PART II

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1888

-v-

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND PART.

APPENDICES.

-1-

CHAPTER IX.

THE ORLANDO FURIOSO.

Orlando Furioso and Divina Commedia—Ariosto expresses the Renaissance as Dante the Middle Ages—Definition of Romantic, Heroic, Burlesque, Heroic-comic, and Satiric Poems—Ariosto's Bias toward Romance—Sense of Beauty in the Cinque Cento—Choice of Boiardo's unfinished Theme—The Propriety of this Choice—Ariosto's Irony and Humor—The Subject of the Furioso—Siege of Paris—Orlando's Madness—Loves of Ruggiero and Bradamante—Flattery of the House of Este—The World of Chivalry—Ariosto's Delight in the Creatures of his Fancy—Close Structure of the Poem—Exaggeration of Motives—Power of Picture-painting—Faculty of Vision—Minute Description—Rhetorical Amplification—Rapidity of Movement—Solidity—Nicety of Ethical Analysis—The Introductions to the Cantos—Episodes and Novelle—Imitations of the Classics—Power of Appropriation and Transmutation—Irony—Astolfo's Journey to the Moon—Ariosto's Portrait—S. Michael in the Monastery—The Cave of Sleep—Humor—Pathos and Sublimity—Olimpia and Bireno—Conception of Female

Character—The Heroines—Passion and Love—Ariosto's Morality—His Style—The Epithet of Divine—Exquisite Finish—Ariosto and Tasso—Little Landscape-Painting—Similes—Realism—Adaptation of Homeric Images—Ariosto's Relation to his Age.

Ariosto's Satires make us know the man intus et in cute—to the very core. The lyrics have a breadth and amplitude of style that mark no common master of the poet's craft. Yet neither the Satires nor the Lyrics reveal the author of the Furioso. The artist in Ariosto was greater than the man; and the Furioso, conceived and executed with no reference to the poet's personal experience, enthroned him as the Orpheus of-2- his age. The Orlando Furioso gave full and final expression to the cinque cento, just as the Divina Commedia uttered the last word of the middle ages. The two supreme Italian singers stood in the same relation to their several epochs. Dante immortalized medieval thoughts and aspirations at the moment when they were already losing their reality for the Italian people. Separated from him by a short interval of time, came Petrarch, who substituted the art of poetry for the prophetic inspiration; and while Petrarch was yet singing, Boccaccio anticipated in his multifarious literature the age of the Renaissance. Then the evolution of Italian literature

was interrupted by the classical revival; and when Ariosto appeared, it was his duty to close the epoch which Petrarch had inaugurated and Boccaccio had determined, by a poem investing Boccaccio's world, the sensuous world of the Renaissance, with the refined artistic form of Petrarch. This he accomplished. But even while he was at work, Italy underwent those political and mental changes, in the wars of invasion, in the sack of Rome, in the siege of Florence, in the Spanish occupation, in the reconstruction of the Papacy beneath the pressure of Luther's schism, which ended the Renaissance and opened a new age with Tasso for its poet. Those, therefore, who would comprehend the spirit of Italy upon the point of transition from the middle ages, must study the Divine Comedy. Those who would contemplate the genius of the Renaissance, consummated and conscious of its aim, upon the very verge of transmutation and eventual ruin, must turn to the Orlando Furioso. It seems to be a law of intellectual development that-3- the highest works of art can only be achieved when the forces

which produced them are already doomed and in the act of disappearance.[1]

Italian critics have classified their narrative poems, of which the name is legion, into Romantic, Heroic, Burlesque, Heroic-comic, and Satiric.[2] The romantic poet is one who having formed a purely imaginary world, deals with the figments of his fancy as though they were realities. His object is to astonish, fascinate, amuse and interest his readers. Nothing comes amiss to him, whether the nature of the material be comic or tragic, pathetic or satiric, miraculous or commonplace, impossible or natural, so long as it contributes grace and charm to the picture of adventurous existence he desires to paint. His aim is not instruction; nor does he seek to promote laughter. Putting all serious purposes aside, he creates a wonderland wherein the actions and passions of mankind shall be displayed, with truth to nature, under the strongly colored light of the artistic fantasy. The burlesque poet enters the same enchanted region; but he deliberately degrades it below the level of common life, parodies the fanciful extravagances of romance, and seeks to raise a laugh at the expense of

