CHAPTER VII.

PULCI AND BOIARDO.

The Romantic Epic--Its Plebeian Origin--The Popular Poet's

Standpoint--The Pulci Family--The Carolingian

Cycle--Turpin--_Chanson de Roland_--Historical Basis--Growth

of the Myth of Roland--Causes of its Popularity in

Italy--Burlesque Elements--The _Morgante Maggiore_--Adventures

in Paynimry--Roncesvalles--Episodes introduced by the

Poet--Sources in older Poems--The Treason of Gano--Pulci's

Characters--His Artistic Purpose--His Levity and

Humor--Margutte--Astarotte--Pulci's _bourgeois_

Spirit--Boiardo--His Life--Feudalism in Italy--Boiardo's

Humor--His Enthusiasm for Knighthood--His Relation to

Renaissance Art--Plot of the _Orlando

Innamorato_--Angelica--Mechanism of the Poem--Creation of

Characters--Orlando and Rinaldo--Ruggiero--Lesser Heroes--The

Women--Love--Friendship--Courtesy--Orlando and Agricane at

Albracca--Natural Delineation of Passions--Speed of

Narration--Style of Versification--Classical and Medieval

Legends--The Punishment of Rinaldo--The Tale of

Narcissus--Treatment of Mythology--Treatment of Magic--Fate of

the _Orlando Innamorato_.

Lorenzo de' Medici and Angelo Poliziano reunited the two currents of

Italian literature, plebeian and cultivated, by giving the form of

refined art to popular lyrics of divers kinds, to the rustic idyll, and

to the sacred drama. Another member of the Medicean circle, Luigi Pulci,

aided the same work of restoration by taking up the rude tales of the

_Cantori da Piazza_ and producing the first romantic poem of the

Renaissance.

Of all the numerous forms of literature, three seem to have been

specially adapted to the Italians of this Period. They were the

_Novella_, the Romantic Epic, and the Idyll. With regard to the

_Novella_ and the Idyll, it is enough in this place to say that we may

reckon them indigenous to modern Italy. They suited the temper of the

people and the age; the _Novella_ furnishing the fit artistic vehicle

for Italian realism and objectivity; the Idyll presenting a point of

contact with the literature of antiquity, and expressing that calm

sensibility to natural beauty which was so marked a feature of the

national character amid the distractions of the sixteenth century. The

Idyll and the _Novella_ formed, moreover, the most precious portion of

Boccaccio's legacy.

Concerning the Romantic Epic it is necessary to speak at greater length.

At first sight the material of the Carolingian Cycle, which formed the

basis of the most considerable narrative poems of the Renaissance, seems

uncongenial to the Italians. Feudalism had never taken a firm hold on

the country. Chivalry was more a pastime of the upper classes, more

consciously artificial than it had been in France or even England. The

interest of the Italians in the Crusades was rather commercial than

religious, and the people were not stirred to their center by the

impulse to recover the Holy Sepulcher. The enthusiasm of piety which

animated the Northern myth of Charlemagne, was not characteristic of the

race that earlier than the rest of Europe had indulged in speculative

skepticism and sarcastic raillery; nor were the marvels of the legend

congenial to their positive and practical imagination, turned ever to

the beauties of the plastic arts. Charlemagne, again, was not a national

hero. It seemed as though the great foreign epics, which had been

transported into Italy during the thirteenth century, would find no

permanent place in Southern literature after the close of the

fourteenth. The cultivated classes in their eagerness to discover and

appropriate the ancient authors lost sight of peer and paladin. Even

Boccaccio alluded contemptuously to chivalrous romance, as fit reading

only for idle women; and when he attempted an epical poem in octave

stanzas, he chose a tale of ancient Greece. Still, in spite of these

apparent drawbacks, in spite of learned scorn and polished indifference,

the Carolingian Cycle had taken a firm hold upon the popular fancy. We

have seen how a special class of literary craftsmen reproduced its

principal episodes in prose and verse for the multitudes gathered on the

squares to hear their recitations, or for readers in the workshop and

the country farm. Now, in the renascence of the native literature, poets

of the highest rank were destined to receive the same material from the

people and to give it a form appropriate to their own culture. This fact

must not be forgotten by the student of Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and

Ariosto. The romantic epics of the golden age had a plebeian origin; and

the masters of verse who devoted their best energies to that brilliant

series of poems, were dealing with legends which had taken shape in the

imagination of the people, before they applied their own inventive

faculties to the task of beautifying them with art unrivaled for

splendor and variety of fancy. This, and this alone, explains the

anomalies of the Italian romantic epic--the mixture of burlesque with

seriousness, the irony and sarcasm alternating with gravity and pathos,

the wealth of comic episodes, the interweaving of extraneous incidents,

the antithesis between the professed importance of the subject-matter

and the spirit of the poet who plays with it as though he felt its

puerility--all the startling contrasts, in a word, which have made this

glittering Harlequin of art in the Renaissance so puzzling to modern

critics. If we remember that the poets of the sixteenth century adopted

their subjects from the people, finding them already impregnated with

the plebeian instincts of _improvisatori_, who felt no real sympathy

with knighthood, and whose one aim was to amuse and gratify an audience

eager for excitement; if we further recollect that these poets

approached their own task in the same spirit, adding yet another element

of irony proper to men who stood aloof and laughed, and who desired to

entertain the Courts of Italy with masterpieces of humor and fantastic

beauty; we shall succeed in comprehending the peculiarities of their

productions.

The romances of Orlando must be regarded as works of pure art, wrought

by courtly singers from a previously existing popular literature, which

in its turn had been fashioned from the Frankish legends to suit the

tastes of a non-chivalrous, but humorous and marvel-loving multitude. In

passing from the Song of Roland or Turpin's Chronicle to the _Orlando

Furioso_ we can trace two separate processes of transmutation. By the

earlier process the _materia di Francia_ was adapted to the Italian

people; by the second the new material thus obtained was reconstructed

for the Italian Courts. The final product is a masterpiece of refined

art, retaining something of the French originals, something of the

popular Italian _rifacimento_, but superadding the wisdom, the irony,

and the poetry of one of the world's brightest geniuses. We might

compare the growth of a romantic epic of the sixteenth century to the

art of Calimala, whereby the rough stuffs of Flanders were wrought at

Florence into finer cloths, and the finished fabric was tinted with the

choicest dyes, and made fit for a king's chamber.

Hitherto I have spoken as though Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, Berni, and the

lesser writers of romantic epics could be classed together in one

sentence. The justification of so broad a treatment at the outset lies

in this, that their relation to the popular romances they rehandled was

substantially the same. But it will be the special purpose of the

following pages to point out their essential differences, not only as

poets, but also with regard to the spirit in which they viewed their

common subject-matter.

Boccaccio, in his desire to fuse the classic and the medieval modes of

thought and style, not merely adapted the periods of Latin to Italian

prose, but also sought to treat an antique subject in the popular

measure of the octave stanza. His _Teseide_ is a narrative poem in which

the Greek hero plays a prominent part, while all the chiefs of Theban

and Athenian legend are brought upon the scene. Yet the main motive is a

tale of love, and the language is as modern as need be. Writing to

please the mistress of his heart, and emulous of epic fame, Boccaccio

rejected the usual apostrophes and envoys of the _Cantori da Banca_, and

constructed a poem divided into books. Poliziano approached the problem

of fusing the antique and modern from a different point of view. He

adorned a courtly theme of his own day with phrases and decorative

details borrowed from the classic authors, presenting in a series of

brilliant pictures an epitome of ancient art. It remained for Pulci to

develop, without classical admixture, the elements of poetry existing in

the popular Italian romances. The _Morgante Maggiore_ is therefore more

thoroughly and purely Tuscan than any work of equal magnitude that had

preceded it. This is its great merit, and this gives it a place apart

among the hybrid productions of the Renaissance.

The Pulci were a noble family, reduced in circumstances and attached to

the Casa Medici by ties of political and domestic dependency. Bernardo,

the eldest of three brothers, distinguished himself in literature by his

translations of Virgil's Eclogues, by his elegies on Cosimo de' Medici,

by a _Sacra Rappresentazione_ on the tale of Barlaam, and by a poem on

the Passion of Christ which he composed at the instance of a devout nun.

Luca wrote the stanzas on the Tournament of Lorenzo de' Medici above

mentioned,[512] and took some part at least in the composition of an

obscure poem called the _Ciriffo Calvaneo_.[513] But the most famous of

the brothers was Luigi, whose correspondence with Lorenzo de' Medici

proves him to have been a kind of Court-poet in the Palace of the Via

Larga, while the sonnets he exchanged with Matteo Franco breathe

Burchiello's plebeian spirit.[514] He had a wild fantastic temperament,

inclining to bold speculations on religious topics; tinctured with

curiosity that took the form of magic art; bizarre in expression, yet

withal so purely Florentine that his prose and verse are a precious mine

of _quattrocento_ idioms gathered from the jargon of the streets and

squares. Of humanistic culture he seems to have possessed but little.

Still the terms of familiar intercourse on which he lived with Angelo

Poliziano, Matteo Palmieri, and Paolo Toscanelli enabled him to gather

much of the learning then in vogue. The theological and scientific

speculations of the age are transmitted to us in his comic stanzas with

a vernacular raciness that renders them doubly precious.[515]

Before engaging with the _Morgante Maggiore_, it is needful to inquire

into the source of this and all the other Italian romantic poems, and to

account for the fact that they were confined, so far as their subject

went, within the circle of the Carolingian epic. In 1122 a prose

history in monkish Latin, purporting to be the Chronicle of the last

years of the reign of Charles the Great written by Turpin, Archbishop of

Rheims, was admitted among the canonical books by Calixtus II., who in

his Bull cursed those who should thenceforward listen to the "lying

songs of Jongleurs." This Chronicle was merely a sanctimonious and

prosaic version of the Songs of Roland and of Roncesvalles.[516] The

object of the scribe who compiled it, and of the Pope who canonized it,

was to give an ecclesiastical complexion to the martial chants which

already possessed the ear of the public.[517] Accordingly, while he left

untouched the tales of magic, the monstrous marvels and the unchristian

ethics of the elder fable, this pseudo-Turpin interspersed prayers,

confessions, vows, miracles, homilies, and pulpit admonitions. In order

to secure verisimilitude for his narrative, he reversed the old account

of Roncesvalles, according to which Turpin perished on the field,

anathematized all previous poets, and pretended that his Chronicle was

written by the hands of the Archbishop.[518] What he effected for the

Song of Roland, Geoffrey of Monmouth did, without a sacerdotal bias, for

the romance of Arthur.

We possess a MS. of the _Chanson de Roland_ in Norman French. It was

discovered in the Bodleian Library and published first in 1837 by M.

Michel, afterwards in 1851 by M. Genin. The date of the MS. has been

fixed by some critics as early as the eleventh, by others as late as the

thirteenth, century. Purporting to be the work of one Turold, its most

enthusiastic admirers claim it as the genuine production of Theroulde,

tutor to William the Conqueror, which, after passing through the hands

of Taillefer, the knightly bard of Senlac field, was deposited in his

MS. chest by a second Theroulde, abbot of Peterborough.[519] Be that as

it may, we can assume that the Bodleian MS. presents the ancient

battle-song in nearly the same form as when the Normans followed

Taillefer at Hastings, and heard him chanting of "Charlemain and Roland

and Oliver who died in Roncesvalles." This song reverberated throughout

medieval Europe. Poggio in the _Facetiae_ compares a man who weeps over

the fall of Rome, to one who in Milan shed tears over Roland's death at

Roncesvalles. Dante may have heard it on the lips of the _Cantores

Francigenarum_ in Lombard towns, or in the halls of Fosdinovo above the

Tyrrhene Sea; for he writes with an energy of style scarcely inspired by

the pseudo-Turpin:

Dopo la dolorosa rotta, quando

Carlo Magno perde la santa gesta,

Non sono si terribilmente Orlando.

Orlando and Oliver (or Ogier) are carved upon the facade of the Duomo at

Verona--Dietrich's town of Bern, where Northern traditions of chivalry

long lingered.[520] Like the Spanish legend of the Cid, or the climax of

the _Niebelungenlied_, this Song of Roland, in dignity and strength of

style, in tragic heroism and passionate simplicity, is worthy to be

ranked with a Canto of the _Iliad_. Like all medieval romantic poetry,

it is but a fragment--the portion of a cycle never wrought by

intervention of a Homer into epical completeness. But its superiority

over Turpin's Chronicle in all the qualities that could inspire a singer

is immeasurable.

