have understood the feeling which led him in that direction: it

was beyond all judgment of that sort, because we do not judge rockets

or fireworks morally or economically, with approval or reproof. It

can of course be remarked that knightly tales had henceforth been

reduced to such an extent in Italy and in the spirit of Ariosto that

they were not only without the religious and national feeling of the

ancient epic, but even without what is still to be found in certain

popular Italian compilations, such as the _Monarchs of France;_ but

this observation, though correct and important enough in the history of

culture, has no meaning whatever as regards Ariosto's poetry. The fact

that Ariosto was sometimes entranced and carried away as it were by the

spectacles which his fancy presented to him, and sometimes kept aloof

from them, with a smile for commentary, or turned away towards the real

world that surrounded him, goes without saying, and does not appear to

demand the discussions and the intellectual efforts which have been

devoted to it.

His was on the other hand a distinctly jesting outlook upon religious

beliefs, God, Christ, Paradise, angels and saints; and Charlemagne's

prayer to God, the vision of the angel Michael upon earth and the

voyage of Astolfo to the world of the Moon, his conversations with John

the Evangelist, the deeds and words of the hermit with whom Angelica

and Isabella find themselves, and finally those of the saintly hermit

who baptises Ruggiero, accord with this laughing and almost mocking

spirit. Here we do not find even the seriousness of the game and in

the game, with which he treats of knightly doings; nor could there be,

because relation towards religion admits only of complete reverence

or complete irreverence. And Ariosto was irreverent, or what comes

to the same thing, indifferent; his spirit was as areligious as it

was aphilosophical, untormented with doubts, not concerned with human

destiny, incurious as to the meaning and value of this world, which he

saw and touched, and in which he loved and suffered. He was altogether

outside the philosophy of the Renaissance, whether Ficino's or

Pomponazzi's, as he was outside every sort of philosophy. This limits

and as it were deprives of importance his mockeries and to salute him

as some have done "the Voltaire of the Renaissance" or as a precursor

of Voltaire, and Voltaire himself who so much enjoyed Ariosto's

profanations of sacred things, maliciously underlining the witticism

that escapes from the lips of St. John about "my much-praised Christ"

(after having said that writers turn the true into the false, and

the false into the true, and that he also had been a "writer" in the

world), has given Ariosto a place which does not belong to him at all.

Voltaire was not areligious or indifferent, and was only irreligious in

so far as he attacked all historical religions with a religion of his

own, which was deism or the religion of the reason; and for this reason

his satires and his lampoons possess a polemical value, which is not to

be found in the jests of Ariosto.

Presented in its outstanding features, and to the extent which suits

our purpose, such is the complex of sentiments which flowed together

to form the _Furioso_ and to produce the images of which it consists.

They produced them all the same, where he seems to have taken them from

other poems or books, from Virgil or from Ovid, from French or Spanish

romances, because in the taking and with the taking of them, he made

them images of his own sentiment, that is to say, he breathed into

them a new life and poetically created them in so doing. But although

this material of the poem may seem to us who have considered it to be

anterior and external to the poem itself and owing to our analysis,

disaggregated, it must not be supposed that those sentiments ever

existed in the spirit of Ariosto as mere matter or in an amorphous

condition, because there is nothing in the spirit without some form

and without its own form. Indeed, we have seen a great part of it

take form in the minor works, while some dwelt in his mind, expressed

and realised in their own way, even if unfulfilled or if we lack

written record of their existence. But they possessed a different

aspect in this anterior form, differing therefore from that which

they assumed in the poem. In the lyrics and satires, words of love

and nostalgia, of friendship and complaint, of anger and indignation

against princes who take little interest in poets, of impatience and

contempt for the ambitious throng, and the like, are more lively and

direct; and it would be easy to find parallels for identical thoughts

appearing with different intonations in the two different places. Had

Ariosto always accorded artistic treatment to those sentiments at the

moment of experiencing them, he would have continued to write songs,

sonnets, epistles and satires, and would not have set to work upon

the _Furioso._ An examination of the poem upon Obizzo D'Este as to

the material of chivalry, or if we like the sound of it better, as to

feats of arms and of daring, will at least yield us a glimpse of what

it would have become, had it received immediate treatment, whether this

poem belongs to the early years of Ariosto, prior to the composition

of the _Furioso,_ or whether (as is more probable), it be later than

the composition of the poem and the appearance of the first edition.

The fragment is notable for its great limpidity and narrative fluency,

but one sees that if the poet had continued in this direction, the poem

would have been nothing but an elegant book of songs; Ariosto did not

wish to be a song-writer, so he ceased the work which had been begun.

Had he versified his mockeries of sacred things, he would have become a

wit, a collector of burlesque surprises, capable of arousing laughter

about friars and saints; but Ariosto disdained such a trade, Ariosto

whose many grandiose distractions are on record, but no witticisms

or smart sayings: he was too much of a dreamer, too fine an artist

to take pleasure in such things. His sentiment for Harmony aided him

to turn the pleasant stories of chivalry and capricious jesting into

poetry, and lesser erotic or narrative and argumentative poetry into

more complex poetry, to accomplish the passage and ascent from the

minor works to that which is truly great, to mediate the immediate, by

transforming his various sentiments in the manner that we are about to

consider.

CHAPTER V

THE REALISATION OF HARMONY

The first change to manifest itself in them so soon as they were

touched by the Harmony which sang at the bottom of the poet's heart,

was their loss of autonomy, their submission to a single lord, their

descent from being the whole to becoming a part, their becoming

occasions rather than motives, instruments rather than ends, their

common death for the benefit of the new life.

The magical power which accomplished this prodigy was the _tone_ of the

expression, that self-possessed, lightness of tone, capable of adopting

a thousand forms and remaining ever graceful, known to the old school

of critics as "the confidential air," and remembered among the other

"properties" of the "style" of Ariosto. But not only does his whole

style consist of this, but since style is nothing but the expression

of the poet and of his soul, this was all Ariosto himself and his

harmonious singing.

This work of disvaluation and destruction is to be detected in the

expressive tone in the proems to the separate cantos, in the digressive

argumentations, in the observations interjected, in the repetitions, in

the use of vocables, in the phrasing and the arrangement of periods,

and above all in the frequent comparisons that form pictures which

rather than intensifying the emotion, cause it to take a different

path, in the interruptions to the narrative, sometimes occurring at

their most dramatic point, in the nimble passage to other narratives of

a different and often opposite nature. Yet the palpable part of this

whole, what it is possible to segregate and to analyse as elements of

style, forms but a small part of the impalpable whole, which flows

along like a tenuous fluid, and since it is soul, we feel it with our

soul, though we cannot touch it with our hands, even though they be

armed with scholastic pincers.