its most delicate illusions. The heroic poet has nothing to do-4- with pure romance and pleasurable fiction. He deals with the truths of history, resolving to embellish them by art, to extract lessons of utility, to magnify the virtues and the valor of the noblest men, and to inflame his audience with the fire of lofty aspiration. His object, unlike that of the romancer, is essentially serious. He is less anxious to produce a work of pure beauty than to raise a monument of ideal and moralized sublimity. The heroic-comic poet adopts the tone, style, conduct and machinery of the heroic manner; but he employs his art on some trivial or absurd subject, making his ridicule of baseness and pettiness the more pungent by the mock-gravity of his treatment. Unlike the burlesque writer, he does not aim at mere scurrility. There is always method in his buffoonery, and a satiric purpose in his parody. The satirist strikes more directly; he either attacks manners, customs, institutions, and persons without disguise, or he does so under a thin veil of parable. He differs from the heroic-comic poet

chiefly in this, that he does not array himself in the epical panoply. Within the range of Italian literature we find ready examples of these several styles. Boiardo and Ariosto are romantic poets. The Morgante Maggiore is a romance with considerable elements of burlesque and satire mingled.[3] Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata is a fair specimen of the heroic, and Tassoni's Secchia Rapita of the heroic-comic species. The Ricciardetto of Fortiguerri and Folengo's Orlandino represent burlesque, while Casti's Animali Parlanti is a narrative satire.

It may seem at first sight strange that Ariosto-5- should have preferred the romantic to the heroic style of poetry, and that the epic of the Italian Renaissance should be a pure play of the fancy. Yet this was no less natural to the man revealed in his Epistles, than to the spirit of his century as we have learned to know it. The passions and convictions that give force to patriotism, to religion, and to morality, were extinct in Italy; nor was Ariosto an exception to the general temper of his age. Yet the heroic style demands some spiritual motive analogous to the enthusiasm for Rome which inspired Virgil, or to the faith that touched the lips of Milton with coals from the altar. An indolent and tranquil epicurean, indifferent to the world around him, desiring nothing better than a life among his books, with leisure for his loves and day-dreams, had not the fiber of a true heroic poet; and where in Italy could Ariosto have found a proper theme? Before he settled to the great work of his life, he began a poem in terza rima on the glories of the House of Este. That was

meant to be heroic; but the fragment which remains, proves how frigid, how all unsuited to his genius and his times, this insincere and literary epic would have been.[4] Italy offered elements of greatness only to a prophet or a satirist. She found her prophet in Michelangelo. But what remained for a poet like Ariosto, without Dante's anger or Swift's indignation, without the humor of Cervantes or the fire of Juvenal, without Tasso's piety or Shakspere's England, yet equal as an artist to the greatest singers whom the world has known? The answer to this question is not far to seek. What really survived of noble and enthu-6-siastic in the cinque cento was the sense of beauty, the adoration of form, the worship of art. The supreme artist of his age obeyed a right instinct when he undertook a work which required no sublime motive, and which left him free for the production of a masterpiece of beauty. In this sphere the defects of his nature were not felt, and he became the mouthpiece of his age in all that still remained of greatness to his country.

In like manner we can explain to ourselves Ariosto's choice of Boiardo's unfinished theme. He was not a poet with something irresistible to say, but an artist seeking a fit theater for the exercise of his omnipotent skill. He did not feel impelled to create, but to embellish. Boiardo had constructed a vast hall in the style of the Renaissance, when it first usurped on Gothic; he had sketched a series of frescoes for the adornment of its walls and roof, and then had died, leaving his work incomplete. To enrich the remaining panels with pictures conceived in the same spirit, but executed in a freer and a grander manner, to adorn them with all that the most wealthy and fertile fancy could conceive, and to bestow upon them perfect finish, was a task for which Ariosto was eminently suited. Nor did he vary from the practice of the greatest masters in the other arts, who willingly lent their own genius to the continuation of designs begun by predecessors. Few craftsmen of the Renaissance thought as much of the purpose of their work or of its main motive as of execution in

detail and richness of effect. They lacked the classic sense of unity, the medieval sincerity and spontaneity of inspiration. Therefore Ariosto was contented to receive from Boiardo a theme-7- he could embroider and make beautiful, with full employment of his rare inventive gifts upon a multitude of episodical inventions. It is vain to regret that a poet of his caliber should not have bent his faculties to the task of a truly original epic—to the re-awakening of prostrate Italy, to the scourging of her feebleness and folly, or even to the celebration of her former glories. Had he done either of these things, his poem would not have been so truly national, and we should have lacked the final product of a most brilliant though defective period of civilization.