Two questions have now to be asked. What historical basis can be found

for the Carolingian myth? and how did it happen that the Italians

preferred this legend of French Paladins to any other of the feudal

romances? The history of Charlemagne and his peers--of Roland, Oliver,

Ogier, Turpin, Ganilo the traitor, Pinabel, Marsilius the Moorish king

of Spain, and all the rest, of whom we read in the Norman Song, and who

receive numerous additions from the Italian romancers--must not be

sought in Eginhard. It is a Myth. But like all myths, it has some

nucleus of reality, round which have crystallized the enthusiasms of a

semi-barbarous age, the passionate memories of the people looking back

to bygone greatness, the glowing fancies of poets intent on visions of

the future. This nucleus of fact is little more than the name of

Charles the Frankish Emperor. All the legends of the cycle represent him

as conducting a crusade, defeating the Saracens in mighty battles,

besieged by them in Paris, betrayed by his own subject Ganilo, and

bereft of his noblest paladins in the Pass of Roncesvalles. History

knows nothing of these events. Nor can history account for the

traditional character of the Emperor, who is feeble, credulous,

browbeaten by lawless vassals, incapable of strenuous action, and yet

respected as the conqueror of the world and the anointed of the

Lord.[521] It is therefore clear that the myth has blent together divers

incongruous elements, and that the spirit of the crusades has been at

work, giving a kind of unity to scarce remembered acts of the chief of

Christendom. We hear from Eginhard that Charlemagne in 778 advanced as

far as Saragossa into Spain, and during his retreat had his rearguard

cut off by the Basques.[522] Among the slain was "Roland, prefect of the

Breton Marches." We read again in Eginhard (anno 824) how Louis le

Debonair lost two of his counts, who were returning from Spain through

the Pass of Roncesvalles. Furthermore, the Merovingian Chronicles tell

us of a Pyrenean battle in the days of Dagobert, when twelve Frankish

chiefs were surrounded in those passes and slain. These are sufficient

data to account for the Pass of Roncesvalles becoming a valley dolorous,

the vale of the great woe. For the crusading exploits of Charlemagne we

have to look to his predecessor, Charles Martel, who defeated the

Saracens at Tours and stemmed the tide of Mussulman invasion. His

successors, the feeble monarchs of the Frankish line, several of whom

bore the name of Charles, explain the transformation of the Emperor into

a vacillating monarch, infirm of purpose and incapable of keeping his

peers in order; for the distinguishing surnames of history are later

additions, and Chronicles, though written, were not popularly read. The

bard, therefore, mixed his materials without care for criticism, and the

myth produced a hybrid Charlemagne composed of many royal Karls. As for

the traitor Gano, we hear of Lupus, Duke of Gascony, who dealt

treasonably with Charlemagne, and of one Ganilo, Ganelon, or Wenelon,

Archbishop of Sens, who played the same part toward Charles the Bald in

864.[523] This portion of the myth may possibly be referred to these dim

facts. Yet it would be wiser not to insist upon them; for the endeavor

to rationalize an entire legend is always hazardous, and it is enough to

say that a traitor was needed for the fight of Roncesvalles no less than

Mordred for the death of Arthur in the plain of Glastonbury. To explain

the legendary siege of Paris by the Saracens, so important an incident

in the Italian romances, it has been ingeniously remarked that, though

the Moors never menaced the French capital, the Normans did so

repeatedly, while both Saracens and Normans were Pagans.[524] It may

also be remembered that Saracens had pillaged Rome, and the Saracen

forays were a common incident of Italian experience. The gathering of

great armies from the far East and the incursions of hideous barbarian

hordes, which form an integral element of Boiardo's and Ariosto's

scheme, can be referred to the memory of Tartar, Hun, and Turk; while

the episodes of Christian knights enamored of Pagan damsels are

incidents drawn from actual history in the intercourse of Italy with the

Levant. Allowing for this slight framework of fact, but not pressing

even the few points that have been gathered by antiquarian research, it

may be briefly said that the bulk of the Carolingian romance, with its

numerous subordinate legends of knights and ladies, is purely mythical.

In the next place we have to consider what led the Italians to select

the romances of Charlemagne for special development rather than those of

Arthur, with which they were no less familiar.[525] We have seen that on

the first introduction of the _materia di Francia_ into Italy, the

Arthurian Cycle became the property of the nobles, who found in it a

mirror of the feudal manners they affected, whereas the people listened

to _Chansons de Geste_ upon the market-place.[526] When, therefore, the

polite poets of the fifteenth century adopted the romantic epic from the

popular rhymers, they found a mass of Carolingian tales in vogue, to

which they had themselves from infancy been used. But this preference of

the multitude for Charlemagne and Roland requires further explanation.

It must be remarked in the first place that the Empire exercised a

fascination over the Italians in the middle ages, paralleled by no other

power except the Papacy. They regarded it as their own, as their glory

in the past, as their pride in the future, if only the inheritor of the

Caesars would do his duty and rule the world from Rome with equal

justice. The pedigree of the Christian Emperors from Constantine to

Charles the Great formed an integral part of the Carolingian romance as

it took form in Italy.[527] It was something for the Italians that

Charles had been crowned at Rome, a ceremony from time to time repeated

by his German successors during the centuries which made his legend

famous. Nor, though the people were but little influenced by the

crusading fanaticism, was it of no importance that in the person of this

Emperor Christendom had been imperiled by the infidels, and Christendom

through him had triumphed. The Chronicle of Turpin, again, had received

authoritative sanction. Add to it as the romancers chose, attribute

nonsense to the Archbishop as they pleased, they always relied, in show

at least, on his canonical veracity. Pulci, Bello, Boiardo, and Ariosto

appeal to his authority with mock seriousness; and even the burlesque

Berni, while turning Turpin into ridicule, adopts the style:

Perche egli era Arcivescovo, bisogna

Credergli, ancor che dica la menzogna.[528]

The fashion lasted till the days of Folengo and Fortiguerra. It may

further be mentioned that Orlando at an early date had been made a Roman

by the popular Italian mythologists. They said that he was born at

Sutri, and that Oliver was the son of the Roman prefect for the Pope.

The sentiment of the people for this strange _Senator Romanus_ expressed

itself touchingly and pithily in his supposed epitaph: "One God, One

Rome, One Roland."[529] Orlando was so rooted in the popular

consciousness as a hero, that to have substituted for him another epical

character would have been impossible.

When we further investigate the naturalization of Orlando in Italy, we

find that all the romantic poems written on his legend inclined to the

burlesque. The chivalrous element of love which pervades the Arthurian

Cycle, had been extracted and treated after their own fashion by the

lyrists of the fourteenth century. That was no immediate concern of the

people, nor had the citizens any sympathy with the chivalry of arms. To

deal as solemnly with medieval romance as the Northern bards had done,

was quite beside the purpose of the _improvisatori_ who refashioned the

_Chansons de Geste_ for Italian townsfolk. When, therefore, Pulci

undertook to amuse Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the mother of Lorenzo de'

Medici, with a tale of Roland, he found his material already stripped of

epical sobriety; nor was it hard for him to handle his theme in the

spirit of Boccaccio, bent on exhausting every motive of amusement which

it might suggest. He assumed the tone of a street-singer, opening each

canto with the customary invocation to Madonna or a paraphrase of some

Church collect, and dismissing his audience at the close with grateful

thanks or brief good wishes. But Pulci was no mere _Cantastorie_. The

popular style served but for a cloak to cover his subtle-witted satire

and his mocking levity. Sarcastic Tuscan humor keeps up an _obbligato_

accompaniment throughout the poem. Sometimes this humor is in harmony

with the plebeian spirit of the old Italian romances; sometimes it turns

aside and treats it as a theme of ridicule. In reading the _Morgante_,

we must bear in mind that it was written, canto by canto, to be recited

in the Palace of the Via Larga, at the table where Poliziano and Ficino

gathered with Michelangelo Buonarroti and Cristoforo Landino. Whatever

topics may from time to time have occupied that brilliant circle, were

reflected in its stanzas; and this alone suffices to account for its

tender episodes and its burlesque extravagances, for the satiric picture

of Margutte and the serious discourses of the devil Astarotte. The

external looseness of construction and the intellectual unity of the

poem, are both attributable to these circumstances. Passing by rapid

transitions from grave to gay, from pathos to cynicism, from theological

speculations to ribaldry, it is at one and the same time a mirror of the

popular taste which suggested the form, and also of the courtly wits who

listened to it laughing. The _Morgante_ is no _naive_ production of a

simple age, but the artistic plaything of a cultivated and critical

society, entertaining its leisure with old-world stories, accepting some

for their beauty's sake in seriousness, and turning others into nonsense

for pure mirth.

A careful study of the _Morgante Maggiore_ reveals to the critic three

separate strains of style. To begin with, it is clear that we are

dealing with two poems fused in one--the first ending with the

twenty-third canto, the second consisting of the last five cantos.

Between these two divisions a considerable period of time is supposed to

have elapsed. The first poem consists of a series of romantic adventures

in strange countries, whither Orlando, Uliviero, Rinaldo and Astolfo

have been driven by the craft of Gano, and where they fight giants,

liberate ladies, and fall in love with Pagan damsels, after the jovial

fashion of knights errant. The second assumes a more heroic tone, and

tells in truly thrilling verse the tale of Roncesvalles. But over and

above this double material, different in matter and in manner, we trace

throughout the whole romance a third element, which seems to be more

essentially the poet's own than either his fantastic tissue of

adventures or his serious narrative of Roland's death. This third

element consists of half-ironical half-sober dissertations, reflective

digressions, and brilliant interpolated incidents, among which we have

to reckon the splendid episodes of Astarotte and Margutte. So much was

clear to my mind when I first read the _Morgante_, and attempted to

comprehend the difficulties it presented to critics like Ginguene and

Hallam. Since then the truth of this view has been substantiated by the

eminent Italian scholar, Pio Rajna, who has proved that the _Morgante_

is the _rifacimento_ of two earlier popular poems, the first existing in

MS. in the Laurentian library, the second entitled _La Spagna_.[530]

Pulci availed himself freely of his popular models, at times repeating

the old stanzas with no alteration, but oftener rehandling them and

adding to their comic spirit, and interpolating passages of his own

invention. Since the two originals differed in character, his

_rifacimento_ retained their divers peculiarities, notwithstanding those

master-touches which betray the same hand in both of its main sections.

But the most precious part of the poem remains Pulci's own. Nothing can

deprive him of Margutte and Astarotte; nor without his clever

transmutation of the old material would the bulk of the _Morgante

Maggiore_ deserve more attention than many similar romances buried in

condign oblivion. Between the two parts we may notice a considerable

difference of literary merit. The second and shorter is by far the finer

in poetic quality, earnestness, and power of treatment. The first is

tedious to read. The second inthralls and carries us along.[531]

The poem takes its title from the comic hero Morgante, a giant captured

and converted by Orlando in the first Canto.[532] He dies, however, in

the twentieth, and the narrative proceeds with no interruption. If we

seek for epical unity, in a romance so loosely put together from so many

divers sources, we can find it in the treason of Gano. The action turns

decisively and frequently upon this single point, returns to it from

time to time for fresh motives, and reaches its conclusion in the

execution of the traitor after the great deed of crime has been

accomplished in the valley dolorous. An Italian of the fifteenth century

could not have chosen a motive more suited to the temper and experience

of his age, when conspiracies like that of the Pazzi at Florence and the

Baglioni at Perugia were frightfully frequent, and when the successful

massacre of Sinigaglia made Cesare Borgia the hero of historical

romance. _Il tradimento_, _il traditore_, the kiss of Judas, the simile

of the fox, recur with fatal resonance through all the Cantos of the

poem. The style assumes a rugged grandeur of tragic realism, not

unworthy of poets of the stamp of our own Webster or Marston, in the

passage which describes the tempest by the well at Saragossa, where Gano

met Marsilio to plan their fraud, and where the locust-tree let fall its

fruit upon the traitor's head.[533] The _Morgante_ is, in truth, the

epic of treason, and the character of Gano, as an accomplished yet not

utterly abandoned Judas, is admirably sustained throughout. The powerful

impression of his perversity is heightened by contrast with the loyalty

of his son Baldovino. In the fight at Roncesvalles Baldovino carries a

mantle given to Gano by the Saracen king, without knowing for what

purpose his father made him wear it; and wherever he charges through the

press of men, the foes avoid him. Orlando learns that he is protected by

this ensign of fraud, and accuses him of partaking in Gano's treason.

Then the youth flings the cloak from his shoulders, and plunges into the

fight with an indignant repudiation of this shame upon his lips. The

scene is not unworthy of the _Iliad_;[534] and his last words, as he

falls pierced in the breast with two lances, _Or non son io piu

traditiore!_ are dramatic.

Pulci deserves credit for strong delineation of character. Through all

the apish tricks and fantastic arabesque-work of his style, the chief

personages retain firmly-marked types. Never since the _Chanson de

Roland_ was first sung, has a more heroic portrait of Orlando, the

God-fearing knight, obedient to his liege-lord, serene in his courage

and gentle in his strength, courteous, pious and affectionate, been

painted.[535] Close adherence to the popular conception of Orlando's

character here stood Pulci in good stead; nor was he hampered with the

difficulties which beset Boiardo and Ariosto, when they showed the

champion of Christianity subdued to madness and to love. Thus one work

at least of the Renaissance maintained for the Italians an ideal of

chivalrous heroism, first conceived by Franco-Norman bards, and

afterwards transmitted through the fancy of the people, who are ever

ready to discern and to preserve the lineaments of greatness. Oliver the

true friend and doughty warrior, Rinaldo the fiery foe and reckless

lover, to whom the press of men was Paradise,[536] and Malagigi the

magician, are drawn with no less skill. Charles is such as the

traditions of the myth and the requirements of the plot obliged Pulci

to make him. Yet in spite of the feebleness which exposes him to the

treasonable arts of Gano, he is not deficient in a certain nobility. In

the conduct of these characters, amid the windings of the poet's

freakish fancy, we trace the solidity of his plan, his faculty for

earnest art. But should there still be found critics who, after a

careful study of Gano, Orlando, Uliviero, Rinaldo and Carlo, think that

Pulci meant his poem for a mere burlesque, this opinion cannot but be

shaken by a perusal of the twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh

Cantos. The refusal of Orlando to blow his horn:

Non sonero perche e' m'aiuti Carlo,

Che per vilta mai non volli sonarlo:

his address to the knights when rushing into desperate battle at

impossible odds[537]; the scene of his death, so tender in its pathos,

so quaint in its piety; the agony of Charles when he comes, too late, to

find him slain, and receives his sword from the Paladin's dead hands;

these passages must surely be enough to convince the most incredulous of

doctrinaires.

