ARIOSTO.
The Sixteenth Century had not seen many years before the world was
presented with one of the most celebrated works in the Italian
Language, a poem destined to acquire a reputation hardly inferior to
that of Dante's great work, the _Orlando Furioso_ of ARIOSTO.
LUDOVICO ARIOSTO was born at Reggio in Lombardy on the eighth of
September, 1474. His father was attached to the Court of Ferrara, and
he himself entered the services of Cardinal Ippolito d'Esté, brother
to the Duke, but in what capacity is not accurately known. To the
Cardinal he dedicated his great work, but received no thanks for the
homage. He fell into complete disgrace by refusing to accompany his
patron to Hungary. He then tried his luck with the reigning Duke, who
was more generous than his kinsman, and who appointed the poet Governor
of Garfagnana, a remote province of the Duchy, infested by brigands.
He retained this post for three years, and brought the province into
such excellent order that he acquired the love and esteem of the whole
district.
When he returned to Ferrara, he enjoyed the highest consideration and
favour of the Duke, who took great pleasure in the representation of
his comedies. He was clandestinely married to a Florentine lady, by
whom, however, he had no children. It is supposed that secrecy was
kept in order to preserve some ecclesiastical revenues assigned to his
share by the Cardinal. From previous connections he had two sons, on
whom the Duke conferred patents of legitimacy. His descendants acquired
considerable opulence, and became one of the first families of Ferrara.
His son Orazio made himself remarkable by declaring, when the question
of Torquato Tasso's superior genius roused the attention of Italy,
that both poets had their particular beauties, for which opinion he
was fiercely attacked by the zealots in his father's cause. In the
Eighteenth Century, a Marquis Ariosto was intimate with Voltaire at
Brussels. The last descendant of the poet, the Countess Ariosto, died
at Ferrara in 1878, at the age of ninety years.
Ariosto gives us in his Satires with rare candour a picture of his
mind and of the vicissitudes of his life. He was of a buoyant and
open disposition, fond of pleasure and susceptible to the attractions
of love, but faithful and sincere to his friends, and very generous
to his numerous brothers and sisters. Titian was among his friends,
and the great painter has preserved for us the features of the great
poet. Curious anecdotes are told of his absence of mind when plunged
in thought. Once he went through the streets of Ferrara in his
dressing-gown, and was not aware of his apparel until an acquaintance
accosted him and told him of the fact. He built himself a little house,
and placed a Latin inscription over the entrance, and when someone
remarked that it was very small for one who had described such splendid
edifices in his verses, he made answer that fabrics of the imagination
are erected with little, and those of stone and mortar, with great,
cost. His death, the result of indigestion, owing to the rapidity with
which he took his meals in order to return to his studies, took place
in 1533.
Fully to appreciate the genius of Ariosto we must understand the spirit
of his age, for in him were developed, more fully than in any other
writer of the period, the qualities, moral and intellectual, that gave
their stamp to the memorable epoch of the Renaissance. The taste, the
love of beauty, the classical simplicity, the vivid imagination, the
ethereal lightness of touch characterising the productions of the great
contemporary painters, are united in as high perfection in the verse of
Ariosto as on their canvas and frescoes. He had, with the merits of his
age, also its shortcomings: the want of moral elevation, the frivolity,
and the absence of religious enthusiasm.
He was, therefore, unfitted to be an heroic poet in the stiff old
conventional style, and it was not until he had tried and abandoned
many subjects chat he discovered himself to be something infinitely
more striking and original. At last he discovered in the subject that
inspired Pulci and Bojardo, an inexhaustible mine of poetry, and he
took up the thread of narrative where Bojardo's unfinished poem had
left it, and produced one of the greatest masterpieces in the whole
range of literature.
He is matchless in the ease and clearness of his style, which never
flags for one moment in the forty-six cantos of the work. He is said
to have written with the greatest care, and to have corrected much and
erased not a little. The stanza in the first canto:
"La verginella è simile alla rosa,"
he wrote nine times before he was satisfied. Galileo confessed that he
owed the lucidity of his style to the assiduous study of Ariosto, but
accused him of introducing verses for the sake of the rhyme; but we may
pardon an occasional blemish in a work of such immense length.
He tells us himself that he saturated his mind with the spirit of the
Latin poets, especially with Catullus, and in his works we find the
urbanity of the Augustan age united to a strength and vivacity of
imagination unknown to the Romans. With great judgement he improved
on the hints they gave him, and the graceful manner in which he
occasionally introduces mythological allusions seems to have been
Milton's model when he did the same. Although he rates Virgil's
flattery of Augustus at its proper value when he says:
"Non era cosi saggio e grande Augusto
Come la tromba di Virgilio suona,
E per avere in poesia buon gusto
Le proscrizioni inique gli perdona,"
he cannot himself be acquitted of the charge of gross flattery to
the House of Este, without having even the excuse of Virgil, for
it is well known with how little applause his patrons received his
masterpiece. Some critics have asserted that he chose his subject
merely because he could introduce the character of Ruggiero, ancestor
to his patrons, but, fortunately for the glory of one of the greatest
of human minds, there is no reason to believe this libel. The subject
recommended itself by its own merits to the poet, as any candid reader,
after perusing the work, will confess. It is impossible to enter the
maze of incidents in the _Orlando Furioso_ without being bewildered,
astonished, dazzled, and lost in all the wonders conjured up by the
poet's fancy. His genius was essentially narrative (as is proved by his
comedies being so vastly inferior to his Epic), and his subject allowed
him to heap story on story, and to develop adventure out of adventure.