Ariosto's own temperament and the conditions of his age alike condemned him to the completion of a romance longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey together, which has for its sole serious aim, if serious aim it has of any sort, the glorification of an obscure family, and which, while it abounds in pathos, wisdom, wit, and poetry of dazzling brilliance, may at the same time be accused of levity, adulation, and licentiousness. To arraign Ariosto for these faults is tantamount to arraigning his whole century and nation. The greatest artist of the sixteenth century found no task worthier of his genius than to flatter the House of Este with false pedigrees and fulsome praises. He had no faith that could prevent him from laughing at all things human and divine, not indeed, with the Titanic play of Aristophanes, whose merriment is but the obverse of profound seriousness, but with the indulgent nonchalance of an epicurean. No sentiment of sublimity raised him above the grosser atmosphere in which love is tainted with lust, luxurious images are sought for their

own sake,-8- and passion dwindles in the languor of voluptuousness. The decay of liberty, the relaxation of morals and the corruption of the Church had brought the Italians to this point, that their representative Renaissance poem is stained with flattery, contaminated with licentiousness, enfeebled with levity. Poetic beauty of the highest order it cannot claim. That implies more earnestness of purpose and an ideal of sublimer purity. Still, though the Furioso misses the supreme beauty of the Iliad, the Antigone and the Paradise Lost, it has in superfluity that secondary beauty which expressed itself less perfectly in Italian painting. In one respect it stands almost alone. The form reveals no inequalities or flaws. This artist's hand has never for a moment lost its cunning; this Homer never nods.

Pulci approached the romance of Charlemagne from a bourgeois point of view. He felt no sincere sympathy with the knightly or the religious sentiment of his originals. Boiardo treated similar material in a chivalrous spirit. The novelty of his poem consisted in the fusion of the Carolingian and Arthurian Cycles; for while he handled an episode of the former group, he felt sincere admiration for errant knighthood as figured in the tales of Lancelot and Tristram. Throughout the Orlando Innamorato we trace the vivid influence of feudal ideals. Ariosto differed in his attitude from both of his predecessors. The irony that gives a special quality to his romance, is equally removed from the humor of Pulci and the frank enthusiasm of Boiardo. Ariosto was neither the citizen of a free burgh playing with the legends of a bygone-9- age, nor yet the highborn noble in whose eyes the adventures of Orlando and his comrades formed a picture of existence as it ought to be. He was a courtier and a man of letters, and his poem is a masterpiece of courtly and literary art. Boiardo

never flattered the princes of the House of Este. Ariosto took every occasion to interweave their panegyric with his verse. For Boiardo the days of chivalry were a glorious irrecoverable golden age. Ariosto contemplated this mythical past less with the regret of a man who had fallen upon worse days, than with the satisfaction of an artist who perceives the rare opportunities for poetic handling it afforded. He does not really believe in chivalry; where Boiardo is in earnest, Ariosto jests. It is not that, like Cervantes, he sought to satirize the absurdities of romance, or that he set himself, like Folengo, to burlesque the poems of his predecessors; but his philosophy inclined him to watch the doings of humanity with a genial half-smile, an all-pervasive irony that had no sting in it. A poet who stands thus aside and contemplates the comedy of the world with the dry light of a kindly and indulgent intellect, could not treat the tales of Paladins and giants seriously. He uses them as the machinery of a great work on