It has been customary to explain the apparent contradictions of the

_Morgante Maggiore_--Pulci's brusque transitions from piety to

ribaldry, from pathos to satire--by reference to the circumstances of

Florence at the date of its composition. The republic was at war with

Sixtus IV., who had taken part in the Pazzi conspiracy. To his Bull of

excommunication the Signoria had retorted by terming it "maledictam

maledictionem damnatissimi judicis," and had described the Pope himself

as "delirum senem," "leno matris suae, adulterorum minister, diaboli

vicarius." It was not to be expected that even an orthodox Christian

should be tender toward the vices of the clergy or careful in guarding

his religious utterances at such a moment. Yet we need not go far afield

to account for Pulci's profanity. The Italians of the age in which he

lived, were freethinkers without ceasing to be Catholics. To begin a

Canto with a prayer, and to end it with speculations on the destiny of

the soul after death, was consistent with their intellectual temper. The

schools and private coteries of Florence were the arena in which

Platonism and Averroism waged war with orthodoxy, where questions of

freewill and creation, the relation of man to God, and the essence of

the human spirit, were being discussed with a philosophic indifference

and warmth of curiosity that prepared the way for Pomponazzi's

materialism. Criticism, the modern Hercules, was already in its cradle,

strangling the serpents of sacerdotal authority: and as yet the

Inquisition had not become a power of terror; the Council of Trent and

the Spanish tyranny had not turned Italians into trembling bigots or

sleek hypocrites. Externally they remained tenacious of their old

beliefs; and from the point of view of art at least, they were desirous

of adhering to tradition. For Pulci to have celebrated Orlando without

assuming the customary style of the _cantastorie_, would have been

beside his purpose. Therefore, the mixture of magic, theology, impiety,

speculation and religious fervor which perplexes a reader of the present

day in the _Morgante_, corresponded to the mental attitude of the

educated majority at Pulci's date. On the border-land between the middle

ages and the modern world the keen Italian intellect loved to entertain

itself with a perpetual _perhaps_, impartially including in the sphere

of doubt old dogmas and novel hypotheses, and finding satisfaction in an

insecurity that flattered it with the sense of disengagement from

formulae.[538] With some minds this volatile questioning was serious;

with others it assumed a Rabelaisian joviality. Pulci ranked with those

who made the problems of the world material for humorous debate.

A few instances of Pulci's peculiar levity might be selected from the

last Cantos of the _Morgante_, where no one can maintain that his

intention was burlesque. We have just heard from the minstrel's lips how

Roland died, recommending his soul to God and delivering his glove in

sign of feudal fealty to Gabriel. The sound of his horn has startled

Charlemagne from the sleep of false tranquillity, and the Emperor is on

his way to Roncesvalles. But time is short. He prays Christ that as of

old for Joshua, so now for him in his sore need, the sun may be stayed

and the day be prolonged[539]:

O crucifisso, il qual, gia sendo in croce,

Oscurasti quel sol contra natura;

Io ti priego, Signor, con umil voce

Infin ch'io giunga in quella valle oscura,

Che tu raffreni il suo corso veloce.

The prayer is worthy, in its solemn tone, of this exordium; and the

desired effect soon follows. But now Pulci changes his note from grave

to gay[540]:

E disse: Pazienzia, come Giobbe;

Or oltre in Roncisvalle andar si vuole.

Che come savio il partito conobbe,

_Per non tenere in disagio piu il sole_.

A few lines further he describes the carnage in the dolorous valley, and

finds this comic phrase to express the confusion of the field[541]:

Chi mostra sanguinosa la percossa,

Chi il capo avea quattro braccia discosto,

_Da non trovarli in Giusaffa si tosto_.

Pulci's grotesque humor gives an air of false absurdity to many

incidents which, together with his hearers, he undoubtedly took in good

faith. During the slaughter of the Christians he wishes to impress the

audience with the multitude of souls who crowded into Paradise. S. Peter

is tired to death with opening the door for them and deafened with their

jubilations[542]:

E cosi in ciel si faceva apparecchio

D'ambrosia e nettar con celeste manna,

E perche Pietro alla porta e pur vecchio,

Credo che molto quel giorno s'affanna;

E converra ch'egli abbi buono orecchio,

Tanto gridavan quelle anime Osanna

Ch'eran portate dagli angeli in cielo;

Sicche la barba gli sudava e 'l pelo.

In the same spirit is the picture of the fiends seated like hawks upon

the bell-towers of a little chapel, waiting to pounce upon the souls of

Pagans.[543]

Sometimes a flash of purely Bernesque humor appears in Pulci; as when he

says that the Saracens:

Bestemmiavano Dio divotamente,

or when Oliver, after a pathetic love-lament, complains that it is

impossible:

Celar per certo l'amore e la tossa.

According to modern notions his jokes not unfrequently savor of

profanity. Rinaldo and Ricciardetto are feasting upon ortolans, and give

this punning reason for their excellence[544]:

Cioe che Cristo a Maddalena apparve

In ortolan, che buon sozio gli parve.

On the same occasion Rinaldo is so pleased with his fare that he

exclaims:

Questi mi paion miracoli;

Facciam qui sei non che tre tabernacoli.

Such expressions flash forth from mere Florentine sense of fun in

passages by no means deliberately comic.

The most diverting character of the _Morgante_ is Margutte, an

eccentric heteroclite creature, the prototype of Folengo's Cingar and

Rabelais' Panurge, whom the giant met upon his wanderings and adopted

for a comrade. It has been supposed with some reason that Pulci here

intended to satirize the Greeks who flocked to Florence after the fall

of Constantinople, and that either Marullo, the personal enemy of

Poliziano, or Demetrius Chalcondylas, his rival in erudition, sat for

Margutte's portrait. The character of the rogue, described by himself in

thirty stanzas of fantastic humor, contains a complete epitome of the

abuse which the scholars of those days used to vomit forth in their

reciprocal invectives.[545] Part of the comic effect produced by his

speech is due to this self-attribution of qualities which supplied the

arsenals of humanistic combatants with poisoned arrows. But Margutte has

far more than a merely illustrative or temporary value. He is the first

finished humoristic portrait sketched in modern literature, the first

broadly-conceived and jovially-executed Rabelaisian study. Though it is

very improbable that Pulci had any knowledge of Aristophanes, though he

died eight years or thereabouts before the Cure of Meudon was born, his

Margutte is cousin-german of the Sausage-seller and Panurge.[546]

Margutte takes an impish pride in reckoning up his villanies and vices.

When Morgante asks him whether he believes in Christ or Appollino, he

replies:

A dirtel tosto,

Io non credo piu al nero ch' all'azzurro,

Ma nel cappone, o lesso, o vuogli arrosto ...

E credo nella torta e nel tortello,

L'una e la madre, e l'altro e il suo figliuolo;

Il vero paternostro e il fegatello,

E possono esser tre, e due, ed un solo,

E diriva dal fegato almen quello.

He explains his disengagement from all creeds by referring to his

parentage:

Che nato son d'una monaca greca,

E d'un papasso in Bursia la in Turchia.

Beginning life by murdering his father, he next set out to seek

adventures in the world:

E per compagni ne menai con meco

Tutt'i peccati o di turco o di greco,

Anzi quanti ne son giu nell'inferno:

Io n'ho settanta e sette de' mortali,

Che non mi lascian mai la state o 'l verno;

Pensa quanti io n'ho poi de' veniali!

Margutte's humor consists in the baboon-like self-contentment of his

infamous confessions, and in the effect they produce upon Morgante, who

feels that he has found in him a finished gentleman. After amusing his

audience with this puppet for a while, Pulci flings him aside. Margutte,

like Pietro Aretino, dies at last of immoderate laughter.[547]

Another of Pulci's own creations is Astarotte, the proud and courteous

fiend, summoned by Malagigi to bring Rinaldo from Egypt to Roncesvalles.

This feat he accomplishes in a few hours by entering the body of the

horse Baiardo. The journey consists of a series of splendid leaps,

across lakes, rivers, mountains, seas and cities; and when the paladin

hungers, Astarotte spreads a table for him in the wilderness or

introduces him invisible into the company of queens at banquet in fair

Saragossa. The humor and the fancy of this magic journey are both of a

high order.[548] Yet Astarotte is made to serve a second purpose. Into

his mouth Pulci places all his theological speculations, and makes him

reason learnedly like Mephistophilis:

Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,

Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.

He is introduced in these lines[549]:

Uno spirto chiamato e Astarotte,

Molto savio, terribil, molto fero,

Questo si sta giu nell'infernal grotte;

Non e spirto folletto, egli e piu nero.

Of his noble descent from the highest of created intelligences Astarotte

is well aware[550]:

Io era Serafin de' principali ...

Io fui gia Serafin piu di te degno.

He is in earnest to prove that courtesy exists in Hell[551]:

Che gentilezza e bene anche in inferno ...

Non creder, nello inferno anche fra noi

Gentilezza non sia.

When Malagigi questions him concerning divine foreknowledge and his own

state in Hell, he replies with a complete theory of sin and punishment

founded upon the doctrine of freewill.[552] The angels sinned with

knowledge. Therefore for them there is no redemption. Adam sinned in

ignorance. Therefore there is hope for all men, and a probability of

final restitution for the whole human race[553]:

Forse che 'l vero dopo lungo errore

Adorerete tutti di concordia.

E troverete ognun misericordia.

Astarotte's own torment in Hell causes him bitter anguish; but he

recognizes the justice of God; and knowing that the sentence of

damnation cannot be canceled, he is too courageous to complain. When

Rinaldo offers to intercede for him, he answers[554]:

Il buon volere accetto;

Per noi fien sempre perdute le chiavi,

Maesta lesa, infinito e il difetto:

O felici Cristian, voi par che lavi

Una lacrima sol col pugno al petto,

E dir; Signor, tibi soli peccavi;

Noi peccammo una volta, e in sempiterno

Rilegati siam tutti nello inferno.

Che pur se dopo un milione e mille

Di secol noi sperassim rivedere

Di quell'Amor le minime faville,

Ancor sarebbe ogni peso leggiere:

Ma che bisogna far queste postille?

Se non si puo, non si debbe volere;

Ond'io ti priego, che tu sia contento

Che noi mutiamo altro ragionamento.

There is great refinement in this momentary sadness of Astarotte,

followed by his return to more cheerful topics. He is the Italian

counterpart of Marlowe's fiend, that melancholy demon of the North, who

tempts his victim by the fascination of mere horror.[555] Like

Mephistophilis, again, Astarotte is ready to satisfy the curiosity of

mortals, and condescends to amuse them with elfish tricks.[556] He

explains to Rinaldo that it is quite a mistake to suppose that there are

no inhabited lands beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. The earth, he says,

is round, and can be circumnavigated; and cities full of people,

worshiping our planets and our sun, are found in the antipodes. Hercules

ought to blush for having fixed his pillars where he did.[557] The good

understanding established between Astarotte and Rinaldo on their

journey is one of the prettiest incidents of this strange poem. When

they part, the fiend and the paladin have become firm friends. Astarotte

vows henceforth to serve Rinaldo for love; and Rinaldo promises to free

him from Malagigi's power.[558]

Pulci dealt with the Carolingian Cycle in what may be termed a

_bourgeois_ spirit. Whether humorous or earnest, he maintained the tone

of Florentine society: and his _Morgante_ reflects the peculiar

conditions of the Medicean circle at the date of its composition. The

second great poem on the same group of legends, Boiardo's _Orlando

Innamorato_, transports us into a very different social and intellectual

atmosphere. The highborn Count of Scandiano, reciting his cantos in the

huge square castle surrounded by its moat, which still survives to speak

of medieval Italy in the midst of Ferrara, had but little in common with

Luigi Pulci, whose Tuscan fun and satire amused the merchant-princes of

the Via Larga. The value of the _Orlando Innamorato_ for the student of

Italian development is principally this, that it is the most purely

chivalrous poem of the Renaissance. Composed before the French

invasion, and while the classical Revival was still unaccomplished, we

find in it an echo of an earlier semi-feudal civility. Unlike the other

literary performances of that age, which were produced for the most part

by professional humanists, it was the work of a nobleman to whom feats

of arms and the chase were familiar, who disdained the common folk

(_popolaccio_, _canaglia_, as he always calls them), and whose ideal

both of life and of art was contained in this couplet[559]:

E raccontare il pregio e 'l grande onore

Che donan l'armi giunte con l'amore.