And this tone is the often noted and named, but never clearly defined

_irony_ of Ariosto; it has not been well-defined, because described as

a kind of jesting or mockery, similar or coincident with what Ariosto

sometimes employed in his descriptions of knightly personages and their

adventures. It has thus been both restricted and materialised, but

what we must not lose sight of is that the irony is not restricted

to one order of sentiments, as for instance those of knighthood or

religion, and so spares the rest, but encompasses them all, and thus is

no futile jesting, but something far more lofty, more purely artistic

and poetical, the victory of the dominant sentiment over all the others.

All the sentiments, sublime and mirthful, tender and strong, the

effusions of the heart and the workings of the intellect, from the

pleadings of love to the laudatory lists of names, from representations

of battles to witticisms, are alike levelled by the irony and find

themselves uplifted in it. The marvellous Ariostesque octave rises

above them all as they fall before it, the octave which has a life of

its own. To describe the octave as smiling, would be an insufficient

qualification unless the smile be understood in the ideal sense, as

a manifestation of free and harmonious life, poised and energetic,

throbbing in veins rich with good blood and satisfied in this incessant

throbbing. The octaves sometimes have the quality of radiant maidens,

sometimes of shapely youths, with limbs lithe from exercise of the

muscles, careless of exhibiting their prowess, because it is revealed

in their every gesture and attitude.--Olympia comes ashore with her

lover on a desolate and deserted island, after many misfortunes, and a

long, tempestuous sea voyage:

Il travaglio del mare e la paura,

che tenuta alcun di l'aveano desta;

Il ritrovarsi al lito ora sicura,

lontana da rumor, nella foresta:

e che nessun pensier, nessuna cura,

poi che'l suo amante ha seco, la molesta;

fûr cagion ch'ebbe Olimpia si gran sonno

che gli orsi e i ghiri aver maggior nol ponno.[1]

Here we have the complete analysis of the reasons why Olympia fell

into the deep sleep, expressed with precision; but all this is clearly

secondary to the intimate sentiment expressed by the octave, which

seems to enjoy itself, and certainly does so in describing a motion,

a becoming, which attain completion.--Bradamante and Marfisa vainly

pursue King Agramante, to put him to death:

Come due belle e generose parde

che fuor del lascio sien di pari uscite,

poscia ch' i cervi o le capre gagliarde

indarno aver si veggano seguite,

vergognandosi quasi che fûr tarde,

sdegnose se ne tornano e pentite;

così tornâr le due donzelle, quando

videro il Pagan salvo, sospirando.[2]

Here we find a like process and a like result, but we observe a like

process and result where there appears to be nothing whatever of

intrinsic interest in the subject, that is to say, where the thought

is merely conventional, a complimentary expression of courtly homage

or an expression of friendship and esteem. To say of a fair lady: "She

seemed in every act of hers to be a Goddess descended from heaven," is

not a subtle figure, but it is so turned and so inspired with rhythm by

Ariosto that we assist at the manifestation of the Goddess as she moves

majestically along, witnessing the astonishment of those present and

seeing them kneel devoutly down, as the little drama unrolls itself:

Julia Gonzaga, che dovunque il piede

volge e dovunque i sereni occhi gira,

non pur ogn' altra di beltà le cede,

ma, come scesa dal ciel Dea, l'ammira.[3] ...

To rattle off a list of mere names with a view to affording honourable

mention, and without varying any of them beyond the addition of

some slight word-play, is an exercise even less subtle; but Ariosto

arranges the names of contemporary painters as though upon a Parnassus,

according to the greatest among them the most lofty place, in such a

manner that those bare names each of them resound (owing to the mastery

of the many stresses in the verse), so as to seem alive and endowed

with sensation:

E quei che fùro a' nostri di, o sono ora,

Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Gian Bellino,

duo Dossi, e quel ch' a par sculpe e colora,

Michel, più che mortale, Angel divino ...[4]

The "reflections" of Ariosto, which were held to be "commonplaces" by

De Sanctis, "not profound and original observations," have by others

been described as "banal" and "contradictory." But they are reflections

of Ariosto, which should not be meditated upon but sung:

Oh gran contrasto in giovanil pensiero,

desir di laude, ed impeto d' Amore!

Nè, chi più vaglia, ancor si trova il vero,

che resta or questo or quello superiore....[5]

It could be said of the irony of Ariosto, that it is like the eye of

God, who looks upon the movement of creation, of all creation, loving

all things equally, good and evil, the very great and the very small

in man and in the grain of sand, because he has made it all, and finds

in it nought but motion itself, eternal dialectic, rhythm and harmony.

From the ordinary meaning of the word "irony" has been accomplished the

passage to the metaphysical meaning assumed by it among Fichtians and

Romantics. We should be ready to apply their theory to the inspiration

of Ariosto, save that these critics and thinkers confused with irony

what is called humour, strangeness and extravagance, that is to say,

extra-aesthetic facts, which contaminate and dissolve art. Our theory

on the contrary is less pretentious and exaggerated, confining itself

rigorously within the bounds of art, as Ariosto confined himself within

the bounds of art, never diverging into the clumsy or humouristic,

which is a sign of weakness: his irony was the irony of an artist, sure

of his own strength. This perhaps is the reason or one of the reasons

why Ariosto did not suit the taste of the dishevelled Romantics, who

were inclined to prefer Rabelais to him and even Carlo Gozzi.

To weaken all orders of sentiment, to render them all equal in their

abasement, to deprive beings of their autonomy, to remove from them

their own particular soul, amounts to converting the world of spirit

into the world of _nature:_ an unreal world, which has no existence

save when we perform upon it this act of conversion, and in certain

respects, the whole world becomes nature for Ariosto, a surface

drawn and coloured, shining, but without substance. Hence his seeing

of objects in their every detail, as a naturalist making minute

observations, his description that is not satisfied with a single

trait which suffices as inspiration for other artists, hence his lack

of passionate impatience with its inherent objections to certain

material. It may seem that the figure of St. John is drawn in the way

it is, as a jest:

Nel lucente vestibulo di quella

felice casa un Vecchio al Duca occorre,

Che'l manto ha rosso e bianca la gonnella,

che l'un più al latte, l'altro al minio opporre;

i crini ha bianchi e bianca la mascella

di folta barba ch'al petto discorre ...[6]

But the beauty of Olympia is portrayed in a like manner, forgetful of

the chastity of the lady, which might have seemed to ask a different

sort of description or rather veiling:

Le bellezze d' Olimpia eran di quelle

che son più rare; e non la fronte sola,

gli occhi e le guancie, e le chiome avea belle,

la bocca, il naso, gli omeri e la gola....[7]

Finally, Medoro is described in the same way, Medoro whose brave and

devoted heart and youthful heroism might seem to ask in its turn a

less attentive observation of its fresh youthfulness:

Medoro avea la guancia colorita,

e bianca e grata ne la età novella.[8] ...