human life, painting mankind, not as he thinks it ought to be, but as he finds it. This treatment of romance from the standpoint of good sense and quiet humor produces an apparent discrepancy between his practical knowledge of the world and his fanciful extravagance. In the artistic harmony effected by Ariosto between these opposite elements lies the secret of his irony. His worldly wisdom has the solidity of prose-10- and embraces every circumstance of life. The creatures of his imagination belong to fairyland and exceed the wildest dreams in waywardness. He smiles to see them play their pranks; yet he never loses sight of reality, and moves his puppets by impulses and passions worthy of real men and women. Having granted the romantic elements of wonder and exaggeration for a basis, we find the superstructure to be natural. Never was sagacity of insight combined more perfectly with exuberance of fancy and a joyous lightheartedness than in this poem. Nowhere else have sound lessons in worldly wisdom been conveyed upon a stage of so much palpable impossibility.

We may here ask what is the main subject of the Orlando Furioso. The poem has three chief sources of interest—the siege of Paris and the final rout of the Saracen army, the insanity of Orlando, and the loves of Ruggiero and Bradamante. The first serves merely as a groundwork for embroidery, a background for relieving more attractive incidents. Orlando's madness, though it gives its name to the romance, is subordinate to the principal action. It forms a proper development of the situation in the Orlando Innamorato; and Ariosto intends it to be important, because he frequently laments that the Paladin's absence from the field injured the cause of Christendom. But Charlemagne, by help of Rinaldo, Bradamante, and Marfisa, conquers without Orlando's aid. Thus the hero's insanity is only operative in neutralizing an influence that was not needed; and when he regains his wits, he performs no critical prodigies of valor. Finding the Saracens expelled from France, and Charlemagne at-11- peace, Orlando fights a duel with a crownless king upon a desert island more for show than for real

service. Far different is the remaining motive of the poem. If the Furioso can be said to have constructive unity, the central subject is the love and marriage of Ruggiero. Ariosto found this solution of the plot foreshadowed in the Innamorato. The pomp and ceremony with which the fourth book opens, the value attached to the co-operation of Ruggiero in the war with Charlemagne, and the romantic beginning of his love for Bradamante, make it clear that Boiardo would have crowned his poem, as Ariosto has done, with the union of the ancestors of Casa d'Este. Flattery, moreover, was Ariosto's serious purpose. Consequently, the love of Ruggiero and Bradamante, whose protracted disappointments furnished the occasion for renewed prophecies and promises of future glory for their descendants, formed the artistic center of his romance. The growing importance of all that concerns this pair of characters, the accumulation of difficulties which interfere with their union, and the final honor reserved for Ruggiero of killing the dreadful Rodomonte in single combat, are so disposed

and graduated as to make the marriage of the august couple the right and natural climax to an epic of 100,000 lines. The fascinations of Angelica, the achievements of Orlando and Rinaldo, the barbaric chivalry of Rodomonte and Marfisa, even the shock of Christian and Pagan armies, sink into insignificance before the interest that environs Bradamante toward the poem's ending. Victorious art was needed for the achievement of this success. Like a pyramid, upon-12- the top of which a sculptor places a gilded statue, up grows this voluminous romance, covering acres of the plain at first, but narrowing to a point whereon the poet sets his heroes of the House of Este.[5]

Though the marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante forms the consummation of the Furioso, it would show want of sympathy with Ariosto's intention to imagine that he wrote his poem for this incident alone. The opening lines of the first canto are explicit:

"The ladies, the knights, the feats of arms, the loves, the courtesies, the bold adventures are my theme." In one word, his purpose was to paint the world of chivalry. Agramante's expedition into France gives him the time; Orlando's madness is an episode; Ruggiero's marriage forms a fitting climax. But his-13- true subject-matter is chivalry—the dream-world of love, honor, magic, marvel, courtesy, adventure, that afforded to his fancy scope for its most brilliant imaginings. In Ariosto's age chivalry was a thing of the past, even among the nations of the North. It is true that Francis I. was kneeling on the battlefield before Bayard to receive the honor of knighthood in the names of Oliver and Roland. It is true that Henry VIII. was challenging his Most Christian cousin to a kingly settlement of their disputed claims in a pitched field. But the spirit of the times was not in these picturesque incidents. Charles V., who incarnated modern diplomacy, dynastic despotism, and autocratic statecraft, was deciding the destinies of Europe. Gunpowder had