Matteo Maria Boiardo was almost an exact contemporary of Pulci. He was

born about 1434 at his hereditary fief of Scandiano, a village seven

miles from Reggio, at the foot of the Apennines, celebrated for its

excellent vineyards. His mother was Lucia Strozzi, a member of the

Ferrarese house, connected by descent with the Strozzi of Florence. At

the age of twenty-eight he married Taddea Gonzaga, daughter of the Count

of Novellara. He lived until 1494, when he died at the same time as Pico

and Poliziano, in the year of Charles VIII.'s invasion, two years after

the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, and four years before Ficino. These

dates are not unimportant as fixing the exact epoch of Boiardo's

literary activity. At the Court of Ferrara, where the Count of Scandiano

enjoyed the friendship of Duke Borso and Duke Ercole, this bard of

chivalry held a position worthy of his noble rank and his great talents.

The princes of the House of Este employed him as embassador in

diplomatic missions of high trust and honor. He also administered for

them the government of Reggio and Modena, their two chief subject

cities. As a ruler, he was celebrated for his clemency and for his

indifference to legal formalities. An enemy, Panciroli, wrote of him:

"He was a man of excessive kindness, more fit for writing poems than for

punishing crimes." He is even reported to have held that no offense

deserved capital punishment--an opinion which at that period could only

have been seriously entertained in Italy, and which even there was

strangely at variance with the temper of the petty tyrants. Well versed

in Greek and Latin literature, he translated Herodotus, parts of

Xenophon, the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, and the _Ass_ of Lucian into

Italian. He also versified Lucian's _Timon_ for the stage, and wrote

Latin poems of fair merit. His lyrics addressed to Antonia Caprara prove

that, like Lorenzo de' Medici, he was capable of following the path of

Petrarch without falling into Petrarchistic mannerism.[560] But his

literary fame depends less upon these minor works than on the _Orlando

Innamorato_, a masterpiece of inventive genius, which furnished Ariosto

with the theme of the _Orlando Furioso_. Without the _Innamorato_ the

_Furioso_ is meaningless. The handling and structure of the romance, the

characters of the heroes and heroines, the conception of Love and Arms

as the double theme of romantic poetry, the interpolation of _novelle_

in the manner of Boccaccio, and the magic machinery by which the poem

is conducted, are due to the originality of Boiardo. Ariosto adopted his

plot, continued the story where he left it, and brought it to a close;

so that, taken together, both poems form one gigantic narrative, of

about 100,000 lines, which has for its main subject the love and the

marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante, mythical progenitors of the

Estensi. Yet because the style of Boiardo is rough and provincial, while

that of Ariosto is by all consent "divine," Boiardo has been almost

forgotten by posterity.

Chivalry at no time took firm root in Italy, where the first act of the

Communes upon their achievement of independence had been to suppress

feudalism by forcing the nobles to reside as burghers within their

walls. The true centers of national vitality were the towns. Here the

Latin race assimilated to itself the Teutonic elements which might, if

left to flourish in the country, have given a different direction to

Italian development. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the

immense extension of mercantile activity, the formation of tyrannies,

the secular importance of the Papacy, and the absorption of the

cultivated classes in humanistic studies, removed the people ever

further from feudal traditions. Even the new system of warfare, whereby

the scions of noble families took pay from citizens and priests for the

conduct of military enterprises, tended to destroy the stronghold of

chivalrous feeling in a nation that grew to regard the profession of

arms as another branch of commerce. Still Italy could not wholly

separate herself from the rest of Europe, and there remained provinces

where a kind of semi-feudalism flourished. The most important of these

undoubtedly was the kingdom of Naples, subject to alternate influence

from France and Spain, and governed by monarchs at frequent warfare with

their barons. The second was Ferrara, where the House of Este had

maintained unbroken lordship from the period when still the Empire was a

power in Italy. Here the ancient Lombard traditions of chivalry, the

customs of the Marca Amorosa, and the literature of the troubadours

still lingered.[561] Externally at least, the manners of the Court were

feudal, however far removed its princes may have been in spirit from the

ideal of knighthood. In Ferrara, therefore, more than in Florence and

Venice, those cities of financiers and traders, could the romance of

chivalry be seriously treated by a poet who admired the knightly

virtues, and looked back upon the days of Arthur and of Roland as a

golden age of honor, far removed but real. While the humanists of

Florence indulged their fancy with dreams of Virgil's Saturnian reign,

the baron of Ferrara refashioned a visionary world from the wrecks of

old romance.[562]

Boiardo did not disdain to assume the style of a minstrel addressing his

courtly audience with compliments and _conges_ at the beginning and

ending of each canto. The first opens with these words:

Signori e cavalieri che v'adunati

Per odir cose dilettose e nuove,

State attenti, quieti, ed ascoltati

La bella istoria che 'l mio canto muove.

But his spirit is always knightly, and he refrains from the quaint

pietism of Pulci's preambles. He is no mere jongleur or _Cantatore da

Banca_, but a new Sir Tristram, celebrating in heroic verse the valorous

deeds and amorous emotions of which he had himself partaken. Nor does

he, like Ariosto, appear before us as a courtier accomplished in the

arts of flattery, or as a man of letters anxious above all things to

refine his style. Neither the Court-life of Italy nor the humanism of

the revival had destroyed in him the spirit of old-world freedom and

noble courtesy. At the same time he was so far imbued with the culture

of the Renaissance as to appreciate the value of poetic unity and to

combine certain elements of classic learning with the material of

romance. Setting out with the aim of connecting all the Frankish legends

in one poem, he made Orlando his hero; but he perceived that the element

of love, which added so great a charm to the Arthurian Cycle, had

hitherto been neglected by the minstrels of Charlemagne. He therefore

resolved to tell a new tale of the mighty Roland; and the originality of

his poem consisted in the fact that he treated the material of the

_Chansons de Geste_ in the spirit of the Breton legends.[563] Turpin, he

asserts with a grave irony, had hidden away the secret of Orlando's

love; but he will unfold the truth, believing that no knight was ever

the less noble for his love. Accordingly the passion of Orlando for "the

fairest of her sex, Angelica," like the wrath of Achilles in the

_Iliad_, is the mainspring of Boiardo's poem. To his genius we owe the

creation of that fascinating princess of the East, as well as the

invention of the fountains of Cupid and Merlin, which cause the

alternate loves and hates of his heroes and heroines--the whole of that

closely-woven mesh of sentiment in which the adventures and the warlike

achievements of Paladins and Saracens alike are involved.

In dealing with his subject Boiardo is serious--as serious, that is to

say, as a writer of romance can be.[564] His belief in chivalry itself

is earnest, though the presentation of knightly prowess runs into

intentional extravagance. A dash of Italian merriment mingles with his

enthusiasm; but he has none of Pulci's skeptical satiric humor, none of

Ariosto's all-pervasive irony. The second thoughts of the burlesque poet

or of the humorous philosopher do not cross the warp of his conception,

and his exaggerations are romantic. Such a poem as the _Orlando

Innamorato_ could not have been planned or executed in Italy at any

other period or under any other circumstances. A few years after

Boiardo's death Italy was plunged into the wars that led to her

enslavement. Charles V. was born and Luther was beginning to shake

Germany. The forces of the Renaissance were in full operation,

destroying the faiths and fervors of the medieval world, closing the

old aeon with laughter and lamentation, raising new ideals as yet

imperfectly apprehended. Meanwhile Boiardo, whose life coincided with

the final period of Italian independence, uttered the last note of the

bygone age. His poem, chivalrous, free, joyous, with not one stain of

Ariosto's servility or of Tasso's melancholy, corresponded to a brief

and passing moment in the evolution of the national art. In the pure and

vivid beauty which distinguish it, the sunset of chivalry and the

sunrise of modern culture blend their colors, as in some far northern

twilight of midsummer night. Joyousness pervades its cantos and is

elemental to its inspiration--the joy of open nature, of sensual though

steadfast love, of strong limbs and eventful living, of restless

activity, of childlike security. Boiardo's style reminds us somewhat of

Benozzo Gozzoli in painting, or of Piero di Cosimo, who used the skill

of the Renaissance to express the cheerful _naivete_ of a less

self-conscious time. It is sad to read the last stanza of the

_Innamorato_, cut short ere it was half completed by the entry of the

French into Italy, and to know that so free and freshly-tuned a "native

wood-note wild" would never sound again.[565] When Ariosto repieced the

broken thread, the spirit of the times was changed. Servitude,

adulation, irony, and the meridian splendor of Renaissance art had

succeeded to independence, frankness, enthusiasm and the poetry of

natural enjoyment. Far more magnificent is Ariosto's Muse; but we lack

the spontaneity of the elder poet. And as the years advance, the change

is more apparent toward decay. The genius of Boiardo might be compared

to some high-born lad, bred in the country, pure-hearted, muscular,

brave, fair to look upon. That of Ariosto is studious and accomplished

with the smile of worldly sarcasm upon his lips. The elegances of Bembo

and the Petrarchisti remind one of a hectic scented fop, emasculate and

artificial. Aretino resembles his own _bardassonacci, paggi da taverna_,

flaunting meretricious charms with brazen impudence. Tasso in the

distance wears a hair shirt beneath his armor of parade; he is a

Jesuit's pupil, crossing himself when he awakes from love-dreams and

reveries of pleasure. It was probably the discord between Boiardo's

spirit and the prevailing temper of the sixteenth century, far more than

the roughness of his verse or the provinciality of his language, that

caused him to be so strangely and completely forgotten. In the Italy of

Machiavelli and the Borgias, of Michelangelo and Julius II., his aims,

enthusiasms and artistic ideals found alike no sympathy. To class him

with his own kind, we must go beyond the Alps and seek his brethren in

France or England.

Boiardo's merit as a constructive artist can best be measured by the

analysis of his plot. Crowded as the _Orlando Innamorato_ is with

incidents and episodes, and inexhaustible as may be the luxuriance of

the poet's fancy, the unity of his romance is complete. From the moment

of Angelica's appearance in the first canto, the whole action depends

upon her movements. She withdraws the Paladins to Albracca, and forces

Charlemagne to bear the brunt of Marsilio's invasion alone. She restores

Orlando to the French host before Montalbano. It is her ring which frees

the fated Ruggiero from Atlante's charms. The nations of the earth are

in motion. East, West, and South and North send forth their countless

hordes to combat; but these vast forces are controlled by one woman's

caprice, and events are so handled by the poet as to make the fate of

myriads waver in the balance of her passions. We might compare Boiardo's

romance to an immense web, in which a variety of scenes and figures are

depicted by the constant addition of new threads. None of the old

threads are wasted; not one is merely superfluous. If one is dropped for

a moment and lost to sight, it reappears again. The slightest incidents

lead to the gravest results. Narratives of widely different character

are so interwoven as to aid each other, introducing fresh agents,

combining these with those whom we have learned to know, but leaving the

grand outlines of the main design untouched.

The miscellaneous details which enliven a tale of chivalry, are grouped

round four chief centers--Paris, where the poem opens with the

tournament that introduces Angelica, and where, at the end of the second

book, all the actors are assembled for the supreme struggle between

Christendom and Islam; Albracca, where Angelica is besieged in the far

East; Biserta, where the hosts of pagan Agramante muster, and the hero

Ruggiero is brought upon the scene; Montalbano, where Charlemagne

sustains defeat at the hands of Agramante, Rodamonte, Marsilio, and

Ruggiero. In order to combine such distant places in one action,

Boiardo was obliged to set geography and time at defiance. Between

Tartary and Circassia, France and Spain, Africa and Hungary, the knights

make marches and countermarches within the space of a few weeks or even

days. All arrive at the same dangerous gates and passes, the same

seductive lakes and gardens; for the magical machinery of the romance

was more important to the poet's scheme than cosmographical conditions.

His more than dramatic contempt for distance was indispensable in the

conduct of a romance which admitted of no pause in the succession of

attractive incidents, and was also pardonable in an age devoid of

accurate geography. His chief aim was to secure novelty, excitement,

variety, ideal unity.

Boiardo further showed his grasp of art by the emphatic presentation of

the chief personages, whose action determined the salient features of

his tale. It is impossible to forget Angelica after her first entrance

on the scene at Paris. In like manner Marfisa at Albracca, Rodamonte in

the council-chamber at Biserta, Ruggiero on the heights of Mount Carena,

Orlando entering the combat before Albracca, Mandricardo passing forth

unarmed and unattended to avenge his father's death, are brought so

vividly before our eyes, that the earliest impression of each character

remains with us in all their subsequent appearances. The inferior actors

are introduced with less preparation and diminished emphasis, because

they have to occupy subordinate positions, and to group themselves

around the heroes; and thus the whole vast poem is like a piece of

arras-work, where the strongest definition of form, and the most

striking colors, serve to throw into relief the principal figures amid

a multitude of minor shapes. Not less skill is manifested in the

preservation of the types of character outlined in these first

descriptions. To vary the specific qualities of all those knights

engaged in the same pursuit of love and arms, was extremely difficult.

Yet Boiardo, sometimes working on the lines laid down by earlier

romancers, sometimes inventing wholly new conceptions (as in the case of

Rodamonte, Ruggiero, Marfisa, Brandiamante), may be said to have

succeeded in this master-stroke of art. The Homeric heroes are scarcely

less firmly and subtly differentiated than his champions of chivalry.