No finer compliment was ever paid by one poet to another, than by Byron
to Scott, when he called him the Northern Ariosto, and the Italian poet
the Southern Scott,
"Who, like the Ariosto of the North, worth."
Sang ladye-love and war, romance and knightly
It was not a mere compliment, but a very just parallel, and it would
be difficult to decide which of the two poets was the greater. Scott
had certainly more power of delineating character; but Ariosto had, if
not the richer, the more vivid imagination. If we take only Scott's
poetical works into consideration, Ariosto would have the advantage;
but if the prose romances of Scott are thrown into the balance, they
incline the scales in his favour. Both poets were, as Byron called
them, bards of chivalry, but Scott's chivalry was that of the soul,
and Ariosto's too often only that of the sword. Perhaps we may come to
a satisfactory conclusion by saying that Ariosto was the greater, and
Scott the nobler, poet.
Ariosto's rapidity of style is such that I know of no poem more concise
than this Epic, containing over forty thousand lines. One of his tricks
to arrest the attention, or to tantalize the curiosity of the reader,
is to break off a story in the middle, passing on to other incidents,
and concluding the interrupted episode in a later canto. The graceful
badinage with which he amuses us when the interest threatens to flag,
is most judiciously introduced, for such a subject treated with solemn
glumness and heavy pomp would become irksome in the extreme.
Every canto has an introduction, as ingenious in thought as it is
beautiful in expression. The most interesting Introduction is probably
that of the last canto, where he represents his contemporaries
congratulating him on the completion of so arduous a work; but others
deserve scarcely less praise; for instance, that on jealousy, and that
in which he enumerates the great painters of the age, amongst others,
Michael Angelo:
"Quel che a par sculpe e colora,
Michel, più che mortal, Angel divino."
The rapidity of his transitions is truly amazing. He whirls the
reader in two lines from one end of the world to the other. When we
are harassed and wearied by the breathless speed of his Pegasus, he
pauses, lavishing all the riches of his mind on a description or an
incident. Here he reveals himself the wonderful poet he is. The maiden
chained to a rock and about to be devoured by the sea-monster; Zerbino
and Isabella, Ginevra and Ariodante; above all, Alcina and her magic
garden; and, not inferior to any passage in the greatest poets, the
frenzy of Orlando: these are only a few of the wonderful passages that
place his Epic among the noblest productions of the human mind.
His style is, perhaps, if not the most lofty, yet the most perfect
of any Italian poet; it is so sweetly varied, so gracefully and
judiciously adorned with metaphors and tropes, so picturesque in
description, so vivid in narrative, so exquisitely graduated to impart
the suitable colouring to the poet's thoughts. Perhaps the only
quality it lacks, is the expression of deep emotion, which his joyous
and animated verse seldom attains. Nor can it be said that he ever
displays great depth of thought, so that we seek in vain in his works
for those marvellous flashes that irradiate the mystery of things. With
this want is connected the absence of striking individuality in many
of his characters; they are Knights and Saracens such as tradition
supplied. When he chooses, however, he can individualize his figures,
like Angelica, or Orlando and Alcina, with great success, and many
observations interspersed throughout the work, show keen insight into
human nature. Voltaire, an ardent admirer of this poet, said he had
more knowledge of the human heart than is to be found in all epics and
novels from Homer's _Iliad_ down to Richardson's _Pamela._ He regretted
Madame du Deffand had not learnt Italian in order to read so admirable
a poet. He says in one of his last poems:
"Je relis l'Arioste ou même la Pucelle."
The _Pucelle,_ indeed, was written in emulation of the _Orlando
Furioso_ which it resembles no more than a statue of Silenus resembles
the Jupiter of Otricoli.
No one represented more truthfully the effect produced by Ariosto on
the mind than Leopardi in the following lines:
"Nascevi ai dolci sogni intanto, e il primo
Sole splendeati in vista,
Cantor vago dell' arme e degl' amori,
Che in età della nostra assai men trista
Empièr la vita di felici errori,
Nova speme d'Italia. O torri, O celle,
O donne, O cavalieri,
O giardini, O palagi! a voi pensando,
In mille vane amenità si perde
La mente mia."
Ariosto began his great poem in 1505, at the age of thirty-one, and
finished it in 1516; but the year before his death he published an
edition with countless alterations and improvements, and with six
additional cantos, and it is in the latter form that it has descended
to posterity. At his death he left five cantos of an unfinished epic,
entitled _Rinaldo Ardito,_ in which many characters of the _Orlando_
reappear; but the fragment is in a very imperfect state and by no means
approaches the beauty of the completed work.