The very numerous similes between the personages and the situations in

which they find themselves and the spectacles afforded by the life of

animals or the phenomena of nature, also form an almost prehensible

and palpable part of this conversion of the human world into the world

of nature. We shall not give details of it, for this has already been

done in an irritatingly patient manner by a German philologist, whose

cumbrous compilation effectually precludes one from desiring to dwell

even for a moment upon Ariosto's similes, comparisons and metaphors.

This apparent naturalism, this objectivism, of which we have

demonstrated the profoundly subjective character, has led to the

erroneous statement, already met with, as to Ariosto's form consisting

of indifference and chilly observation, directed to the external

world. He has been coupled with his contemporary Machiavelli in this

respect. Machiavelli examined history and politics with a sagacious

eye, describing--as they say--their mode of procedure and formulating

their laws, to which he gave expression in his prose with analogously

inexorable objectivity and scientific coldness. It is true that both

did in a certain but in a very remote sense, destroy a prior spiritual

content and naturalised in different fields and with different ends

(Machiavelli destroyed the mediaeval religious conception of history

and politics). But this judgment of Machiavelli amounts to nothing more

than a brilliant or principal remark, for Machiavelli, as a thinker,

developed and explained facts with his new vigorous thought, and as a

writer gave an apparently cold form to his severe passion. Ariosto's

naturalistic and objective tendency is also to be regarded as nothing

more than a metaphor, because Ariosto reduced his material to nature,

in order to spiritualise it in a new way, by creating spiritual forms

of Harmony.

From the opposite point of view and arising out of what we have just

said, we must refrain from praising Ariosto for his "epicity," for

the epic nobility and decorum which Galilei praised so much in him,

or for the force and coherence of his personages, so much admired by

the old as well as by new and even recent critics. How could there be

epicity in the _Furioso,_ when the author not only lacked the ethical

sentiments of the epos and when even that small amount, which he might

be said to have inherited, was dissolved with all the rest in harmony

and irony? And how could there be true and proper characters in the

poem, if characters and personages in art are nothing but the notes of

the soul of the poet themselves, in their diversity and opposition?

These become embodied in beings who certainly seem to live their own

proper and particular lives, but really live, all of them, the same

life variously distributed and are sparks of the same central power.

One of the worst of critical prejudices is to suppose that characters

live on their own account and can almost continue living outside the

works of art of which they form a part and in which they in no wise

differ nor can be disassociated from the strophes, the verses and the

words. Since there is no free energy of passionate sentiments in the

_Furioso,_ we do not find there characters, but figures, drawn and

painted certainly, but without relief or density, portrayed rather as

general or typical than individual beings. The knights resemble and

mingle with one another, though differentiated by their goodness or

wickedness, their greater polish or greater rudeness, or by means of

external and accidental attributes, often by their names alone; in

like manner the women are either amorous or perfidious, virtuous and

content with one love, or dissolute and perverse, often distinguished

merely by their different adventures or the names that adorn them. The

same is to be said of the narratives and descriptions (typical and

non-individual, or but little individual, is the madness of Orlando,

to compare which with Lear's is a rhetorician's fancy), and of natural

objects, landscapes, palaces, gardens, and all else. Reserves have been

and can with justice even be made as to the coherence of the characters

taken as a whole and forming part of a general scheme, for Ariosto's

personages take many liberties with themselves, according to the course

of the events with which they find themselves connected, or rather

according to the services which the author asks of them.

Such warnings as these are indispensable, because, if some readers

realise their expectation of finding objectively described and

coherent characters in Ariosto and consequently praise him for creating

them, others with like expectations equally unfounded are disappointed

and consequently blame him. Thus for De Sanctis Ariosto's feminine

characters have seemed to be inferior to those of Dante, of Shakespeare

and of Goethe: but this is an impossible comparison, because Angelica,

Olympia, and Isabella, although they certainly lack the passionate

intensity of Francesca, Desdemona and Margaret, yet the latter for

their part lack the harmonious octaves in which the first trio lives

and has its being, consisting of just these octaves. And what is more,

neither trio suffers from the imperfections, which are imperfections

only in the light of imperfect critical knowledge and consequent

prejudice, but not real imperfections and poetical contradictions in

themselves. De Sanctis also blamed Ariosto for his lack of sentiment

for nature, as though it were a defect; but what is called sentiment

for nature (as for that matter the great master De Sanctis himself

taught) does not depend upon nature, but rather upon the attitude of

the human spirit, upon the feelings of comfort, of melancholy or of

religious terror, with which man invests nature and finds them where

he has placed them; but this attitude was foreign to the fundamental

attitude of Ariosto, and were there to be by chance some reference to

it in the poem, were some note of sentiment to sound there, we should

immediately be sensible of the discord and impropriety. To Lessing,

another objective critic, the portrayal of the beauties of Alcina

seemed to be a mistake and to exceed the limit of poetry, to which

De Sanctis replied that this materiality which Lessing blamed was

the secret of the poetry, because the beauty of the magician Alcina

required a material description, since it was fictitious in its nature.

This blame was unjust, and although the answer to it was ingenious,

yet it was perhaps not perfectly correct, for we have already seen

that Ariosto always described thus both true and imaginary beauties,

Olympias and Alcinas. The true answer seems to be the one already

given, that it would be useless to seek for features of energy in

Ariosto, lively portraits dashed off in a couple of brush strokes, for

these things presuppose a mode of feeling that he lacked altogether or,

at any rate suppressed. Those "laughing fleeting" eyes, which are all

Sylvia, "le doux sourire amoureux et souffrant," which are the whole

of the spiritual sister-soul of the _Maison du Berger,_ do not belong

to Ariosto, but to Leopardi and to De Vigny.

There are two ways in which the _Furioso_ should not be read: the

first is the way in which one reads a work of rhythmic and lofty

moral inspiration, like the _Promessi Sposi,_ tracing, that is to

say, the development of a serious human affection, which circulates

in and determines every part alike, even to the smallest detail; the

second is that suitable for such works as _Faust,_ where the general

composition, which is more or less guided by mental concepts, does not

at all coincide with the poetical inspiration of the separate parts.

Here the poetical should be separated from the unpoetical parts,

and the poetically endowed reader will neglect the one to enjoy the

other. In the _Furioso,_ this inequality of work is absent or only

present to a very slight extent (that is to say, to the extent that

imperfection must ever be present in the most perfect work of man)

and it is as equally harmonious as the _Promessi Sposi;_ but it lacks

that particular form of passionate seriousness, to be found throughout

Manzoni's work and in stray passages of Goethe's. The _Furioso_

should therefore be read in a third manner, namely by following a

content which is ever the same, yet ever expressed in new forms,

whose attraction consists in the magic of this ever-identical yet

inexhaustible variety of appearances, without paying attention to the

material element of the narratives and descriptions.