Orlando is the ideal of Christian knighthood, fearless, indifferent to

wealth, chaste, religious, respectful in his love, courteous toward

women, swift to wrath, but generous even in his rage, exerting his

strength only when the occasion is worthy of him.[566] His one weakness

is the passion for Angelica. Twice he refuses for her sake to accompany

Dudone to the help of his liege-lord, and in the fight at Montalbano he

is careless of Christendom so long as he can win his lady.[567] Studying

Boiardo's delineation of love-lunacy in Orlando, we understand how

Ariosto was led by it to the conception of the _Furioso_. Rinaldo is

cast in a somewhat inferior mold. Lion-hearted, fierce, rebellious

against Charles, prone to love and hate excessively, he is the type of

the feudal baron, turbulent and troublesome to his suzerain. Astolfo,

slight, vain, garrulous, fond of finery and flirting, boastful, yet as

fearless as the leopards on his shield, and winning hearts by his

courtesy and grace, offers a spirited contrast to the massive vigor of

Rinaldo. It was a master-stroke of humor to have provided this fop of a

Paladin with the lance of Argalia, whereby his physical weakness is

supplemented and his bravery becomes a match for the muscles of the

doughtiest champions.[568] Brandimarte presents another aspect of the

chivalrous ideal. Fidelity is his chief virtue--loyalty to his love,

Fiordelisa, and his hero, Orlando, combined with a delightful frankness

and the freshness of untainted youth. He is not wise, but boyish,

amorous, of a simple, trustful soul; a kind of Italian Sir Bors.

Ferraguto, on the contrary, is all fire and fury, as petulantly fierce

in love as in arms, so hot in his temerity that even at times he can

forget the laws of honor.[569] Mandricardo's distinctive quality (beside

that of generous daring, displayed in his solitary and unarmed quest of

Orlando, and in the achievement of Hector's armor) is singular good

fortune. Ruggiero has for his special mark victorious beauty, blent with

a courtesy and loftiness of soul, that opens his heart to romantic love,

and renders him peerless among youthful warriors. Boiardo has spared no

pains to impress our imagination with the potency of his unrivaled

comeliness.[570] He moves before our eyes like the angelic knight in

Mantegna's _Madonna of the Victory_, or like Giorgione's picture of the

fair-haired and mail-clad donzel, born to conquer by the might of

beauty. Agramante, the Eastern Emperor, whose council is composed of

thirty-two crowned heads, enhances by his arrogance of youth the

world-worn prudence of old Charlemagne. Marfisa, the Amazonian Indian

queen, who has the force of twenty knights, and is as cruel in her

courage as a famished tigress, sets off the gentler prowess of

Brandiamante, Rinaldo's heroic sister. Rodamonte is the blustering,

atheistic, insolent young Ajax, standing alone against armies, and

hurling defiance at heaven from the midst of a sinking navy.[571]

Agricane is distinguished as the knight who loves fighting for its own

sake, and disdains culture; Sacripante, as the gentle and fearless

suitor of Angelica; Gradasso, as the hyperbolical champion of the

Orient, inflamed with a romantic desire to gain Durlindana and Baiardo,

the enchanted sword and horse. Gano and Truffaldino, among these

paragons of honor, are notable traitors, the one brave when he chooses

to abandon craft, the other cowardly. Brunello is the Thersites of the

company, a perfect thief, misshapen, mischievous, consummate in his

guile.[572] Malagise deals in magic, and has a swarm of demons at his

back for all exigences. Turpin's chivalry is tempered with a subtle

flavor of the priest, exposing him to Boiardo's mockery. Of Oliver and

Ogier we hear, accidentally perhaps, but little. Such are some of

Boiardo's personages. Not a few were given to him by the old romancers;

but these he has new-fashioned to his needs.[573] Others he has molded

from his own imagination with such plastic force that they fall short in

no respect of the time-honored standard. It is no slight tribute to his

creative power that we recognize a real fraternity between these puppets

of his fancy and the mythic heroes with whom they are associated. As

Boiardo left the actors in his drama, so Ariosto took them up and with

but slight change treated them in his continuation of the tale.

Women, with the exception of Marfisa and Brandiamante, fare but ill at

Boiardo's hands. He seems to have conceived of female character as a

compound of fickleness, infidelity, malice, falsehood, and light love.

Angelica is little better than a seductive witch, who dotes on Rinaldo,

and yet contrives to make use of Orlando, luring him to do her purpose

by false promises.[574] Falerina and Dragontina are sorceresses, apt for

all iniquity and guile. Morgana and Alcina display the capricious loves

and inhuman spites of fairies. Origille is a subtle traitress, beautiful

enough to deceive Orlando, but as poisonous as a serpent. Even the

ladies who are intended to be amiable, show but a low standard of

morality.[575] Leodilla, princess of the Far Isles, glories in adultery,

and hates Orlando for his constancy to Angelica in absence.[576]

Fiordelisa is false in thought to Brandimarte, when she sees Rinaldo

sleeping in the twilight. The picture, however, of the slumbering

warrior and the watchful maiden is so fresh and true to Boiardo's genius

that it deserves quotation[577]:

Upon his steed forthwith hath sprung the knight,

And with the damsel rideth fast away;

Not far they fared, when slowly waned the light,

And forced them to dismount and there to stay.

Rinaldo 'neath a tree slept all the night;

Close at his side the lovely lady lay:

But the strong magic of wise Merlin's well

Had on the baron's temper cast a spell.

He now can sleep anigh that beauteous dame;

Nor of her neighborhood have any care;

Erewhile a sea, a flood, a raging flame

Would not have stayed his quick desire, I swear:

To clasp so fair a creature without shame,

Walls, mountains, he'd have laid in ruins there;

Now side by side they sleep, and naught he recks;

While her, methinks, far other thoughts perplex.

The air, meanwhile, was growing bright around,

Although not yet the sun his face had shown;

Some stars the tranquil brows of heaven still crowned;

The birds upon the trees sang one by one:

Dark night had flown; bright day was not yet found:

Then toward Rinaldo turned the maid alone;

For she with morning light had cast off sleep,

While he upon the grass still slumbered deep.

Beauteous he was, and but a stripling then;

Strong-thewed and lithe, and with a lively face;

Broad in the chest, but in the haunches thin;

The lady gazed, smit with his manly grace:

His beard scarce budded upon cheek and chin:

Gazing, she almost fainted in that place,

And took such pleasure in so sweet a sight

That naught she heeds beyond this one delight.

Love, as conceived by Boiardo, though a powerful and steadfast passion,

is not spiritual. The knights love like centaurs, and fight like bulls

for the privilege of paying suit to their ladies. Rinaldo and Orlando

meet in deadly duel for Angelica; Rodamonte and Ferraguto dispute

Doralice, though the latter does not care for her, and only asserts his

right to dwell in thought upon her charms. Orlando and Agricane break

their courteous discourse outside Albracca to fight till one of them is

killed, merely because the name of Angelica has intervened. For

Boiardo's descriptions of love returned, and crowned with full fruition,

the reader may be referred to two magnificent passages in the episodes

of Leodilla and Fiordelisa.[578] Poetically noble in spite of their

indelicacy, these pictures of sensuous and natural enjoyment might be

paralleled with the grand frankness of Venetian painting. It is to be

regretted for Boiardo's credit as an artist in expression, that more

than a bare reference to them is here impossible.

Boiardo's conception of friendship or fraternity in arms is finer. The

delineation of affection generated by mutual courtesy under the most

trying conditions of intercourse, which binds together the old rivals

Iroldo and Prasildo, has something in it truly touching.[579] The same

passion of comradeship finds noble expression in the stanzas uttered by

Orlando, when he recognizes Rinaldo's shield suspended by Aridano near

Morgana's Lake.[580] It must be remembered that the cousins had recently

parted as foes, after a fierce battle for Angelica before Albracca:

Hearing these dulcet words, the Count began

Little by little of his will to yield;

Backward already he withdrew a span,

When, gazing on the bridge and guarded field,

Force was that he the armor bright should scan

Which erst Rinaldo bore--broad sword and shield:

Then weeping, "Who hath done me this despite?"

He cried: "Oh, who hath slain my perfect knight?

"Here wast thou killed by foulest treachery

Of that false robber on this slippery bridge;

For all the world could not have conquered thee

In fair fight, front to front, and edge to edge:

Cousin, from heaven incline thine ear to me!

Where now thou reignest, list thy lord and liege!

Me who so loved thee, though my brief misprision,

Through too much love, wrought 'twixt our lives division.

"I crave thy pardon: pardon me, I pray,

If e'er I did thee wrong, sweet cousin mine!

I was thine ever, as I am alway,

Though false suspicion, or vain love malign,

And jealous blindness, on an evil day,

Brought me to cross my furious brand with thine:

Yet all the while I loved thee--love thee now;

Mine was the fault, and only mine, I vow.

"What traitorous wolf ravening for blood was he

Who thus debarred us twain from kind return

To concord sweet and sweet tranquillity,

Sweet kisses, and sweet tears of souls that yearn?

This is the anguish keen that conquers me,

That now I may not to thy bosom turn,

And speak, and beg for pardon, ere I part;

This is the grief, the dole that breaks my heart!"

Scarcely less beautiful is the feeling which binds Brandimarte to the

great Count, the inferior to the superior hero, making him ready to

release his master from Manodante's prison at the price of his own

liberty.[581] Boiardo devotes the exordium of the seventh Canto of the

third Book to a panegyric of chivalrous friendship:

Far more than health, far more than strength is worth,

Nay more than pleasure, more than honor vain,

Is friendship tried alike in dole and mirth:

For when one love doth join the hearts of twain,

Their woes are halved, their joys give double birth

To joy, by interchange of grief and pain;

And when doubts rise, with free and open heart

Each calls his friend, who gladly bears a part.

What profit is there in much pearls and gold,

Or power, or proud estate, or royal reign?

Lacking a friend, mere wealth is frosty cold:

He who loves not, and is not loved again,

From him true joys their perfect grace withhold:

And this I say, since now across the main

Brave Brandimarte drives his flying ship

To help Orlando, drawn by comradeship.

Next to bravery the poet's favorite virtue is courtesy. It is enough to

mention Orlando's gentle forbearance with Agricane at Albracca, their

evening conversation in the midst of a bloody duel, and the hero's

sorrow when he has wounded his opponent to the death.[582] Of the same

quality is the courteous behavior of Rinaldo and Gradasso before a

deadly encounter, the aid afforded to Marfisa by Rinaldo in the midst of

their duel, and the graceful sympathy of Astolfo for Brandimarte, whom

he has unhorsed.[583] But the two passages which illustrate Boiardo's

ideal of the chivalrous character, as blent of bravery and courtesy, of

intelligence and love, are Orlando's discourse with Agricane and his

speech to Morgana's maiden. In the first of these the Count and King had

fought till nightfall. Then they agree to sleep together side by side,

and to resume the combat at daybreak. Before they settle for the night,

they talk[584]:

After the sun below the hills was laid,

And with bright stars the sky began to glow,

Unto the King these words Orlando said:

"What shall we do, now that the day is low?"

Then Agrican made answer, "Make our bed

Together here, amid the herbs that grow;

And then to-morrow with the dawn of light

We can return and recommence the fight."

No sooner said, than straight they were agreed:

Each tied his horse to trees that near them grew;

Then down they lay upon the grassy mead--

You might have thought they were old friends and true,

So close and careless couched they in the reed.

Orlando nigh unto the fountain drew,

And Agrican hard by the forest laid

His length beneath a mighty pine-tree's shade.

Herewith the twain began to hold debate

Of fitting things and meet for noble knights.

The Count looked up to heaven and cried, "How great

And fair is yonder frame of glittering lights,

Which God, the mighty monarch, did create;

The silvery moon, and stars that gem our nights,

The light of day, yea, and the lustrous sun,

For us poor men God made them every one!"

But Agrican: "Full well I apprehend

It is your wish toward faith our talk to turn:

Of science less than naught I comprehend;

Nay, when I was a boy, I would not learn,

But broke my master's head to make amend

For his much prating; no one since did yearn

To teach me book or writing, such the dread

Wherewith I filled them for my hardihead.

"And so I let my boyish days flow by,

In hunting, feats of arms, and horsemanship;

Nor is it meet, meseems, for chivalry

To pore the livelong day on scholarship.

True knights should strive to prove their skill, say I,

And strength of limb in noble fellowship;

Leave priests and teaching men from books to learn.

I know enough, thank God, to serve my turn."

Then spake the Count: "Thus far we both agree;

Arms are the chief prime honor of a knight.

Yet knowledge brings no shame that I can see,

But rather fame, as fields with flowers are bright;

More like an ox, a stock, a stone is he

Who never thinks of God's eternal light;

Nor without learning can we rightly dwell

On his high majesty adorable."

Then Agrican, "Small courtesy it were,

War with advantage so complete to wage!

My nature I have laid before you bare;

I know full well that you are learned and sage;

Therefore to answer you I do not care.

Sleep if you like; in sleep your soul assuage;

Or if you choose with me to hold discourse,

I look for talk of love, and deeds of force.

"Now, I beseech you, answer me the truth

Of what I ask, upon a brave man's faith:

Are you the great Orlando, in good sooth,

Whose name and fame the whole world echoeth?

Whence are you come, and why? And since your youth

Were you by love inthralled? For story saith

That any knight who loves not, though he seem

To sight alive, yet lives but in a dream."

Then spake the Count: "Orlando sure am I

Who both Almonte and his brother slew.

Imperious love hath lost me utterly,

And made me journey to strange lands and new;

And, for I fain would thus in amity

Prolong discourse, therefore I tell you true,

She who now lies within Albracca's wall,

Gallafron's daughter, holds my heart in thrall."

This unlucky mention of Angelica stirs the rage of Agricane, and the two

men fight in the moonlight beneath the forest-trees till the young King

is wounded to the death--a splendid subject for some imaginative

painter's pencil. We may notice in this dialogue the modification of

chivalry occasioned by Italian respect for culture. Boiardo exalts the

courage of the educated gentleman above the valor of a man-at-arms. In

the conversation between Orlando and Morgana's maiden he depicts another

aspect of the knightly ideal. The fairy has made Orlando offer of

inestimable treasures, but he answers that indifference to riches is the

sign of a noble heart[585]:

Orlando smiling heard what she would say,

But scarce allowed her time her speech to end,

Seeing toward riches of the sort the fay

Proffered, his haughty soul he would not bend;

Wherefore he spake: "It irked me not to-day

My very life unto the death to spend;

For only perils and great toils sustain

Honor of chivalry without a stain.

"But for the sake of gold or silver gear,

I would not once have drawn my brand so bright;

For he who holds mere gain of money dear

Hath set himself to labor infinite;

The more he gets the less his gains appear;

Nor can he ever sate his appetite;

They who most have, still care for more to spend,

Wherefore this way of life hath ne'er an end."

Having seen the knights in their more generous moments, we ought to

bear in mind that they are capable of blustering, boasting, and

exchanging foul abuse like humanists. One reference will suffice.

Orlando and Rinaldo quarrel at Albracca and defy each other to combat.

Before fighting they indulge in elaborate caricatures and vilifications,

from which it would appear, to say the least, that these champions of

Christendom were the subject of much scandalous gossip.[586]

Human nature, unsophisticated and unqualified, with the crude impulses

and the contradictions proper to an unreflective age, has been studied

by Boiardo for his men and women. His power of expressing the passions

by natural signs might win for him the title of the Homer of Chivalry.

The love lamentations of Prasildo, the love-languors of Angelica, the

frenzy of Marfisa, the wrath of Ferraguto, the truculency of Rodamonte,

the impish craft of Brunello, Origille's cunning, Brandimarte's fervor,

Ruggiero's impatience to try his strength in the tournament, and his

sudden ecstasy of love for Brandiamante--these and a hundred other

instances of vigorous dramatic presentation could be mentioned. In his

pictures of scenery and descriptions Boiardo follows nature no less

faithfully--and this, be it remembered, in an age which refined on

nature and admitted into art only certain chosen phases of her

loveliness. Of affectation and elaboration he has none. The freshness of

authentic vision gives peculiar vividness to the storm that overtakes

Rodamonte in mid-channel; to the garden of Falerina, where Orlando

stuffs his cask with roses in order to stop his ears against a Siren's

song; to the picture of Morgana combing Ziliante's hair in the midst of

her enchanted meadows, and to the scene in which Angelica greets Orlando

with a perfumed bath after the battle.[587] The charm of Boiardo's

poetry consists in its firm grasp on truth and nature, the spontaneity

and immediateness of its painting. He has none of Poliziano's richness,

no Virgilian dignity or sweetness, no smooth and sparkling fluency like

that of Ariosto. But all that he writes has in it the perfume of the

soil, the freedom of the open air; the spirits of the woods and sea and

stars are in it. Of his style the most striking merit is rapidity.

Almost always unpolished, sometimes even coarse, but invariably spirited

and masculine, his verse leaps onward like a grayhound in its swiftness.

Story succeeds story with extraordinary speed; and whether of love or

arms, they are equally well told. The pathetic novel of Tisbina,

Rinaldo's wondrous combat with the griffins and the giants, the

lion-hunt at Biserta, the mustering of Agramante's lieges, and the flux

and reflux of battle before Montalbano tax the vivid and elastic vigor

of Boiardo in five distinct species of rapid narration; and in all of

them he proves himself more than adequate to the strain. For ornaments

he cared but little, nor did he wait to elaborate similes. A lion at

bay, a furious bull, a river foaming to the sea, a swollen torrent, two

battling winds, a storm of hail, the clash of thunderclouds, an

earthquake, are the figures he is apt to use. The descriptions of

Rinaldo, Marfisa and Orlando, may be cited as favorable specimens of

his illustrative metaphors.[588] Short phrases like _a guisa di leone_,

_a guisa di colomba_, _a guisa di serpente_, _a guisa d'uno drago_, _a

guisa di castello_, indicate in outline images that aid the poet's

thought. But nothing like the polish or minuteness of Ariosto's

highly-wrought comparisons can be found in the _Innamorato_. Boiardo's

study of the classics had not roused him to the emulation of their

decorative beauties. Nor, again, did he attend to cadence in his

versification. He would have wondered at the _limae labor_ of the poets

who came after him. His own stanzas are forcible, swift, fiery, never

pompous or voluptuous, liquid or sonorous. The changes wrought by

Poliziano in the structure of _ottava rima_, his majesty and "linked

sweetness long drawn out," were unknown to Boiardo. Yet those rugged

octaves, in spite of their halting pauses at the end of the fifth line,

in spite of their frequent repetitions and inequalities of volume, are

better adapted to the spirit of his medieval subject-matter than the

sumptuous splendor of more polished versifiers. His diction, in like

manner, judged by the standard of the _cinque cento_, is far from

choice--loaded with Lombardisms, gaining energy and vividness at the

expense of refinement and precision. Thus style and spirit alike removed

him from the sympathies of the correct and classic age that followed.

For the student of the earlier Renaissance Boiardo's art has one

commanding point of interest. In the romantic treatment of antique

motives he is unique. It was the aim of Italian poets after Boccaccio to

effect a fusion between the classical and modern styles, and to ingraft

the beauties of antique literature upon their own language. Boiardo, far

more a child of nature than either Boccaccio or Poliziano, with deeper

sympathy for feudal traditions and chivalrous modes of feeling, attacked

this problem from a point of view directly opposite to theirs. His

comprehensive study of Greek and Roman authors had stored his mind with

legends which gave an impulse to the freedom of his own imagination. He

did not imitate the ancients; but used the myths with so much novelty

and delicate perception of their charm, that beneath his touch they

assumed a fresh and fascinating quality. There is nothing grotesque in

his presentation of Hellenic fancy, nothing corresponding to the

medieval transformation of deities into devils; and yet his spirit is

not classical. His Sphinx, his Cyclops, and his Circe-Dragontina, his

Medusa, his Pegasus, his Centaur, his Atalanta, his Satyr, are living

creatures of romantic wonderland, with just enough of classic

gracefulness to remove them from the murky atmosphere of medieval

superstition into the serene ether of a neo-pagan mythology. Nothing can

be more dissimilar from Ovid, more unlike the forms of Graeco-Roman

sculpture. With his firm grasp upon reality, Boiardo succeeded in

naturalizing these classic fancies. They are not copied, but drawn from

the life of the poet's imagination. A good instance of this creative

faculty is the description of the Faun, who haunts the woodland in the

shade of leaves, and lives on fruits and drinks the stream, and weeps

when the sky is fair, because he then fears bad weather, but laughs when

it rains, because he knows the sun will shine again.[589] It is not

easy to find an exact analogue in the sister arts to this poetry, though

some points in the work of Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo, some early

engravings by Robeta and the Master of the Caduceus, some bass-reliefs

of Amadeo or incrustations on the chapel-walls of S. Francesco at

Rimini, a Circe by Dosso Dossi in the Borghese palace at Rome, an

etching of Mantegna here or there, might be quoted in illustration of

its spirit.[590] Better justice can be done to Boiardo's achievement by

citation than by critical description. The following stanzas are a

picture of Love attended by the Graces, punishing Rinaldo for his

rudeness near the Font of Merlin[591]:

When to the leafy wood his feet were brought,

Towards Merlin's Font at once he took his way;

Unto the font that changes amorous thought

Journeyed the Paladin without delay;

But a new sight, the which he had not sought,

Caused him upon the path his feet to stay.

Within the wood there is a little close

Full of pink flowers, and white, and various:

And in the midst thereof a naked boy,

Singing, took solace with surpassing cheer;

Three ladies round him, as around their joy,

Danced naked in the light so soft and clear.

No sword, no shield, hath been his wonted toy;

Brown are his eyes; yellow his curls appear;

His downy beard hath scarce begun to grow:

One saith 'tis there, and one might answer, No!

With violets, roses, flowers of every dye,

Baskets they filled and eke their beauteous hands:

Then as they dance in joy and amity,

The Lord of Montalbano near them stands:

Whereat, "Behold the traitor!" loud they cry,

Soon as they mark the foe within their bands;

"Behold the thief, the scorner of delight,

Caught in the trap at last in sorry plight!"

Then with their baskets all with one consent

Upon Rinaldo like a tempest bore:

One flings red roses, one with violets blent

Showers lilies, hyacinths, fast as she can pour:

Each flower in falling with strange pain hath rent

His heart and pricked his marrow to the core,

Lighting a flame in every smitten part,

As though the flowers concealed a fiery dart.

The boy who, naked, coursed along the sod,

Emptied his basket first, and then began,

Wielding a long-grown leafy lily rod,

To scourge the helmet of the tortured man:

No aid Rinaldo found against the god,

But fell to earth as helpless children can;

The youth who saw him fallen, by the feet

Seized him, and dragged him through the meadow sweet.

And those three dames had each a garland rare

Of roses; one was red and one was white:

These from their snowy brows and foreheads fair

They tore in haste, to beat the writhing knight:

In vain he cried and raised his hands in prayer;

For still they struck till they were tired quite:

And round about him on the sward they went,

Nor ceased from striking till the morn was spent.

Nor massy cuirass, nor stout plate of steel,

Could yield defense against those bitter blows:

His flesh was swollen with many a livid weal

Beneath his mail, and with such fiery woes

Inflamed as spirits damned in hell may feel;

Yet theirs, upon my troth, are fainter throes:

Wherefore that Baron, sore, and scant of breath,

For pain and fear was well-nigh brought to death.

Nor whether they were gods or men he knew;

Nor prayer, nor courage, nor defense availed,

Till suddenly upon their shoulders grew

And budded wings with gleaming gold engrailed,

Radiant with crimson, white, and azure blue;

And with a living-eye each plume was tailed,

Not like a peacock's or a bird's, but bright

And tender as a girl's with love's delight.

Then after small delay their flight they took,

And one by one soared upward to the sky,

Leaving Rinaldo sole beside the brook.

Full bitterly that Baron 'gan to cry,

For grief and dole so great his bosom shook

That still it seemed that he must surely die;

And in the end so fiercely raged his pain

That like a corpse he fell along the plain.

This is a fine painting in the style I have attempted to

characterize--the imagery of the Greek mythology taking a new and

natural form of fanciful romance. It is alien to anything in antique

poetry or sculpture. Yet the poet's imagination had been touched to

finest issues by the spirit of the Greeks before he wrote it. Incapable

of transplanting the flowers of antiquity like delicate exotics into the

conservatory of studied art, he acclimatized them to the air of thought

and feeling in which his own romantic spirit breathed. This

distinguishes him from Poliziano, whose stately poem, like the

palm-house in Kew Gardens, contains specimens of all the fairest species

gathered from the art of Greece and Rome. Even more exquisitely instinct

with the first April freshness of Renaissance feeling is another

episode, where Boiardo presents the old tale of Narcissus under a wholly

new and original aspect. By what strange freak of fancy has he converted

Echo into an Empress of the East and added the pathos of the fairy

Silvanella, whose petulance amid her hopeless love throws magic on the

well! We are far away indeed from the Pompeian frescoes here[592]:

Beyond the bridge there was a little close

All round the marble of that fountain fair;

And in the midst a sepulcher arose,

Not made by mortal art, however rare:

Above in golden letters ran the gloss,

Which said, "That soul is vain beyond compare

That falls a-doting on his own sweet eyes.

Here in the tomb the boy Narcissus lies."

Erewhile Narcissus was a damozel

So graceful, and of beauty so complete,

That no fair painted form adorable

Might with his perfect loveliness compete;

Yet not less fair than proud, as poets tell,

Seeing that arrogance and beauty meet

Most times, and thus full well with mickle woe

The laity of love is taught to know.

So that the Empress of the Orient

Doting upon Narcissus beyond measure,

And finding him on love so little bent,

So cruel and so careless of all pleasure,

Poor wretch, her dolorous days in weeping spent,

Craving from morn till eve of love the treasure,

Praying vain prayers of power from Heaven to turn

The very sun, and make him cease to burn.

Yet all these words she cast upon the wind;

For he, heart-hardened, would not hear her moan,

More than the asp, both deaf to charms and blind.

Wherefore by slow degrees more feeble grown,

Toward death she daily dwindling sank and pined;

But ere she died, to Love she cried alone,

Pouring sad sighs forth with her latest breath,

For vengeance for her undeserved death.

And this Love granted: for beside the stream

Of which I spoke, Narcissus happed to stray

While hunting, and perceived its silvery gleam;

Then having chased the deer a weary way,

He leaned to drink, and saw as though in dream,

His face, ne'er seen by him until that day;

And as he gazed, such madness round him floated,

That with fond love on his fair self he doted.