As we see, this too amounts to accepting with a rectification a common

judgment on the _Furioso,_ which may be said to have accompanied the

poem from the moment of its first appearance: namely, that it is a

work devoid of seriousness, being of a light, burlesque, pleasing

and frivolous sort. It was described as "_ludicro more_" by Cardinal

Sadoleto, when according the license for printing the edition of 1516

in the name of Leo X, although he added to this, perhaps translating

the declaration of the poet himself, "_longo tamen studio et

cogitatione, multisque vigiliis confectum."_ Bernardo Tasso, Trissino

and Speroni, and other suchlike grave pedantic personages, did not

fail to blame Ariosto for having dedicated his poem to the sole end

of pleasing. Boileau looked upon it simply as a collection of _fables

comiques,_ and Sulzer called it a "poem with the sole end of pleasing,

not directed by the reason"; and even to-day are to be found its merits

and defects noted down to credit and debit account in many a scholastic

manual; on the credit side stand the perfection of the octave, the

vivacity of the narrative, the graceful style, to the debit account

lack of profound sentiment, light which shines but does not warm and

failure to touch the heart. We accept and rectify this judgment with

the simple observation that those who regard the poem thus see clearly

enough everything that is on a level with their own eyes, but do not

raise them to regard what is above their heads and is the principal

quality of the _Furioso,_ owing to which the frivolity of Ariosto

reveals itself as profound seriousness of rare quality, profound

emotion of the heart, but of a noble and exquisite heart, equally

remote from the emotions of what is generally looked upon as life and

reality.

Apart, but not separated from, nor alien to, nor indifferent: and in

respect to this we must resume and develop the analysis already begun

by setting readers on their guard against the easy misunderstanding

of the "destruction," which we have already spoken of as brought

about by the tone and the irony of Ariosto. This must not be looked

upon as total destruction and annihilation, but as destruction in

the philosophic sense of the word, which is also conservation. Were

this otherwise, what could be the function of the varied material or

emotional content, which we have examined in the poem? Are the stars

stuck into the sky like pin-heads in a pin-cushion (Don Ferrante would

sarcastically enquire)? The eloquence of other's but not Ariosto's

poetry, arises from a total indifference of sentiment and an absence

of content: theirs is the rouge on the corpse, not the rosy cloud

that enfolds and adorns the living. Such eloquence produces soft and

superficially musical versification of the _Adone,_ not the octave of

the _Furioso;_ and to quote Giraldi Cinzio once more, the lover of

Ariosto (who gave the advice to readers not to confuse the "facility"

of the _Furioso_ with verses "of sweet sound but no feeling"), the

eight hundred "stanzas," by one of the composers of that time, which

Giraldi once had to read, "which seemed to be collections made among

the flowery gardens of poetry, so full were they of beauty from stanza

to stanza, but put together, were vain things, seeming, so far as sense

is concerned, to have been born of the soil of childishness," because

their author was "intent only upon the pleasure that comes from the

splendour and choice of words, and had altogether neglected the dignity

and assistance afforded by sensibility."

Had Ariosto while in the act of composition not been keenly stirred

in the various ways described, by the varied material employed in his

poem, he would have lacked the impetus, the vivacity, the thought,

the intonation, which were afterwards reduced and tempered by the

harmonious disposition of his soul. He would have been a cold writer of

poetry, and no one ever succeeded in writing poetry coldly. This was

the case, as it seems to me, with the _Cinque Canti,_ which he excluded

from the _Furioso_ and for which he substituted others. In them the

cunning of Ariosto's hand is everywhere to be found in the descriptive

passages and transitions, as are also all the elements of the every-day

world, stories of war, knightly adventures, tales of love (the love

of Penticone for the wife of Otto and that of Astolfo for the wife of

Gismondo), satirical tales (the foundation of the city of Medea, with

the sexual law which she imposed upon it), astonishing fancies (such

as the knights imprisoned in the body of the whale, where they have

their beds, their kitchen and their tub), copious moral and political

reflections (on jealousy, ambition, wicked men, mercenary soldiers);

yet we feel nevertheless that Ariosto wrote them in an unhappy moment,

when Minerva was reluctant or averse: the poet did not take sufficient

interest and lacked the necessary heat. And is there no part of

the _Furioso_ itself that languishes? It would seem so, not indeed

in the forty cantos of the first edition, which originated in his

twelve-year-old poetical springtime, but in the parts which were added

later, all of them (as could be shown) more or less intellectualiste

of origin, and therefore (save the episode of Olympia) not among the

most read and most popular. The most intellectualistic of all is the

long delay introduced toward the end of the poem, the double betrothal

of Bradamante and the contest in courtesy between Leone and Ruggiero,

where the tone becomes here and there altogether pedestrian. It is true

that philologists who have given themselves to art have discovered

progress in Ariosto in just these languid parts, and above all in the

_Cinque Canti,_ where he has lost his bearings and is out of tune. Here

they suppose him to have become "serious," to join hands with no less

a personage than Torquato Tasso.

The process of "destruction" effected upon the material may possibly be

rendered clear to those who do not appreciate philosophical formulas

or find them too difficult, by means of the comparison with what in

the technique of painting is called "concealing a colour," which does

not mean its cancellation, but its toning down. In such an equally

distributed toning down, all the sentiments which go to form the web of

the poem, not only preserve their own physiognomy, but their reciprocal

proportions and connections; so that although they certainly appear in

the "transparent polished glasses" and in the "smooth shining waters"

of the octaves, pale as "pearls on a white forehead" to the sight, yet

they retain their distinctness and are more or less strong according

to the greater or less strength which they possessed in the soul of

the poet. The comic, at once lowered and raised, nevertheless remains

comical, the sublime remains sublime, the voluptuous voluptuous, the

reflective reflective, and so on. And sometimes it happens that Ariosto

reaches the boundary, which if he were to pass, he would abandon his

own tone, but he never does abandon it, because he always refrains

from passing the boundary. Everyone remembers the most emotional

words and passages of the _Furioso_: Medoro, who, when surrounded and

surprised by his enemies, makes a sort of tower of himself, using the

trees as a shield, and never abandoning the body of his lord, Zerbino,

who feels penetrated with pity and stays his hand as he looks on his

beautiful countenance, when on the point of slaying him; Zerbino, who

when about to die, is desperate at leaving his Isabella alone, the prey

of unknown men, while she bursts into tears and speaks sweet words

of eternal faithfulness; Fiordiligi, who hears the news, or rather

divines the death of her husband ... We always catch our breath, and

something--I know not what--comes into our eyes, as we repeat these

and similar verses. Here is Fiordiligi, who shudders as she feels the

presentiment:

E questa novità d' aver timore

le fa tremar di doppia tema il core.[9]

The fatal news comes to hand: Astolfo and Sansonetto, the two friends

who happen to be where she has remained, hide it from her for an

hour or so, and then decide to betake themselves to her that they may

prepare her for the misfortune that has befallen:

Tosto ch'entrano, e ch'ella loro il viso

Vide di gaudio in tal vittoria privo,

Senz' altro annunzio sa, senz' altro avviso,

Che Brandimarte suo non è più vivo....[10]

Another moment of the same narrative, where suffering appears to resume

its strength and to grow upon itself, is that in which Orlando, who is

awaited, enters the temple where the funeral of Brandimarte is being

celebrated: Orlando, the friend, the companion, the witness of his

death:

Levossi, al ritornar del Paladino,

Maggiore il grido e raddoppiossi il pianto.[11]

Before such words and images as these, De Sanctis used to say to his

pupils, when explaining to them the _Furioso_: "See how much heart

Ariosto had!" But he always kept telling them this truth also:

that "Ariosto never pushes situations to the point of painfulness,"

forbidden to him by the tone of his poetry; and he used to show them

how Ariosto used sometimes to make use of interruptions, sometimes of

graceful similitudes, or reflections, or devices of style, in order to

restrain the painfulness ready to break through. Those critics who for

instance are shocked by the octaves on the name of "Isabella" are too

exigent, or ask too much, and what they ought not to ask (this name

of Isabella was destined by God to adorn beautiful, noble, courteous,

chaste and wise women from this time forth, and was originally intended

as homage from Ariosto to the Marchesana of Mantua, Isabella of Este).

With these octaves he concludes the narrative of the sacrifice of

her life made by Isabella to keep faith with Zerbino; they do not

understand that those octaves and the _Proficiscere_ which precedes

them ("Go thou in peace, thou blessed soul") and the very account of

the drunken bestiality of Rodomonte, and prior to that, the semi-comic

scene of the saintly hermit who presides over the virtue of Isabella,

"like a practised mariner and is quite prepared to offer her speedily

a sumptuous meal of spiritual food," the hermit whom Rodomonte seizes

by the neck and throws three miles into the sea, are all words and

representations so accentuated as to produce the effect of allowing

Isabella to die without plunging the _Furioso_ into tragedy with its

correspondingly tragical catharsis; for the _Furioso_ has its own

general and perpetually harmonious catharsis, which we have now made

sufficiently clear.

It is precisely owing to the action of this sentimental and passionate

material, in spite of and through its effectual surpassing, that the

varied colouring arising from it enters the poem and confers upon it

that character of humanity, which led us to declare at the outset of

our analysis that when we define Ariosto as the _Poet of Harmony,_ we

proposed only to indicate where the _accent_ of his work falls, but

that he is the poet of Harmony and also of something else, of harmony

developed in a particular world of sentiments, and in fact that the

harmony to which Ariosto attains, is not harmony in general, but an

_altogether Ariostesque Harmony._

[Footnote 1: Tempestuous seas and haunting fear which had kept her

waking for days now gave place to a feeling of security: deep in the

forest and removed from care and noise, Olympia clasped her lover to

her breast and fell into sleep as deep as that of bears and dormice.]

[Footnote 2: As two fair generous leopards issuing simultaneouly from

the slips return full of shame and repentance as though weighed down by

the disgrace of having vainly pursued the lusty goats or stags which

had tempted them to the chase: So returned the two damsels sighing when

they saw the Pagan was saved.]

[Footnote 3: Wherever Julia Gonzaga sets her foot or turns her serene

gaze, not only does she excel all in beauty but compels adoration like

a Goddess.]

[Footnote 4: And the painters who lived in former days as well as those

still with us:--Leonardo, A. Mantegna, Gian Bellino, the two Dossi and

Michael who sculptures and portrays with more than mortal skill.]

[Footnote 5: Oh powerful contrast in the breast of youth aflame with

desire for valorous renown and the passion of love; nor can one say

which is the more delectable, since each lays claim alternately to

superiority.]

[Footnote 6: An aged man goes to encounter the Duke along the bright

vestibule of that fortunate house: the sage is clad in red cloak and

white robe, the former white as milk, the latter vermilion, vivid as a

rose. His hair is white and his chin snowy with the thick beard flowing

over his chest.]

[Footnote 7: Olympia's loveliness was of rarest excellence: not only

was she fair of face with forehead, eyes, cheeks glowing amidst the

hair which waved over her shoulders: all else was perfection.]

[Footnote 8: Medoro's cheek showed white and red in the fresh flourish

of youth.]

[Footnote 9: The novel feeling of fear caused her heart to tremble,

doubly terrified.]

[Footnote 10: As she saw them enter without joyous exultation over so

great a victory, with no announcement or any direct word of it, she was

aware her Brandimarte had been slain.]

[Footnote 11: On the return of the Paladin, the cry arose more loudly

and the wail redoubled.]

CHAPTER VI

HISTORICAL DISASSOCIATIONS

From these last words, there can be no difficulty in seeing what must

be our opinion as to the confrontations and comparative judgments

instituted between Ariosto and Pulci or Boiardo, and even Cieco da

Ferrara, and all the other Italian poets of chivalry. These have

sometimes been extended so as to include poetical humourists, such

as Folengo and Rabelais, or burlesque writers like Berni, Tassoni,

Forteguerri, or neo-epical poets, like Tasso and Camoens, and finally

to Cervantes, that direct and fully conscious ironist of chivalry. This

is as perfectly admissible as it is natural that classes of "poems of

chivalry" or "narrative poems" or "romances," should be formed, when

once rhetoricians and writers of treatises have invented the genus and

that these should be disposed in a series under such headings, thus

forming a sort of artificial history, with no real foundation beyond

the accidents of certain abstract literary forms, which are really

representative of certain social tendencies and institutions. And it

is equally, indeed more admissible, because relating to more nearly

connected problems, that these documents afforded by poems of chivalry

should be made use of among other documents in the investigation

of the gradual dissolution of the ideal of chivalry in the first

period of modern society. Salvemini has not neglected to do this in a

temperate manner, in his monograph relating to "knightly dignity" in

the commune of Florence. But the aesthetic judgment, which they strive

to deduce from these comparisons, is inadmissible and illegitimate:

when for instance they bestow the palm on this or that poet for having

better observed than others the "genus" or a particular "species" and

"variety" of the genus; or because chivalry or anti-chivalry has been

better represented by one than by another. We can explain the fact that

De Sanctis was sometimes entangled in this sociological net, in spite

of his exquisite sense of individuality and poetry, when we consider

the condition of studies in his time and his philosophical origins;

but it is none the less true that the judgments which he pronounced

upon this matter, deviate from true and proper aesthetic criticism, and

carry with them the bad effects of every deviation.