Whoever heard so strange a story told?

Justice of Love! how true, how strong it is!

Now he stands sighing by the fountain cold

For what he hath, yet never can be his!

He that was erst so hard as stone of old,

Whom ladies like a god on bended knees

Devoutly wooed, imploring him for grace,

Now dies of vain desire for his own face.

Poring upon his perfect countenance,

Which on this earth hath ne'er a paragon,

He pined in deep desire's extravagance,

Little by little, like a lily blown,

Or like a cropped rose; till, poor boy, the glance,

Of his black eyes, his cheek's vermilion,

His snowy whiteness, and his gleeful mirth

Death froze who freezes all things upon earth.

Then by sad misadventure through the glade

The fairy Silvanella took her way;

And on the spot where now this tomb is made,

Mid flowers the dead youth very beauteous lay:

She, marveling at his fair face, wept and stayed

In sore discomfiture and cold dismay;

Nor could she quit the place, but slowly came

To pine and waste for him with amorous flame.

Yea, though the boy was dead, for him she burned:

Pity and grief her gentle soul o'erspread:

Beside him on the grass she lay and mourned,

Kissing his clay-cold lips and mouth and head.

But at the last her madness she discerned,

To love a corpse wherefrom the soul had fled:

Yet knows she not, poor wretch, her doom to shun;

She fain would love not, yet she must love on.

When all the night and all the following day

Were wasted in the torrent of her woes,

A comely tomb of marble fair the Fay

Built by enchantment in the flowery close;

Nor ever from that station would she stray,

But wept and mourned; till worn by weary throes,

Beside the font within a little space

Like snow before the sun she pined apace.

Yet for relief, or that she might not rue

Alone the luckless doom which made her die,

E'en mid the pangs of love such charms she threw

Upon the font in her malignity,

That all who passing toward the water drew

And gazed thereon, perchance with listless eye,

Must in the depth see maiden faces fair,

Graceful and soul-inthralling mirrored there.

They in their brows have beauty so entire

That he who gazes cannot turn to fly,

But in the end must fade of mere desire,

And in that field lay himself down to die.

Now it so chanced that by misfortune dire

A king, wise, gentle, ardent, passed thereby,

Together with his true and loving dame;

Larbin and Calidora, such their name.

In these stanzas the old vain passion of Narcissus for his own beauty

lives again a new life of romantic poetry. That the enchantment of the

boy's fascination, prolonged through Silvanella's mourning for his

death, should linger for ever after in the font that was his tomb, is a

peculiarly modern touch of mysterious fancy. This part of the romance

has little in common with the classic tale of Salmacis; it is far more

fragile and refined. The Greeks did not carry their human sympathy with

nature, deep and loyal as indeed it was, so far into the border-land of

sensual and spiritual things. Haunted hills, like the Venusberg of

Tannhaeuser's legend; haunted waters, like Morgana's lake in Boiardo's

poem; the charmed rivers and fountains of naiads, where knights lose

their memory and are inclosed in crystal prison-caves; these are

essentially modern, the final flower and blossom of the medieval fancy,

unfolding stores of old mythology and half-forgotten emblems to the

light of day in art.[593] For their perfection it was needful that the

gods of Hellas should have died, and that the phantoms of old-world

divinities should linger in dreams and reveries about the shores of

young romance.

Boiardo's treatment of magic is complementary to his use of classical

mythology. He does not employ this important element of medieval art in

its simplicity, but adapts it to the nature of his own imagination,

adding, as it were, a new quality by the process of assimilation. Some

of his machinery belongs, indeed, to the poems of his predecessors, or

is framed in harmony with their spirit. The enchantment of Durlindana

and Baiardo; the invulnerability of Orlando, Ferraguto, and other

heroes; the wizardry of Malagise, Mambrino's helmet, Morgana's stag, the

horse Rabicano, Argalia's lance, Angelica's ring, and the countless

dragons and giants which Boiardo creates at pleasure, may be mentioned

in this category. But it is otherwise with the gardens of Falerina and

Dragontina, the sublacustrine domain of Fata Morgana, and the caverns of

the Naiades. These, however much they may have once belonged to medieval

tradition, have been alchemized by the imagination of the poet of the

Renaissance. They are glimpses into ideal fairyland, which Ariosto and

Tasso could but refine upon and vary in their famous gardens of Alcina

and Armida. Boiardo's use of the old tradition of Merlin's fountain, and

the other well of Cupid feigned by him beside it, might again be chosen

to illustrate his free poetic treatment of magical motives. When he

trespasses on these enchanted regions, then and then only does he

approach allegory. The quest of the tree guarded by Medusa in Tisbina's

story; the achievement by Orlando of Morgana's garden, where Penitence

and Fortune play their parts; and Rinaldo's encounter with Cupid in the

forest of Ardennes, have obviously allegorical elements. Yet the hidden

meaning is in each case less important than the adventure; and the same

may be said about the highly tragic symbolism of the monster in the

Rocca Crudele.[594] Boiardo had too vivid a sympathy with nature and

humanity to appreciate the mysteries which allured the Northern poets of

_Parzival_, the _Sangraal_, and the _Faery Queen_. When he lapses into

allegory, it is with him a sign of weakness. Akin, perhaps, to this

disregard for parable is the freedom of his spirit from all

superstition. The religion of his knights is bluff, simple, and sincere,

in no sense savoring of the cloister and the cowl. A high sense of truth

and personal honor, indifference to life for life's sake, profound

humility in danger, charity impelling men of power to succor the

oppressed and feeble, are the fruits of their piety. But of penance for

sins of the flesh, of ceremonial observances, of visions and fasts, of

ascetic discipline and wonder-working images, of all the ecclesiastical

trumpery with which the pseudo-Turpin is filled, and which contaminates

even the _Mort d'Arthur_ of our heroic Mallory, we read nothing.

In taking up the thread of Boiardo's narrative, Ariosto made use of all

his predecessor had invented. He adopted the machinery of the two

fountains, the lance of Argalia, Angelica's ring, Rabicane, and the

magic arts of Atalante. The characters of the _Innamorato_ reappear with

slight but subtle changes and with somewhat softened names in the

_Furioso_.[595] Ariosto, again, followed Boiardo closely in his peculiar

method of interweaving _novelle_ with the main narrative; of suspending

one story to resume another at a critical moment; of prefacing his

cantos with reflections, and of concluding them with a courteous

license.[596] Lastly, Ariosto is at great pains, while connecting his

poem with the _Innamorato_, to make it intelligible by giving short

abstracts at intervals of the previous action. Yet throughout this long

laborious work of continuation he preserves a studied silence respecting

the poet to whom he owed so much. Was this due to the desire of burying

Boiardo's fame beneath his own? Did he so contrive that the contemporary

repute of the _Innamorato_ should serve to float his _Furioso_ and then

be forgotten by posterity? If so, he calculated wisely; for this is

what almost immediately happened. Though the _Orlando Innamorato_ was

printed four times before 1513--once at Venice in 1486, once at

Scandiano in 1495, and again at Venice in 1506, 1511, and 1513--and

though it continued to be reprinted at Venice through the first half of

the sixteenth century, yet the sudden silence of the press after this

period shows that the _Furioso_ had eclipsed Boiardo's fame. Still the

integral connection between the two poems could not be overlooked; and

just about the period of Ariosto's death, Francesco Berni conceived the

notion of rewriting Boiardo's epic with the expressed intention of

correcting its diction and rendering it more equal in style to the

_Orlando Furioso_. This _rifacimento_ was published in 1541, after his

death. The mysterious circumstances that attended its publication, and

the nature of the changes introduced by Berni into the substance of

Boiardo's poem, will be touched upon when we arrive at this illustrious

writer of burlesque verse. It is enough to mention here that Berni's

version was printed twice between 1541 and 1545, and that then, like the

original, it fell into comparative oblivion till the end of the last

century. Meanwhile the second _rifacimento_ by Domenichi appeared in

1545; and though this new issue was a mere piece of impudent

book-making, it superseded Berni's masterpiece during the next two

hundred years. The critics of the last century rediscovered Berni's

_rifacimento_, and began to quote Boiardo's poem under his name,

treating the real author as an ignorant and uncouth writer of a

barbarous dialect. Thus one of the most original poets of the fifteenth

century, to whom Italy owes the form and substance of the _Furioso_,

has been thrust aside and covered with contempt, by a curious irony of

fortune, owing to the very qualities that ought to have insured his

immortality. Used by Ariosto as the ladder for ascending to Parnassus;

by Berni as an exercising ground for the display of style; by Domenichi

as the means of getting his name widely known, the _Orlando Innamorato_

served any purposes but that of its great author's fame. Panizzi, by

reprinting the original poem along with the _Orlando Furioso_, restored

Boiardo at length to his right place in Italian literature. From that

time forward it has been impossible to overlook his merits or to

underestimate Ariosto's obligations to so gifted and original a master.

FOOTNOTES:

[512] See p. 406.

[513] This poem relates the adventures of Ciriffo and Il Povero

Avveduto, bastards of two noble ladies, and gives the history of a

crusade of Louis against the Soldan of Egypt. It was published as the

work, as far as the first Book, of Luca Pulci, completed and restored

by Bernardo Giambullari. "Il Ciriffo Calvaneo, diviso in iv. Canti,

col primo Libro di Luca Pulci, ed il resto riformato per Bernardo

Giambullari" (Roma, Mazzocchio, 1514). Luigi Pulci claims a share in

it, if not the whole in the _Morgante_, xxviii. 118, 129.

[514] See _Lettere di Luigi Pulci a Lorenzo Il Magnifico_, Lucca,

Giusti, 1868. _Sonetti di Matteo Franco e Luigi Pulci_, 1759. The

sonnets are indescribably scurrilous, charged with Florentine slang,

and loaded with the filthiest abuse. The point of humor is that Franco

and Pulci undertook (it is said, for fun) to heap scandals on each

other's heads, ransacking the language of the people for its vilest

terms of invective. If they began in joke, they ended in earnest; and

Lorenzo de' Medici, who had a taste for buffoonery, enjoyed the

scuffle of his Court-fools. It was a combat of humanists transferred

from the arena of the schools to the market-place, where two men of

parts degraded themselves by assuming the character of coal-heavers.

[515] The poetical talents of the Pulci family were hereditary.

Cellini tells us of a Luigi of that name who improvised upon the

market-place of Florence.

[516] Turpin's Chronicle consists of thirty-two chapters, relating the

wars of Charlemain with the Spanish Moors, the treason of Ganelon, and

Roland's death in Roncesvalles. The pagan knight, Ferraguto, and the

Christian peers are mentioned by name, proving that at the date of its

compilation the whole Carolingian myth was tolerably perfect in the

popular imagination.

[517] It has been conjectured by M. Genin, editor of the _Chant de

Roland_, not without substantial grounds, that Gui de Bourgogne,

bishop of Vienne, afterwards Pope Calixtus II., was himself the

pseudo-Turpin.

[518] See _Chanson de Roland_, line 804, and compare _Morg. Magg._

xxvii. 79.

[519] See Ludlow's _Popular Epics of the Middle Ages_, vol. i. p. 412,

and M. Genin's Introduction to the _Chanson de Roland_, Paris, 1851.

[520] See Genin (_op. cit._ pp. xxix., xxx.) for the traces of the

Roland myth in the Pyrenees, at Rolandseck, in England, and at Verona;

also for gigantic statues in Germany called Rolands (_ib._ pp. xxi.

xxii.). At Spello, a little town of Umbria between Assisi and Foligno,

the people of the place showed me a dint in their ancient town wall,

about breast-high, which passes for a mark made by Orlando's knee.

There is learned tradition of a phallic monument named after Roland in

that place; but I could find no trace of it in local memory.

[521] The _Song of Roland_ does not give this portrait of

Charlemagne's dotage. But it is an integral part of the Italian

romances, a fixed point in all _rifacimenti_ of the pseudo-Turpin.

[522] Ludlow (_op. cit._ i. 358) translates the Basque Song of

Atta-bicar, which relates to some destruction of chivalrous forces by

the Pyrenean mountaineers.

[523] See Genin (_op. cit._ pp. xxv.-xxviii.).

[524] Introduction to Panizzi's edition of the _Orlando Innamorato_

and _Orlando Furioso_ (London, Pickering, 1830), vol. i. pp. 126-128.

[525] See Dante, _Inf._ xxxii. 61, v. 67, v. 128. Galeotto, Lancelot's

go-between with Guinevere, gave his name to a pimp in Italy, as

Pandarus to a pander in England. Boccaccio's _Novelliere_ was called

_Il Principe Galeotto_. Petrarch in the _Trionfi_ and Boccaccio in the

_Amoroso Visione_ make frequent references to the knights of the Round

Table. The latter in his _Corbaccio_ mentions the tale of Tristram as

a favorite book with idle women. The _Fiammetta_ might be quoted with

the same object of proving its wide-spread popularity. The lyrics of

Folgore da San Gemignano and other _trecentisti_ would furnish many

illustrative allusions.

[526] See above, p. 17.

[527] The _Reali di Francia_ sets forth this legendary genealogy at

great length, and stops short at the coronation of Charles in Rome and

the discovery of Roland. Considering the dryness of its

subject-matter, it is significant that this should have survived all

the prose romances of the fifteenh century. We may ascribe the fact

perhaps to the tenacious Italian devotion to the Imperial idea.

[528] _Orl. Inn. Rifac._ i. 18, 26. Niccolo da Padova in the

thirteenth century quoted Turpin as his authority for the history of

Charlemagne which he composed in Northern French. This proves the

antiquity of the custom. See Bartoli, _Storia della Lett. It._ vol.

ii. p. 44. To believe in Turpin was not, however, an article of faith.

Thus Bello in the _Mambriano_, c. viii.:

Ma poi che 'l non e articolo di fede,

Tenete quella parte che vi piace,

Che l'autor libramente vel concede.

[529] "Un Dio, uno Orlando, e una Roma." _Morg. Magg._ xxvii. 220.

Compare this with Arthur's "Flos regum Arthurus, rex quondam rexque

futurus."

[530] See _Propugnatore_ (Anni ii., iii., iv.). _La Spagna_ was itself

two popular compilations.

[531] This is only strictly true of Cantos xxiv., xxv., xxvi., xxvii.

The last Canto, in fact the whole poem after the execution of

Marsilio, is a dull historical epitome, brightened by Pulci's personal

explanations at the ending.

[532] It is called _Morgante Maggiore_ because the part relating to

him was published separately under the title of _Morgante_. This

character Pulci derived from the MS. poem called by Signor Rajna the

_Orlando_ to distinguish it. In the year 1500 we find one of the

Baglioni called Morgante which proves perhaps the popularity of this

giant.

[533] Canto xxv. 73-78. The locust-tree, according to the tradition of

the South, served Judas when he hanged himself. Northern fancy

reserved this honor for the elder, not perhaps without a poetic sense

of the outcast existence of the plant and its worthlessness for any

practical use. On the same locust-tree Marsilio was afterwards

suspended (c. xxvii. 267). The description of the blasted

pleasure-garden in the latter passage is also very striking. For the

translation of these passages see Appendix.

[534] xxvii. 5-7 and 47. Note in particular (translated in Appendix):

Rispose Baldovin: Se il padre mio

Ci ha qui condotti come traditore,

S'io posso oggi campar, pel nostro Iddio,

Con questa spada passerogli il core!

Ma traditore, Orlando, non son io,

Ch'io t'ho seguito con perfetto amore;

Non mi potresti dir maggiore ingiuria!

Poi si straccio la vesta con gran furia,

E disse: Io tornero nella battaglia,

Poi che tu m'hai per traditore scorto;

Io non son traditor, se Dio mi vaglia,

Non mi vedrai piu oggi se non morto!

E inverso l'oste de' Pagan si scaglia,

Dicendo sempre: Tu m'hai fatto torto!

Orlando si pentea d'aver cio detto

Che disperato vide il giovinetto.

[535] Of all the Paladins only Orlando is uniformly courteous to

Charlemagne. When Rinaldo dethrones the Emperor and flies to his

cousin (c. xi. 114), Orlando makes him return to his obedience (_ib._

127). See, too, c. xxv. 100:

Or oltre in Roncisvalle Orlando va,

Per obbedir, com'e' fe' sempre, Carlo.

[536] xxvi. 126:

Rinaldo, quando e' fu nella battaglia,

Gli parve esser in ciel tra' cherubini

Tra suoni e canti.

[537] Canto xxvi. 24-39. These two touches, out of many that are

noble, might be chosen:

Stasera in paradiso cenerete;

Come disse quel Greco anticamente

Lieto a' suoi gia, ma disse--Nello inferno:

and

La morte e da temere, o la partita,

Quando l'anima e 'l corpo muore insieme;

Ma se da cosa finita a infinita

Si va qui in ciel fra tante diademe,

Questo e cambiar la vita a miglior vita.

[538] This pervasive doubt finds its noblest and deepest expression in

some lines spoken by Orlando just before engaging in the fight at

Roncesvalles (xxvi. 31):

Tutte cose mortal vanno ad un segno;

Mentre l'una sormonta, un'altra cade:

Cosi fia forse di Cristianitade.

This is said not from the hero's but the author's point of view.

Pomponazzi afterwards gave philosophical utterance to the same

disbelief in the permanence of Christianity.

[539] Canto xxvii. 172.

[540] _Ibid._ 196.

[541] _Ibid._ 198.

[542] Canto xxvi. 91.

[543] Canto xxvi. 89.

[544] Canto xxv. 217, 218.

[545] Canto xviii. 114, _et seq._

[546] I have placed in the Appendix a rough plaster cast rather than a

true copy of Margutte's admirable comic autobiography. My stanzas

cannot pretend to exactitude of rendering or interpretation. The

_Morgante_ has hitherto been very imperfectly edited; and there are

many passages in this speech which would, I believe, puzzle a good

Florentine scholar, and which, it is probable, I have misread.

[547] Canto xix. 148.

[548] Cantos xxv. xxvi.

[549] xxv. 119. This distinction between the fallen angels and the

_spiriti folletti_ deserves to be noticed. The latter were light and

tricksy spirits, on whom not even a magician could depend. Marsilio

sent two of them in a magic mirror to Charlemagne (xxv. 92), and

Astarotte warned Malagigi expressly against their vanity (xxv. 160,

161). Fairies, _feux follets_, and the lying spirits of modern

spiritualists seem to be of this family. Translations from Astarotte's

dialogue will be found in the Appendix.

[550] xxv. 159, 208.

[551] xxv. 161; xxvi. 83.

[552] Canto xxv. 141-158; translation in Appendix.

[553] _Ibid._ 233.

[554] _Ibid._ 284.

[555] _Doctor Faustus_, act i. Scene with Mephistophilis in a

Franciscan's habit.

[556] The scene in the banquet-hall at Saragossa (xxv. 292-305) is

very similar to some of the burlesque scenes in _Doctor Faustus_.

[557] xxv. 228-231. Astarotte's discourses upon theology and physical

geography are so learned that this part of the _Morgante_ was by Tasso

ascribed to Ficino. It is not improbable that Pulci derived some of

the ideas from Ficino, but the style is entirely his own. The sonnets

he exchanged with Franco prove, moreover, that he was familiar with

the treatment of grave themes in a burlesque style. In acknowledging

the help of Poliziano he is quite frank (xxv. 115-117, 169; xxviii.

138-149). What that help exactly was, we do not know. But there is

nothing whatever to justify the tradition that Poliziano was the real

author of the _Morgante_. Probably he directed Pulci's reading; and I

think it not impossible, judging by one line in Canto xxv. (stanza

115, line 4), that he directed Pulci's attention to the second of the

two poems out of which the narrative was wrought. If we were to

ascribe all the passages in the _Morgante_ that display curious

knowledge to Pulci's friends, we might claim the discourse on the

antipodes for Toscanelli and the debates on the angelic nature for

Palmieri. Such criticism is, however, far-fetched and laboriously

hypothetical. Pulci lived in an intellectual atmosphere highly charged

with speculation of all kinds, and his poem reflected the opinion of

his age. His own methods of composition and the relation in which he

stood to other poets of the age are explained in two passages of the

_Morgante_ (xxv. 117, xxviii. 138-149), where he disclaims all share

of humanistic erudition, and expresses his indifference to the solemn

academies of the learned. See translation in Appendix.

[558] xxvi. 82-88. We may specially note these phrases:

Astarotte, e' mi duole

Il tuo partir, quanto fussi fratello;

E nell'inferno ti credo che sia

Gentilezza, amicizia e cortesia.

* * * * *

Che di servirti non mi fia fatica;

E basta solo Astarotte tu dica,

Ed io ti sentiro sin dello inferno.

[559] Book II. canto viii. 1. All references will be made to Panizzi's

edition of the _Orlando Innamorato_, London, Pickering, 1830.

[560] _Sonetti e Canzone [sic] del poeta clarissimo Matteo Maria

Boiardo Conte di Scandiano_, Milano, 1845. The descriptions of natural

beauty, especially of daybreak and the morning star, of dewy meadows,

and of flowers, in which these lyrics abound, are very charming and at

all points worthy of the fresh delightful inspiration of Boiardo's

epic verse. Nor are they deficient in metrical subtlety; notice

especially the intricate rhyming structure of a long Canto, pp. 44-49.

[561] See above, p. 15.

[562] See the exordium to the second Book, where it appears that the

gentle poet caressed a vain hope that the peace of Italy in the second

half of the fifteenth century was destined to revive chivalry.

[563] See the opening of Book II. Canto xviii. where Boiardo compares

the Courts of Arthur and of Charlemagne.

[564] The acute and learned critic Pio Rajna, whose two massive works

of scholarlike research, _I Reali di Francia_ (Bologna, 1872), and _Le

Fonti dell'Orlando Furioso_ (Firenze, 1876), have thrown a flood of

light upon Chivalrous Romance literature in Italy, is at pains to

prove that the _Orlando Innamorato_ contains a vein of conscious

humor. See _Le Fonti_, etc., pp. 24-27. I agree with him that Boiardo

treated his subject playfully. But it must be remembered that he was

far from wishing to indulge a secret sarcasm like Ariosto, or to make

open fun of chivalry like Fortiguerra.

[565]

Mentre che io canto, o Dio redentore,

Vedo l'Italia tutta a fiamma e foco,

Per questi Galli, che con gran valore

Vengon, per disertar non so che loco.

Compare II. xxxi. 50; III. i. 2.

[566] Orlando was not handsome (II. iii. 63):

avea folte le ciglia,

E l'un de gli occhi alquanto stralunava.

[567] See his prayer, II. xxix. 36, 37.

[568] See the description of him in the tournament (I. ii. 63, iii.

4), when he saves the honor of Christendom to the surprise of

everybody including himself. Again (I. vii. 45-65), when he defies and

overthrows Gradasso, and liberates Charles from prison. The irony of

both situations reveals a master's hand.

[569] For instance, when he attacks Argalia with his sword, contrary

to stipulation, after being unhorsed by him (I. i. 71-73). The fury of

Ferraguto in this scene is one of Boiardo's most brilliant episodes.

[570] His epithets are always _fiorito_, _fior di cortesia_, _di

franchezza fiore_, etc. For the effect of his beauty, see II. xxi. 49,

50. The education of Ruggiero by Atalante was probably suggested to

Boiardo by the tale of Cheiron and Achilles. See II. i. 74, 75.

[571] See II. i. 56, for Rodamonte's first appearance; for his

atheism, II. iii. 22:

Che sol il mio buon brando e l'armatura

E la mazza, ch'io porto, e 'l destrier mio

E l'animo, ch'io ho, sono il mio Dio.

[572] II. iii. 40.

[573] In Bello's _Mambriano_, for instance, we have a very lively

picture of the amorous and vain Astolfo. Pulci supplies us with even a

more impressive Orlando than Boiardo's hero, while his Amazonian

heroines, Meridiana and Antea, are at least rough sketches for

Marfisa. It was Boiardo's merit to have grasped these characters and

drawn them with a fullness of minute detail that enhances their

vitality.

[574] Her arts and their success are splendidly set forth, I. xxv.

xxvi.

[575] In proem to II. xii., Boiardo makes an excuse, imitated by

Ariosto to his lady for this bad treatment of women.

[576] Leodilla's story is found in I. xxi. xxii. xxiv. 14-17, 44.

[577] I. iii. 47-50.

[578] I. xxii. 24-27; I. xix. 60-65.

[579] I. xvii. 21, 22.

[580] II. vii. 50.

[581] II. xii. 14, _et seq._

[582] I. xvi. 36-44; xviii. 39-47; xix. 15, 16.

[583] I. v. 7-12; xix. 47; ix. 55-57.

[584] I. xviii. 39-47.

[585] I. xxv. 13, 14.

[586] I. xxvii. 15-22; xxviii. 4-11.

[587] II. vi. 7-15, 28-42; II. iv. 24-39; II. xiii. 20-23; I. xxv. 38.

[588] I. xxiii. 38, 47; xxvi. 28.

[589] I. xxiii. 6.

[590] Burne Jones, in his _Pan and Syrinx_, offers a parallel.

[591] II. xv. 43 _et seq._

[592] II. xvii. 49 _et seq._

[593] See II. xxxi. xlv.; III. i. ii.

[594] See I. viii. 56 _et seq._ The whole tale of Grifone and Marchino

in that Canto is horrible.

[595] On Ariosto's treatment of Boiardo's characters there is much

excellent criticism in Pio Rajna's _Le Fonti dell'Orlando Furioso_

(Firenze, Sansoni, 1876), pp. 43-53.

[596] I do not mean that other poets--Pulci and Bello, for

example--had not interwoven episodical _novelle_. The latter's poem of

_Mambriano_ owes all its interest to the episodes, and many of its

introductory reflections are fair specimens of the discursive style.

But the peculiarity of Boiardo, as followed by Ariosto, consisted in

the art of subordinating these subsidiary motives to the main design.

Neither Pulci nor Bello showed any true sense of poetical unity. It

may here be parenthetically remarked that Francesco Bello, a native of

Ferrara, called Il Cieco because of his blindness, recited his

_Mambriano_ at the Mantuan Court of the Gonzagas. It was not printed

till after his death in 1509. This poem consists of a series of tales,

loosely stitched together, each canto containing just enough to

stimulate the attention of an idle audience. Rinaldo, Astolfo, and

Mambriano, king of Bithynia, play prominent parts in the action.