Having ourselves refused to be among those whose feet are caught in

the insidious net of Caligorante, we shall have nothing further to say

as to comparisons with Ariosto, because the poet of the _Furioso_ has

always come out of those maladroit confrontations and the arbitrary

judgments of merit which result from them, crowned above all others

with the sign of victory, or at least unconquered by any other, and

admitting but a very few as his equals. The preference accorded by

romantic German men of letters to Boiardo (recently revived to some

extent in Italy, by Panzini) belongs rather to the domain of anecdote

than to the history of criticism: Boiardo is looked upon by them as

the poet of grand heroic dreams, while Ariosto is a mere citizen

poet; or Boiardo again is lauded for having better represented the

logical form of the Italian poem of chivalry, prescribed according

to a chemical combination drawn up in the philological laboratory of

the anti-Ariostesque Professor Rajna, who is in other respects a most

worthy and well-deserving person. But there is no denying that the

peculiar beauty of Ariosto has often injured Boiardo, Pulci, Tasso

and other poets, who have been illegitimately compared with him; and

therefore, without talking of Tasso--who has now won his case, although

he numbered a Galilei among the ranks of those who under-estimated

him when making the above-mentioned confrontation,--it will not be

inopportune to cast a rapid glance upon Pulci and Boiardo.

Looking at Pulci in Pulci and not at Ariosto, since to place one

physiognomy on the top of another is not a good way of seeing, what

do we find? What is the _Morgante?_ It is above all a whimsicality,

one of those works, born of a caprice or a bet, to which the author

neither devotes himself after the necessary previous meditations, nor

works at with the scrupulosity of the artist, who expends his powers

and employs his utmost endeavour to do the best he can everywhere. But

the occasion or the inspiration is never the substance of a work, which

on the contrary always consists of what the author really brings to it

in the course of his labour; and the mention of the occasional origin

of the _Morgante_ only avails here to account for its ill-digested

and undoubtedly chaotic nature. Nor is it to the purpose to recall

what certainly seems to have been Pulci's intention, namely, to

satisfy in his own way a wish of the pious Lucrezia Tornabuoni, by

composing or re-writing a Christian poem of chivalry, for this in its

turn only explains certain superficialities and extrinsicalities,

such as the general plan of the poem and the parts of it possessing

religious tone, which are successful to the extent that they could

be successful with such a brain as Pulci's. A commencement will have

been made towards a proper understanding of the substance of the

_Morgante,_ its proper and intrinsic inspiration, by referring it first

to the curiosity with which educated Florentine citizens observed and

reproduced the customs and the psychology of the people of the city and

the surrounding districts, productive of the poetry of Politian, of

Lorenzo and of Pulci himself, author of the _Beca di Dicomano,_ each

with its various popular appeal. That inspiration contains something

both of the sympathetic and of the ironical, as we observe in all

poetry based upon popular themes and use of dialect, in the German

romantic _Lieder_ and _Balladen_ and in the dialect literature of the

Italy of to-day (one feels inclined to call the _Morgante_ "dialect"

and not "Italian"): and in Pulci there vibrated a sympathetic-ironic

chord, peculiar to himself and therefore naturally not exactly the

same as in Lorenzo, or still less in Politian. But it did not vibrate

pure and clear, being prevented from doing so, not so much owing to

initial eccentricity and to the intention above-mentioned, as to the

accumulation of other inspirations, arising in the fertile spirit of

Pulci. For Pulci had in mind, in addition to the reconstruction of a

sympathetic-ironic popular poem of the popular story-tellers, something

that might be called a "Picaresque romance," understanding thereby

not only tales of the sort to be found in Spanish literature, but

also certain other tales of Boccaccio and a great part of Folengo's

_Baldus._ Picaresque romance asked in its turn sympathy and irony, but

of a different sort to the preceding, no longer sympathy for popular

ingenuity, but for cleverness, trickiness, for an irony, which should

no longer be simply that of superior culture, but also of superior

morality; and this too was in some measure and in his own way in Pulci;

but he often spoilt this disposition of mind by inadvertently passing,

like a person lacking refinement of education, from Picaresque romance

to Picaresque intonation, from the representation of a blackguard

to the blackguard himself. And there is something else also in the

_Morgante_: the imaginings and caprices of Pulci himself, his own

personal moral opinions, religious or philosophical; things that are

sometimes thought about even by those who do not think much about them,

and which, owing to this casual hasty thinking, become nevertheless

opinions or semi-opinions. Finally the _Morgante_ is a skein formed

of strands of different colour and make, some of them thicker or

thinner than others: it is a poem that is not in tune with a single

dominant inspiration, and if we take one of those elements that we

have described and transport it to the principal place, we immediately

have the feeling that we are depriving the complex nature of the work

of its vigour. Nevertheless the _Morgante_ must be looked upon as one

of the most richly endowed works of our literature, where we meet at

every step with delightful figures and traits of expression: Morgante,

Margutte, Fiorinetta, Astarotte, Farfarello, Archbishop Turpin, certain

touches of character in Orlando, and especially in Rinaldo, and also in

Antea, together with certain descriptions, anecdotes and acute remarks.

Margutte, plunged deep in vice, but quite shameless and aware that he

cannot be other than what nature made him, is also human, incapable

of treachery, capable of affection for Morgante and of enduring his

all-consuming voracity; so that when his companion dies, he never

ceases recalling him to mind, and talking about him even with Orlando:

E conta d'ogni sua piacevolezza,

E lacrimava ancor di tenerezza.[1]

Rinaldo, ardent and furious for revenge, seeks to slay Carlo Magno, who

has been hidden from him; but after a few days Orlando leads him to

believe that the Emperor has died of desperation, and tells him that he

has appeared to him in vision, whereupon Rinaldo changes countenance

and begins to wish him alive again, to feel pity for him, to repent him

of his fury, so that in this way peace and reconciliation are effected.

After a great battle, the conquered as they leave the field, recognise

their dead ones where they lie, and we hear them lamenting a father, a

brother or a friend:

Eravi alcun che cavava l'elmetto

al suo figliolo, al suo cognato, o padre;

poi lo baciava con pietoso affetto,

E dicea: "Lasso, fra le nostre squadre

non tornerai in Soria più, poveretto;

che dirén noî alla tua afflitta madre,

o chi sarà più quel che la conforti?

Tu ti riman cogli altri al campo morti."[2]

And this is an apology, by means of which Orlando explains to Rinaldo

that he has remarked his new affection, and that it is of no use that

he should try to deceive him with words:

Rispose Orlando:--Noi sarem que' frati

che mangiando il migliaccio, l'un si cosse;

l'altro gli vede gli occhi imbambolati,

e domando quel che la cagion fosse.

Colui rispose: "Noi sián due restati

a mensa, e gli altri sono or per le fosse,

ché trentatré fummo e tu lo sia:

Quand' io vi penso, io piango sempre mai."

Quell' altro, che vedea che lo 'ngannava,

finse di pianger, mostrando dolore;

e disse a quel che di ciò domandava:

"E anco io piango, anzi mi scoppia il core,

che noi sián due restati"; e sospirava,

"Ed è già l'uno all' altro traditore."

Cosi mi par che faccian noi, Rinaldo:

"che nol di tu che'l migliaccio era caldo?"[3]

And here is an octave in which Pulci makes it psychologically clear why

King Carlo allowed himself to be led astray and deceived by Gano:

Molte volte, anzi spesso, c'interviene

che tu t'arrecchi un amico e fratello,

e ciò che fa ti par che facci bene,

dipinto e colorito col pennallo.

Questo primo legame tanto tiene,

che, s' altra volta ti dispiace quello,

e qualcha cosa ti parà molesta,

sempre la prima impression pur resta.[4]

"These are not the octaves of Ariosto ": we have said as much.

Certainly they are not, just as the octaves of Ariosto are not those of

Pulci, and Ariosto, whatever trouble he might have taken, could never

have attained to the inventions, the emotions, the clevernesses and

the accents of the _Morgante,_ which are just as inimitable in their

way as are the graces of the _Furioso._ And it is really unjust and

almost odious that the reader, face to face with the treasures of fresh

and original poetry, which Pulci throws without counting into his lap,

should pull a wry face and ungratefully remark that Pulci's poetry

is not that other poetry which he is now thinking about, and that it

should be abolished, or made perfect by the other poetry!

Almost the same thing is to be repeated about the author of the

_Innamorato,_ who has also been tormented, condemned and executed by

means of a comparison with the author of the _Furioso,_ sometimes

conducted with such a refinement of cruelty that the strophes of the

one are printed facing the strophes of the other, and selected as

bearing upon similar situations, so that every word and syllable may

be weighed; as though the strophes of a poet are not to be considered

solely in themselves and in the poem of which they form part, and to

be condemned, if occasion arise for condemnation, within that circle

to which are confined the real conditions of judgment. Boiardo, to one

who reads him without any sort of preconception and abandons himself

to the simple impressions of reading, immediately shows himself to be

altogether different from what some critics maintain, the pedantic

singer of chivalry taken seriously, who gives way now and then to

involuntary laughter and to a harsh intonation which should be toned

down and softened by the skill of an Ariosto. He is quite other also

than the epic bard, which some people have imagined him to be; he could

not be epic, because he had no national sentiment, no feeling for

class or religion, and the marvellous in him is all fancy, a marvel

of the fairies; nor was he a pedant, for he obviously follows his own

spontaneous inclinations, without any secondary purpose. No, Boiardo

was on the contrary a soul passionately devoted to the primitive and

the energetic, his was the energy of the lance-thrust, of the brand

wielded, but also the energy of a proud will, of ferocious courage,

of intransigent honour, of marvellous devices. And it is owing just

to this energy, which has a value of its own, that he lives to unite

poetically the cycles of Charlemagne and of Arthur, the Carlovingian

and the Breton traditions, arms and adventures and love, both of them

primitive cycles, the second being remarkable for the extraordinary

nature of its adventures and the violence of its loves; whereas, if

that heroism had continued to be full and substantial, it would have

been difficult to make it a theme for erotic treatment, representing a

different and opposed sentiment. To ask of him delicacy of treatment

in the representation of his knights, or delicacy of thoughts and

words in his treatment of women and love, and in general, beauty

of sentiment, is to ask of him what is external to his fundamental

motive. To be astonished that he sometimes laughs or smiles, is to

be astonished at what happens every day among the people (and there

are traces of it in the ingenuous epic) when they are listening to

the recital of great deeds, which do not forbid an occasional comic

remark. To lament his supposed neglect of art, his lack of polish of

language and versification, is to censure him as a grammarian who

employs pre-established models or dwells upon minute details to which

he attributes sovereign importance. How on the other hand can it be

forgotten, when praise of his rich fancy and robust frankness of style

and composition is opposed to censures or interlarded among them, that

we must explain whence came to him these merits, for they are not to

be snatched, but are born only of the soul. Whence came they, if not

from true poetical inspiration and from his already mentioned passion

for the energetic and the primitive? Hence the admiration aroused by

his vast canvases, his vivid narratives:--Angelica, who by merely

appearing at Carlo's banquet, makes everyone fall in love with her,

and whom even the Emperor himself cannot refrain from admiring, though

with discretion, lest he should compromise his gravity, Angelica,

whom the greatest champions of Christianity and Paganism follow with

admiration, refusing herself to all and loving only him who alone

abhors her;--the solemn council of war, held by Agramante previous

to entering France, with the speeches of the kings who surround him,

courageous or prudent, the sudden appearance of the youthful Rodomonte,

who dominates all with his tremendous energy;--the joyful courage of

Astolfo, never disconcerted by headlong mishaps, whom fortune succours

by furnishing him with a lance, by means of which, to the astonishment

of all, he accomplishes prodigies, while he himself remains

unastonished;--Brunello, as to whose doings one would like to apply

Vico's phrase about "heroic thieving," Brunello, who wanders about the

earth, stealing the most carefully guarded objects, with an audacious

dexterity and so comic an imagination, Brunello, revelling in his

joyous virtuosity and vainly-pursued over the whole world by Marfisa of

the viper's eye, which spirts venom, Marfisa who wishes to put him to

death; but he flies from her, turning from time to time in his flight

to laugh in her face and make gestures of mockery;--Then again there

are the colloquies of Orlando and Agricane, during the pauses in their

bitter duel, which must end in the death of one of them; Rinaldo's

caustic reply to Orlando, who has reproved him for wishing to carry

away the golden couch from the fairy's garden; and that other no less

caustic repartee of the courageous highway robber to Brandimarte; and

many and many another most beautiful passage?--Yet the _Innamorato,_

notwithstanding its poetical abundance, has never been numbered among

really classical works, so that after the vogue which for ephemeral

reasons it enjoyed in its own day, it has not received and does not

receive the affection and homage of any but those who love what is

little loved and prize what is pure, spontaneous and rude. The poem

does not conclude in itself; it is not satisfied with itself: there is

a break somewhere in the circle: the representation of the energetic

and primitive, which is a sort of formal epicity, has something in

it of the monotonous and arid, and the pleasure derived from it has

something of the solitary and sterile. Like the charger that sniffs the

battle, so says Boiardo:

Ad ogni atto degno e signorile,

Quai se raconti di cavalleria,

sempre se allegra l'animo gentile,

come nel fatto fusse tuttavia,

manifestando fuore il cor virile....[5]

That is well, but the manly heart is not slow to express a certain

feeling of delusion, when it recognises that the images in question

are all body, without depth of soul, and without the guidance and

inspiration of a superior spirit. He says somewhere else:

Già molto tempo m'han tenuto a bada

Morgana, Alcina e le incantazioni,

Nè ve ho mostrato un bel colpo di spada,

E pieno il cel de lancie e de tronconi....[6]

But there are too many lances that meet and clash, too many limbs

flying about without our ever seeing the cause, the meaning or the

justification of all that fighting--even Boiardo himself becomes

melancholy, when he thinks of those blows exchanged in a spiritual

void, exclaiming in one of those frequent purely spontaneous epigrams,

which invest his noble person with sympathy:

Fama, seguace degli imperatori,

Ninfa, che e' gesti a' dolci versi canti,

che dopo morte ancor gli uomini onori,

e fai coloro eterni, che tu vanti,

ove sei giunta? a dir gli antichi amori,

e a narrar battaglie de' giganti;

mercè del mondo, che al tuo tempo è tale,

che più di fama o di virtù non cale.

Lascia a Parnaso quella verde pianta,

che da salvivi ormai perso è il cammino,

e meco al basso questa istoria canta

del re Agramante, il forte Saracino....[7]

Pulci and Boiardo then, not to mention others, are to be placed neither

above nor below Ariosto, for they are not even related to him. Proof of

this is to be found in the fact that thought has gone to other artists,

to Ovid for example, in the search for his parallel in literature

among the Latins, to Petrarch and to Politian among Italians, or to

architects like Bramante and Leon Baptista Alberti, and yet more to

painters, like Raphael, Correggio and Titian, comparisons having been

instituted with all of these and with others whom it is unnecessary to

mention. Now as regards quality of artistic inspiration, affinity is

certainly more intrinsic than are relations established from the use

of similar abstract material; yet it is itself abstract and extrinsic,

because it always accepts one or certain aspects of inspiration, not

the full inspiration. Thus, for example, when a comparison is drawn

between Ariosto and Ovid, who was a story-teller, lacking altogether

in religious feeling for mythological fables and attracted to them

solely by their beauty and variety, we must immediately hasten to add

that with the exception of this side, which they share in common,

Ariosto is different and superior to the Latin poet in every other,

for Ovid had not a delicate taste in art, being merged altogether in

his pleasing and delightful themes. He improvised and overflowed,

owing to his incapacity for firm design and lack of control: he would

be better described as the model of the luxurious Italian versifiers

of the seventeenth century than as the model of Ariosto, whose art

was most chaste. If again he be superficially compared with Politian,

the comparison breaks up immediately, because the _Stanze_ are

inspired by the voluptuousness of the sensible world, contemplated

in all its fugitive brilliance and with that trembling accompaniment

of anxiety and suffering, inseparable from it, while Ariosto soars

above the pathos of voluptuousness. To note affinities is of avail in

a work introductory to the general study of literature, and to draw

comparisons and point out contrasts and successive approximations may

also serve as a useful aid to the accurate description of an artist's

special character. But we do not propose to supply here such a

didactic introduction, for the use of such a method is superfluous,

as we have already described Ariosto's characteristics in the manner

proposed. We shall not therefore form a group of artists, as related to

him in this or that respect, for such cannot be expected of us, nor has

it for us any special attraction.

Observations as to affinities have another use also, as providing a

basis for sparkling and resonant metaphors, as when it is observed of

an artist that he is the "Raphael of poetry," of another that he is

"the Dante of sculpture," or of a third that he is "the Michael Angelo

of sound," or as was said (by Torquato Tasso, perhaps as a witticism,

and certainly with little truth), that Ariosto is "the Ferrarese

Homer." We already possess many pages of magnificent metaphors to the

honour and glory of the author of the _Furioso,_ nor do we intend to

depreciate their merit; but the present writer begs to be excused from

the labour of increasing their number, since he is in general little

disposed to oratory and has allowed what slight gift of the sort he

might have possessed to flow away and lose itself, while conversing

with so unrhetorical and so conversational a poet as was Ludovico

Ariosto.

[Footnote 1: Saying how delightful he was and still weeping for tender

recollection.]

[Footnote 2: Sometimes one would remove the helmet from his son, his

cousin, or his father, kissing him with pious affection, and saying

"alas, poor fellow, never again will he return to our ranks in Soria;

what shall we say to his afflicted mother, who among us can comfort

her? But thou remainest with the others who lie dead on the field."]

[Footnote 3: Orlando answered:--We shall be like the friars one of

whom burnt himself in eating his gruel; the other seeing his eyes

watering asked the reason. His neighbour replied: "Here we are, two of

us remained sitting at table, while the others are in the tomb; well

thou knowest that we were thirty-three; it always makes me weep to

think of it." The other, who saw the deception, in his turn made belief

to lament and grieve and when asked the reason: "Yea, I also weep; my

heart indeed is bursting to think that we two remain"; then sighing he

continued, "And that one of us two is betraying the other. We seem to

be doing much the same thing, Rinaldo: why won't you confess that the

gruel was hot?"]

[Footnote 4: It often happens that a friend becomes like a brother to

you, and whatever he does seems to be so well done as to deserve being

made a picture. This first bond holds so firmly that when he finally

does something you do not like--injures you in some way--nevertheless

the first impression remains the same.]

[Footnote 5: The gentle soul rejoices at every worthy, noble deed

recounted of knighthood, as it does when the deed was accomplished,

which revealed the manly heart.]

[Footnote 6: Morgana, Alcina and their incantations have long held me

in their chains, so that I have been unable to show you aught of fine

sword play, the sky full of lances and limbs....]

[Footnote 7: Where art thou gone, O fame that followest emperors and

singest their brave deeds in gentle verse, thou that honorest men after

death and conferrest eternity upon those thou vauntest? This is the

fault of the world. Thou art gone to sing of ancient loves and to tell

of the battles of the giants, thanks to this world of ours that cares

no longer for courage or for fame. Leave upon Parnassus that growth

of green, since none knows now the upward path that leadeth thither,

and sing here below with me this history of King Agramante, the mighty

Saracen....]

PART II

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE