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ARIOSTO, SHAKESPEARE AND CORNEILLE

BY

BENEDETTO CROCE

TRANSLATED BY

DOUGLAS AINSLIE

RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.I
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN, LTD.

1920

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

Evviva L'Italia! Italy, Britain's ancient friend and loyal ally, has
been an important factor both in winning the war and in bringing it to
an earlier conclusion. The War! That greatest practical effort that
the world has ever made is now over and we must all work to make it a
better place for all to live in.

Now at the hands of her philosopher-critic, Italy offers us a first
effort at reconstruction of our world-view with this masterly treatise
on the greatest poet of the English-speaking world, so original and so
profound that it will serve as guide to generations yet unborn. And it
will not be only the critics of Shakespeare who should benefit by this
treatise, but all critics and lovers of poetry--including prose--who
go beyond the passive stage of mere admiration. The essays on Ariosto
and Corneille are also unique and the three together should inaugurate
everywhere a new era in literary criticism.

These are the first of Benedetto Croce's literary criticisms to see the
light in English.

They are profound and suggestive, because based upon theory, the
_Theory of Aesthetic,_ with which some readers will be acquainted in
the original, others in the version by the present translator. These
will not need to be told that Croce's theory of the independence and
autonomy of the aesthetic fact, which is intuition-expression, and of
the essentially lyrical character of all art, is the only one that
completely and satisfactorily explains the problem of poetry and the
fine arts.

But this is not the place for philosophical discussion, although
it is important to stress the point, that all criticism is based
upon philosophy, and that therefore if the philosophy upon which it
is based is unsound, the criticism suffers accordingly. Croce has
elsewhere shown that the shortcomings of such critics as Sainte-Beuve,
Taine, Lemaître and Brunetière are due to incorrect or insufficient
philosophical knowledge and a similar criterion can be applied at home
with equal truth.

The translator will be satisfied if the present version receives equal
praise from the author with that accorded to the four translations of
the Philosophy into English, which Croce has often declared to come
more near to his spirit than those in any other language--and he has
been translated into all the great European languages--the _Aesthetic_
even into Japanese. The object adhered to in this translation has been
as close a cleaving as possible to the original, while preserving a
completely idiomatic style and remaining free from all pedantry.

A translation should not in any case be taken as a pouring from the
golden into the silver vessel, as used to be erroneously supposed, for
Croce has proved that in so far as the translator rethinks the original
he is himself a creator. This explains why so many writers have been
addicted to translation--in English we have Pope, Fitzgerald, Rossetti,
to name but three of many--and the author of the Philosophy of the
Spirit, Croce himself, has published a splendid Italian version of
Hegel's _Encyclopaedia of the Philosophic Sciences._

DOUGLAS AINSLIE.

    The Athenaeum,
    Pall Mall, London,
    October, 1920.

CONTENTS

PART I

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO

       I   A CRITICAL PROBLEM
      II   THE LIFE OF THE AFFECTIONS IN ARIOSTO, AND THE HEART OF HIS HEART
     III   THE HIGHEST LOVE: HARMONY
      IV   THE MATERIAL FOR THE HARMONY
       V   THE REALISATION OF HARMONY
      VI   HISTORICAL DISASSOCIATIONS

PART II

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

     VII   THE PRACTICAL PERSONALITY AND THE POETICAL PERSONALITY
    VIII   SHAKESPEAREAN SENTIMENT
      IX   MOTIVES AND DEVELOPMENT OF SHAKESPEARE'S POETRY
       X   THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE
      XI   SHAKESPEAREAN CRITICISM
     XII   SHAKESPEARE AND OURSELVES

PART III

PIERRE CORNEILLE

    XIII   CRITICISM OF THE CRITICISM
     XIV   THE IDEAL OF CORNEILLE
      XV   THE MECHANISM OF THE CORNELIAN TRAGEDY
     XVI   THE POETRY OF CORNEILLE

INDEX

PART I

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO

CHAPTER I

A CRITICAL PROBLEM[1]

The fortune of the _Orlando Furioso_ may be compared to that of a
graceful, smiling woman, whom all look upon with pleasure, without
experiencing any intellectual embarrassment or perplexity, since it
suffices to have eyes and to direct them to the pleasing object, in
order to admire. Crystal clear as is the poem, polished in every
particular, easily to be understood by whomsoever possesses general
culture, it has never presented serious difficulties of interpretation,
and for that reason has not needed the industry of the commentators,
and has not been injured by their quarrelsome subtleties; nor has it
been subject, more than to a very slight extent, to the intermittences
from which other notable poetical works have suffered, owing to the
varying conditions of culture at different times. Great men and
ordinary readers have been in as complete agreement about it, as, for
instance, about the beauty, let us say, of a Madame Récamier; and
the list of great men, who have experienced its fascination, goes
from Machiavelli and the Galilei, to Voltaire and to Goethe, without
mentioning names more near to our own time.

Yet, however unanimous, simple and unrestrainable be the aesthetic
approbation accorded to the poem of Ariosto, the critical judgments
delivered upon it are just as discordant, complicated and laboured;
and indeed this is one of those cases where the difference of the two
spiritual moments, intuitive or aesthetic, the apprehension or tasting
of the work of art, and intellective, the critical and historical
judgment,--a difference wrongly disputed from one point of view by
sensationalists and from another by intellectualists,--stands out so
clearly as to seem to be almost spatially divided, so that one can
touch it with one's hand. Anyone can easily read and live again the
octaves of Ariosto, caressing them with voice and imagination, as
though passionately in love; but to say whence comes that particular
form of enchantment, to determine that is to say, the character of
the inspiration that moved Ariosto, his dominant poetical motive,
the peculiar effect which became poetry in him, is a very different
undertaking and one of no small difficulty.

The question has tormented the critics from the time when literary
and historical criticism acquired individual prominence and energy,
that is to say at the origin of romantic aestheticism, when works of
art were no longer examined in parts separated from the whole, or in
their external outline, but in the spirit that animated them. Yet we
must not think that earlier times were without all suspicion of this,
for an uncertain suggestion of it is to be found even in the eccentric
enquiries, as to whether the _Furioso_ be a moral poem or not, or
whether it should be looked upon as serious or playful. But intellects
such as Schiller and Goethe, Humboldt and Schelling, Hegel, Ranke,
Gioberti, Quinet and De Sanctis, treated or touched upon it in the last
century, and very many others during and after their times, and the
theme has again been taken up with renewed keenness, in dissertations,
memoirs and articles, some of them foreign, but mostly Italian.

Many of the problems or formulas of problems, which one at one time
critically discussed have been allowed to disappear, like cast-off
clothes as the results of the new conception of art: that is to say,
not only those we have mentioned, as to whether the _Furioso_ were or
were not an epic, whether it were serious or comic, but also a throng
of other problems, such as whether it possessed unity of action, a
protagonist or hero, whether its episodes were linked to the action,
whether it maintained the dignity of history, whether it afforded
an allegory, and if so, of what sort, whether it obeyed the laws of
modesty and morality, or followed good examples, whether it could be
credited with invention, and if so in what measure, whether it were
finer than the _Gerusalemme_ or less fine, and as to what it was finer
or less fine; and so on. All these problems have become obsolete,
because they have been solved in the only suitable way, that is to
say, they have been shown to be fallacious in their theoretical terms;
and to say that they are obsolete does not mean that there have not
been some, both in the nineteenth century and at the present time,
who have set to work to solve them, and have arrived at unfortunate
conclusions in different ways. The unity of action of the _Furioso_
has also been investigated and determined (by Panizzi, for example,
and by Carducci); its immorality has also been blamed (by Cantù, for
instance); the book of the debts of Ariosto to his predecessors has
been re-opened and charged with so very many figures on the debit side
that the final balance-sheet of credit and debit presents an enormous
deficit (Rajna); the comparison with examples from prototypes under
the name of _"Evolutionary History of Romantic Chivalry,"_ in which
the _Furioso,_ according to some, does not represent the summit, but
rather a deviation and decadence from the ideal prototype (Rajna
again); according to others, the _Furioso_ gave final and perfect form
to "The French Epic of Germanic Heroes" (Morf); allegory, contained in
a moral judgment as to Italian life at the time of the Renaissance,
lost in its pursuit of love, like the Christian and Saracen knights in
their pursuit of Angelica (Canello). But whether in their primitive or
in their more modern forms these problems are obsolete, for us who
are aware of the mistakes and errors in aesthetic, from which they
arise; and others of more recent date must also be held obsolete with
these, such theories as these for instance (to quote one of them) which
undertake to study the _Furioso_ in its "formation," understanding by
formation the literary presuppositions of its various parts, beginning
with the title. Decorated with the name of _Scientific Study,_ this is
mere inconclusive or ill-conclusive philology.

The work of modern criticism does not restrict itself to the clearing
away of these idle and unnecessary enquiries, but also includes a
varied and thorough investigation into the poetry of Ariosto, whose
every aspect we may claim to have illuminated in turn, and to have
given all the solutions as to the true character of the problem that
can be suggested. And it almost seems now that anyone who wishes
to form an idea upon the subject needs but select from the various
existing solutions, that one which shows itself to be clearly superior
to all others, owing to its being supported by the most valid
arguments, after he has possessed himself of the critical literature
relating to Ariosto. It seems impossible to suggest a new solution,
and as though the argument were one of those of which it may be said
that "there is no hope of finding anything new in connection with it."

And this is very nearly true, but only very nearly, for a
non-superficial examination of those various solutions leads to
the result that none of them is valid in the way it is presented,
that is to say, with the arguments that support it. It is therefore
advisable to indicate some of these arguments, which have already been
given, and to deduce from them other consequences, though we may not
succeed in framing others which shall shine with amazing novelty. But
upon consideration, this will be nothing less than providing a new
solution, just because the problem has been differently presented and
differently argued: a novelty of that serious sort which is a step
forward upon what has already been observed and acquired, not that sort
of extravagant novelty agreeable to false originality and to sterile
subtlety.

There are two fundamental types of reply to the question as to the
character of Ariosto's poetry; of these the more important is the
first, either because, as will be seen, really here near to the truth,
or because supported with the supreme authority of De Sanctis. Prior
to De Sanctis, it is only to be vaguely discerned as suggested by the
eighteenth century writer, Sulzer, and more clearly in the German
aesthetic writer, Vischer; it was afterwards repeated, prevailed and
was accepted, among others by Carducci. According to De Sanctis and
to his precursors and followers, in the _Furioso_ Ariosto has no
subjective content to express, no sentimental or passionate motive,
no idea become sentiment or passion, but pursues the sole end of art,
singing for singing's sake, representing for representation's sake,
elaborating pure form, and satisfying the one end of realising his own
dreams.

This affirmation is not to be taken in a general sense, the words in
which it is formulated must not be construed literally, for in that
case it would be easy to raise the reasonable objection, that not only
Ariosto, but every artist, just because he is an artist, never has any
end but that of art, of singing for singing's sake, representing for
representation's sake, of elaborating pure form, and of satisfying
the need that he feels to realise his own dreams: woe to the artist,
who has an eye to any other ends, and tries to teach, to persuade,
to shock, to move, to make a hit or an effect, or anything else
extraneous to art. The theory of art for art, opposed by many, is
incontestable from this point of view, it is indeed indubitable and
altogether obvious. The critics who attribute that end as a character
of Ariosto's poetry, mean rather to affirm, that the author of the
_Furioso_ proceeded in his own individual proper manner with respect
to other poets; and they then proceed to determine their thoughts upon
the subject in two ways, differing somewhat from one another. Both of
these are to be found mingled and confused in the pages of De Sanctis.
Ariosto is held to have allowed to pass in defile within him the chain
of romantic figures of knights and ladies and the stories of their arms
and audacious undertakings, of their loves and their love-making, with
the one object of _delighting the imagination._ Ariosto is held to have
depicted that various human world without interposing anything between
himself and things, without reflecting himself in things, without
sinking them in himself or in his own feelings. He is held to have
been solely an _objective observer._ Now, taking the first case, that
is to say, if the work of Ariosto be really resolved into a plaything
of the imagination, although he might have pleased himself by doing
something agreeable to himself and to others, yet he would not have
been a poet, "the divine Ariosto," because the pleasure of the fancy
belongs to the order of practical acts, to what are called games or
diversion. And in the second case, when he has been praised for being
perfectly objective, this is not only at variance with the actual
creation of the poet, but is also in contradiction to it--and indeed
in contradiction to every form of spiritual production. As though
things existed outside the spirit and it were possible to take them up
in their supposed objectivity and to externalise them by putting them
on paper or canvas. The theory of art for art, when taken as a theory
of merely fanciful pleasure or of indifferent objective reproduction
of things, should be firmly rejected, because it is at variance with
and contradicts the nature of art and of the universal spirit. At the
most, these two paradigms,--art as mere fancy and art as extrinsic
objectivity,--might be of avail as designating two artistic forms of
deficiency and ugliness, _futile_ art and _material_ art, that is to
say, in both cases, non-art; and in like manner the theory of art for
art's sake would in those cases be the definition of one or more forms
of artistic perversion.

Owing to the impossibility of denying to Ariosto any content, and
at the same time of enjoying him and of acclaiming him a poet,--an
impossibility more or less obscurely felt by some, although without
discovering and demonstrating it as has been done above,--it has
come about that not only other critics, but those very critics who,
like De Sanctis, had described him as a poet of pure fancy or pure
objectivity, have been led to recognise in him a content, and sometimes
several contents, one upon the top of the other, in a heap. One of
such contents, perhaps that most generally admitted, is without doubt
the _dissolution of the world of chivalry,_ brought about by Ariosto
through irony: a historical position conferred upon him by Hegel, and
amply illustrated by De Sanctis. But what do they mean by saying that
Ariosto expresses the dissolution of the world of chivalry? Certainly
not simply that in his poem are to be found documents concerning
the passing of the ideals of chivalry, because whether this be true
or not, it does not concern the concrete artistic form, but its
abstract material, considered and treated as a source of historical
documentation. Nor can it mean that he was inspired with aversion to
the ideals of chivalry and in favour of new ideals, because polemic
and criticism, negation and affirmation, are not art. So what was
really meant was (although those who maintain this interpretation often
understand it in one or other of those meanings, which are external to
art), that Ariosto was animated with a true and real feeling toward
the ideals of the life of chivalry, and that this feeling supplied
the lyrical motive for his poem. This motive has been disputed in
its details in various ways, some holding it to have been aversion,
others a mixture of aversion and of love, others of admiration and of
pleasure; but before we engage in further investigation, we must first
ascertain if there exist, that is to say, if Ariosto really endowed
with his own feeling--whatever it be, prevailing aversion or prevailing
inclination or a prevalent alternation of the two,--the material of
chivalry, rendering it serious and emotional, through the seriousness
and emotion of his own feeling. And this does not exist at all, for
what all feel and see as chivalry in Ariosto's mode of treatment, is
on the contrary a sort of aloofness and superiority, owing to which
he never engages himself up to the hilt in admiration or in scorn or
in passionate disagreement with one or the other; and this impression
which his narratives of sieges and combats, of duels and feats of
arms produce upon us, has afforded the ground for the above-mentioned
opposed theories as to his objective attitude and as to his cultivation
of a mere pastime of the imagination. Had Ariosto really aimed, as is
said, at an exaltation or a semi-exaltation or at an ironisation of
chivalry, he would clearly have missed the mark, and this failure would
have been the failure of his art.

What has been remarked concerning the content of chivalry is to be
repeated for all the other contents which have been proposed in turn,
each one or all of them together as the true and proper leading
motive; and of these (leaving out the least likely, because we are
not here concerned with collecting curious trifles of Ariostesque
criticism, but are resuming the essential lines of this criticism
with the intention of cutting into it more deeply and with greater
certainty), the next thing to mention, immediately after chivalrous
ideality or anti-ideality, is the philosophy of life, the _wisdom,_
which Ariosto is supposed to have administered and counselled. This
wisdom is supposed to have embraced love, friendship, politics,
religion, public and private life, and to have been directed with
great moderation and good sense, noble without fanaticism, courageous
and patient, dignified and modest. We admit that these things are to
be found in the _Furioso,_ just as chivalrous things are to be found
there also; but they are there in almost the same way, that is to
say, with the not doubtful accent of aloofness and remoteness, which
at once places a great chasm between Ariosto and the true poets of
wisdom, such as were for instance, Manzoni and Goethe. The latter of
these, in the fine verses (of the _Tasso)_ in praise of Ariosto,--who
is held to have there draped in the garb of fable all that can render
man dear and honoured, to have exhibited experience, intelligence,
good taste, the pure sense of good, as living persons, crowned with
roses and surrounded with a magic winged presence of Amorini,--somewhat
transfigured the subject of his eulogy, by approaching him to himself:
although, as we perceive from the images that he employed, it did not
escape him that in the case of the lovable singer of the _Furioso,_
the wisdom was covered, and as it were smothered beneath a cloud
of many coloured flowers. Thus the two principal solutions hitherto
given of the critical problem presented by Ariosto, the only two which
appear thinkable,--that the _Furioso_ has no content; that it has this
or that content,--each finds countenance in the other and arguments
in its favour. This means that they confute one another in turn. And
since it is impossible that there should be no content in Ariosto,
and on the other hand, since all those to which attention was first
directed (admiration or contempt of chivalry, wisdom of life) turn out
to be without existence, it is clear that there is no way out of the
difficulty, save that of seeking another content, and such an one as
shall show how the truth has been improperly symbolised in the formulas
of "mere imagination," of "indifferent objectivity" and of "art for
art's sake."

[Footnote 1: In the preparation of this essay, I believe that I have
examined all, or almost all, the literature of erudition and criticism,
old and new, in connection with Ariosto; this will not escape the
expert reader, although particular discussions and quotation of
titles and pages of books have seemed to me to be superfluous on this
occasion. But in judging this work, the reader should have present
in his mind above all the chapter of De Sanctis on the _Furioso_
(illustrated with fragments from his lectures at Zurich upon the poetry
of chivalry), which forms the point of departure for these later
investigations and conclusions.]

CHAPTER II

THE LIFE OF THE AFFECTIONS IN ARIOSTO,

AND THE HEART OF HIS HEART

Ariosto had ordinary emotional experiences in life, and this has
been shown to be true, not so much through the biographies of his
contemporaries and documents which have later come to light, as
through his own words, because he took great pleasure, if not exactly
in confessing himself, at any rate in giving vent to his feelings.
It is well known that he was without profound intellectual passions,
religious or political, free from longing for riches and honours,
simple and frugal in his mode of life, seeking above all things peace
and tranquillity and freedom to follow his own imagination, to give
himself over to the studies that he loved. Rarely or only for brief
spaces of time was it given to him to live in his own way, owing to
the necessity, always on his shoulders, for providing for his younger
brothers and sisters and for his mother, and also the necessity
of obtaining bread for himself. All these circumstances together
constrained him to undertake the hard work and the annoyances of a
court life. He was admirable in the fulfilment of family duties,
perfectly honest and reliable on every occasion, full of good, just and
generous sentiments, and therefore the recipient of universal esteem
and confidence. Owing to reasons connected with his office, he was
obliged to associate with greedy, violent, unscrupulous men, but he
did not allow himself to be stained by their contact, preserving the
attitude of an honest employee towards his patrons, attentive to the
formal duties with which he was charged. He is discreet, but pure and
dignified, refraining from taking part whatever in the secret plots and
machinations of those whose orders he obeys. He was thus enabled to
carry out the instructions of his superiors, whom he regarded solely
as filling a certain lofty rank, idealising them in conformity with
their rank, praising them, that is to say, for their attainments,
their ability and their noble undertakings, either because they really
possessed them and really accomplished the things for which he praised
them, or because they should have possessed them and accomplished the
feats in question, as attributes inherent to their social station.

Among these duties and labours one single passion ran like an ever warm
stream through his brain: love, or rather the need of woman's society,
to have with him a beloved woman, to enjoy her beauty, her laughter,
her speech: and although he frequently alludes to this passion, it
is as one ashamed of a weakness, but aware that he can by no means
dispense with the sweetness that it procures for him and which is a
vital element of his being. But even his love for woman, however strong
it may have been, found its correct framework in his idyllic ideal and
in his reflective and temperate spirit: it contained nothing of the
fantastic, the adventurous, the Donjuanesque; and after the customary
evil and evanescent adventures of youth, he took refuge in her "for
whom he trembled with amorous zeal" and (as his friend Hercules
Bentivoglio tells us in verse): in that Alexandra, who was his friend
for twenty years, and finally his more or less legal wife. United to
his desire for quietude, there was thus a potent stimulus not to remove
himself at all, or if at all, then as little as possible, from her
who was warmth and comfort for him, and to whom he clung like a child
to the bosom of its mother. His latter years, in which, recalled from
his severe sojourn at Garfagnana, he occupied himself with correcting
his poems at Ferrara, with the woman he loved at his side, were perhaps
the happiest he knew; and he passed away in that peace for which he had
sighed, ere attaining to old age.

Such tendencies of soul and the life which resulted from them, have
sometimes been admired and envied, as for instance by the sixteenth
century English translator of the _Furioso,_ Harrington. After having
described them, and having disclaimed certain sins, indeed as he said,
the single _pecadillo of love,_ he concludes with a sigh: "_Sic me
contingat vivere, Sicque mori._" Sometimes too they have been looked
upon from above and almost with compassion, as by De Sanctis and
others, who have insisted upon the negative aspects of the character
of Ariosto. These negative aspects are however nothing but the
limits, which are found in everyone, for we are not all capable of
everything; and really Italian critics, especially in the period of the
Risorgimento, were often wrong in laying down as a single measure for
everyone, civil, political, patriotic, religious, excellence, forgetful
that judgment of an individual's character should depend upon his
natural disposition, his temperament. Certainly, the life of Ariosto
was not rich and intense, nor does it present important problems in
respect of social and moral history; and the industry of the learned,
although it has been able to increase its collections and conjectures
as to his economic and family conditions, as to his official duties
as courtier, as ambassador and administrator for the Duke of Ferrara,
as to his loves and as to the names and persons of the women whom he
loved, as to the house which he built and inhabited, and other similar
particulars, anecdotes and curiosities concerning him (the collection
of which shows with how much religion or superstition a great man is
surrounded, and also sometimes the futility of the searcher), has not
added anything substantial to what the poet tells us himself, far less
has been able to furnish materials for a really new biography, which
should be at once profound and dramatic.

Nevertheless, such as it was, the life of a good and of a poor man,
of one tenaciously devoted to love and poetry, it found literary
expression in the minor works of the author: in the Latin songs, in the
Italian verses, and in the satires.

In saying this, we shall set aside the comedies, which seem to be the
most important of those minor works and are notwithstanding the least
significant, so that they might be almost excluded from the history
of his poetical development, connected rather with his doings as a
courtier, as an arranger of spectacles and plays, for which purpose he
decided to imitate the Latin comedy, for he did not believe there was
anything new to be done in that field, since the Latins had already
imitated the Greeks. No doubt Ariosto's comedies stand for an important
date in the history of the Italian theatre and of the Latin imitation
which prevailed there, that is to say, the history of culture, but not
in that of poetry. There they are mute. They are works of adaptation
and combination, and therefore executed with effort; there is nothing
new, even about their form, and a proof of this is that Ariosto, after
he had made a first attempt to write them in prose, finally put them
into monotonous and tiresome ante-penultimate hendecasyllabics, which
have never pleased anyone's ear, because they were not born, but
constructed according to design, with evident artifice and with a view
to giving to Italy the metre of comedy, analogous to the Roman iambic.
Whoever (to cite an instance from the same period and "style") calls
to memory the _Mandragola_ of Machiavelli, instinct with the energetic
spirit, the bitter disdain of the great thinker, or even the sketches
thrown upon paper anyhow by the ne'er-do-well Pietro Aretino, is at
once sensible of the difference between dead ability and living force,
or at any rate careless vigour. Nor does the dead material come alive,
as some easily contented critics maintain, from the fact that Ariosto
introduced, especially into the later of those comedies, allusions to
persons, places and customs of Ferrara, or satirical gibes at the vices
of the time; all these things are light as straws and quite indifferent
when original inspiration lacks, as in the present case.

On the other hand, there are many pure and spontaneous parts in the
minor works: even the imitations of Horace, of Catullus, of Tibullus
in the Latin poems, do not produce a sense of coldness, because we
feel that they are inspired with devotion of the humanists for the
Latins, for "my Latins," as he affectionately called them; and the
heart of the poet often beats with theirs, whether he be lamenting
the death of a friend and companion, or drawing the portrait of some
fair lady, or describing the delights of the country, or inveighing
against some treacherous and venal woman. In like manner, we observe
some fine traits of lofty emotion among the Italian poems, such as the
two songs for Philiberta of Savoy; and the true accents of his love
find their way to utterance among the Petrarchan, the madrigalesque and
the courtly qualities of others. Such is the song celebrating their
first meeting, in which he records the Florentine _festa,_ where he
saw her who was to become his mistress, and who immediately occupied a
place above all other women in his eyes, her whose fair, dense hair,
as it shaded her cheeks and neck and fell upon her shoulders, whose
rich silken robe adorned with scarlet and gold, became part of his
soul; and the elegy which is an outburst of joy upon having attained
the desired felicity; and that other which records the lovers' meeting
at night; then too the chapter upon the visit to Florence, where all
the attractions of the sweet city failed to secure fer him a moment's
respite, eager as he was to return to the longed-for presence of
the loved one, whom he describes poetically in her absence as a fair
magician:

    "Oltra acque, monti, a ripa l'onda vaga
    Del re de' fiumi, in bianca e pura stola,
    Cantando ferma il sol la bella maga,
    Che con sua vista può sanarmi sola."

and in the sonnet which ends:

    "Ma benigne accoglienze, ma complessi
    Licenziosi, ma parole sciolte
    D'ogni freno, ma risi, vezzi e giuochi."

They are often echoes of the erotic Latin poets, refreshed by the true
condition of his own spirit which, in the passion of love, never went
beyond a tender and somewhat slight degree of sensuality. It would be
vain to seek in him what he does not possess--that suave imagining,
those cosmical analogies, those moral finesses and lofty thoughts,
which are to be found in other poets of love.

For this reason, reflections upon himself and upon the society in
which it was his fate to live, confidences about his own various ways
of feeling and the recital of his adventures, follow and accompany
the brief lyrical effusions of this eroticism. When Ariosto limits
himself to the thoughts and happenings of his daily life, it is
rather a question of narrating than creating, and the culmination
of the minor works are known as the _Satires,_ which must not be
limited to the seven which bear this title in the printed editions,
but should be extended to include other compositions of like tone and
content, to be found among the elegies and the capitals, and even
among the odes, such as the elegy _De diversis amoribus._ In all of
these, Ariosto is writing his autobiography in fragments, or rather
as a series of confidential letters to his friends, such as he did
not write in prose, at least none are to be found among those of his
that remain. These are all connected with business, dry, summary,
and written in haste, only here and there revealing the personality
of the writer; whereas, when he expressed himself in verse, he made
his own soul the subject, paying attention to the vivacity of the
representation and the precise accuracy of what he said. This is a
most pleasing versified correspondence, where we hear him lamenting,
losing patience, telling us what he wants, forming projects, refusing,
begging a favour, candidly laying bare for us his true disposition, his
lack of docility, his volubility and his caprices, discussing life
and the world, smiling at others and at himself; we converse with an
Ariosto in his dressing-gown, who experiences great pleasure and has
no compunction about showing us himself as he is, and we know how he
abhorred any sort of restraint. But these letters in verse, although
perfect in quality, vivacious and eloquent as only the writings of a
man who speaks of things that concern himself can be, yet are letters,
confessions, autobiography: they are not pure poetry; their metrical
form is to them something of a delicate pleasing whim, in harmony
with such a definition of the soul. In saying this, we do not wish
to detract in any way from their value, which is great, but only to
prevent their true character from escaping us.

It is no marvel then if a connection, such as prevails between hills
and valleys, seems to run between these lesser works, the odes, the
verses of the satires, and the _Furioso._ It is sufficient to read
an octave or two of the poem to discover at once the difference in
altitude separating it from the most delicious of the love-songs, from
the most nimble and picturesque of the satires, which express the
feelings of the author far more directly than does the _Furioso._
It is further to be noted that Ariosto never wished to publish, and
certainly never would have had published a great number of them, with
the exception of the comedies, even after his death, except perhaps the
satires; but since the minor works are nevertheless the expression of
his feelings in real and ordinary life, it follows that if we wish to
discover the inspiration of the _Furioso,_ the passion which informed
and gave to it its proper content, we must seek for this beyond his
ordinary life, not in the heart which we know as that of a son, a
brother, a poor man, a lover: it is something hidden yet more deeply
within him, the heart of his heart.

That there really was a hidden affection; that Ariosto really had a
heart of his heart shut up within himself; that beyond and above the
beloved woman he worshipped another woman or goddess, with whom he
daily held religious converse, is apparent from his whole habit of
life. Why had he so lofty a disdain for practical ambitions, why was
life at court and business so wearisome to him, why did he renounce so
much, sigh so often and so often pray for leisure and rest and freedom,
save to celebrate that cult, to give himself over to that converse,
to work upon the _Furioso,_ which was its altar, or the statue which
he had sculptured for it and was perfecting with his chisel? What was
the origin of his well-known "distraction," that mind of his so aloof
from his surroundings, ever dwelling upon something else, which his
contemporaries observe and about which curious anecdotes are preserved?
His need of love and of feminine caresses did not present itself to him
as a supreme end, as with people desirous of ease and pleasure, but
seemed to him to be rather a means to an end: as though it were the
surrounding of serene joy, of tumult appeased, which he prepared for
himself and for that other more lofty love. Carducci has successfully
defined this psychological situation in his sonnet on the portrait of
Ariosto, where he says that the only longed for and accepted "prize
for his poems" was for the great dreamer "a lovely mouth--which should
appease the burning of his Apollonian brow--with kisses ..."

The proof of the scrupulous attention which he devoted to the
_Furioso,_ is to be found in the twelve years, during which he worked
upon it in the flower of his age, "with long vigils and labours," as he
wrote to the Doge of Venice, when requesting the privilege of printing
the first edition of 1516; and in his having always returned to it,
to chisel smooth and to soften it in innumerable delicate details,
or to amplify it, or in the throwing away of five cantos, which he
had written by way of amplification, but which did not go well with
the general design, and finally failed to content him. For these he
substituted as many more, and personally superintended the edition of
1532, which also failed to content him altogether, so that he began
to work upon it again during the few months which separated him from
death. His son Virginio attests that he "was never satisfied with
his verses, that he kept changing them again and again, and for this
reason never remembered any of them ..."; and contemporaries never
cease marvelling at his diligence as a corrector and a maker of perfect
things: Giraldi Cinzio, to mention but one witness, says that after
the first edition, "not a single day passed," during sixteen years,
"that he was not occupied upon it with pen and with thought," and that
he was also desirous of obtaining the opinions and impressions of the
greatest men of letters and humanists in Italy as to every part of it,
men such as Bembo, Molza, Navagero; and as Apelles with his paintings,
Ariosto kept his work for two years "in the hall of his house, leaving
it there that it might be criticised by everyone"; and he particularly
said that he wished his critics merely to mark with a stroke of the pen
those parts which did not please them, without giving any reason for so
doing, that he might find it out for himself, and then discuss it with
them, and so arrive at a decision and a solution in his own way. He
pushed his minute delicacy of taste so far as to be preoccupied about
the choice of modes of spelling, refusing, for instance, to remove the
"h" from those words which possessed it by tradition, thus opposing the
suggestion of Tolomei and the new fashion of the illiterate crowd, by
jocosely replying that "He who removes the _h_ from _Huomo,_ does not
know _Huomo_ (man), and he who removes it from _Honore,_ is not worthy
of honour."

What then was the passion which he thus expressed, who was the goddess,
for whom, since he could not raise a temple and a marble statue in the
little house which he longed for and built in the Via Mirasole, he
constructed the architecture, the forms and the poetical adornments of
the _Furioso? _ He never uttered her name, because none of the other
great Italian poets was so little a theorist or critic as Ariosto. He
never discussed his art or art in general, limiting himself to saying
very simply, and indeed very inadequately, that what he meant by art
was "A work containing pleasing and delightful things"; nor, as we have
seen, have the critics told us who she was, since they have at the most
indicated vaguely and indirectly in their illogical formula that "his
Goddess was Art."

THE HIGHEST LOVE: HARMONY

But we on the other hand shall name her, and we shall call her Harmony,
and we shall prove that those who assign a simple aim to Ariosto in the
_Furioso,_ Art or Pure Form, were gazing at her and seeing her as it
were through a veil of clouds. In doing this, we shall at the same time
define the concept of Harmony. We cannot avoid entering upon certain
theoretical explanations in relation to this matter; but it would be
wrong to look upon them as digressions, since it is only by their means
that the way can be cleared to the understanding of the spirit which
animates the _Furioso._ There is something comic or at least ironic in
this necessity in which we find ourselves, of weighting with philosophy
a discourse relating to so transparent a poet as Ariosto; but we have
already warned the reader at the beginning that it is one thing to read
and let sing to him the verses of a poet, and another to understand
him, and that what is easy to learn may sometimes be very difficult to
understand.

It is therefore without doubt contradictory to state that an artist has
for his special and particular end or content, art itself, art which
is the general end of every artist: as contradictory as to say that an
individual has for his concrete and proper end, not this or that work
and profession, but life. And there is also no doubt that since every
error contains in it an element of truth, those erroneous theories
aimed at something effectively existing: a particular content, which
they were not able to define, and which could never be in any case art
for art. Two sorts of judgments of that formula have nevertheless been
expressed in relation to two different groups of works of art: those
relating to works which seemed to be inspired by a particular form of
art, and those which seem to be inspired by the idea of Art itself, by
Art in universal; and for this reason our rapid investigation must be
divided and directed first to the one and then to the other case.

The first case includes the poetry which may be called "humanistic"
or "classicistic": not the classicism and humanism of pedants without
talent or taste, but that lively humanism and classicism which we
are wont to admire and enjoy in several poets of our Renaissance in
the Latin language, such as Sannazaro, Politian and Pontano, and also
in later times those extremely lettered writers in Italian, of whom
Monti, in his best work, may be said to be the greatest representative
and we might add to him Canova, although he has not poetised in verse.
What is there that pleases us in them, in their imitations, their
re-writing, their cantos of classical phrases and measures? And what
was it that warmed and carried them away, so that they were able to
transmit their emotion to us and obtain our delighted sympathy? It
has been answered that this was due to their remaining faithful to
the already sacred traditions of beautiful form, handed down by the
school; but this answer is not satisfactory, because pedants also can
be mechanically faithful in repeating; we have alluded to these and
shown that on the contrary they weary and annoy us. The truth is that
the former hold to those forms of art, because they are the suitable
symbol, the satisfactory expression of their feeling, which is one
of affection for the _past,_ as being venerable, glorious, decorous,
national or super-national and cultural; and their content is not
literary form by itself, but love for that past, love for some one or
other _historical_ age of art. And if this be true, we must place those
romantic archaisers in the same class of art with the humanists or
classicists, when considering the substantial nature of things. For the
former nourish the same feeling and employ the same procedure, not in
relation to the Greek and Roman past, but in relation to the Christian
and medieval past, particularly in Germany, where they let us hear
again the rude accent of the medieval epic, and represent the ingenuous
forms of pious legends and sacred dramatic representations, and make
themselves the echo of ancient popular songs: this re-writing has often
something in it of the pastiche (as the humanists and classicists also
have something of the pastiche, which with them is pedantry), yet
sometimes produce passages of delicate art, which if not profound, were
certainly agreeable to the heart that remembers, to the eternal heart
of childhood which is in us.

Ariosto was also a more or less successful humanist in certain of his
minor works, as we have said, but in the _Furioso,_ although he took
many schemes and details from Latin poets, he stands essentially
outside their line of inspiration, for instead of directing his spirit
towards the past, he always draws the past towards his spirit, and
there is no observable trace in it of Latin-Augustan archaism, or of
the archaism of medieval chivalry. For this reason, the view that he
had Art itself as his content must be taken as applicable without doubt
in the other sense to him and to certain other artists: as devotion to
Art as universal, to Art in its Idea, a devotion which is bodied forth
in his narratives, his figures and his verse.

Now it must be remembered that Art in its Idea is nothing but
expression or--representation of the real,--of the real which is
conflict and strife, but a conflict and a strife that are always being
settled; that it is multiplicity and diversity, but at the same time
unity, dialectic and development, and also and through that, cosmos and
Harmony. And since Art cannot be the content of Art, that is to say,
it is impossible to represent representation (as it is impossible to
think thought, so that if thought is made the object of thought, it is
always itself and the other, that is to say, the whole), by eliding
the term which is superfluous and has been unduly retained, we obtain
the result that when it is stated of Ariosto or of other artists
that they have for content pure Art or pure Form, it is really to be
understood that they have for content devotion to the pure rhythm of
the universe, for the dialectic which is unity, for the development
which is _Harmony._ Thus, if humanistic or otherwise archaistic artists
do not as is generally believed love beautiful forms, but rather the
past and history, it may be said of those others that they do not love
pure Art, but the _pure and universal content_ of Art, not this or that
particular strife and Harmony (erotic, political, moral, religious, and
so on), but strife and _Harmony_ in idea and eternal.

The concept of cosmic Harmony, which has also been called pure
Beauty or absolute Beauty, and indeed God, has been much employed in
old philosophy, and notably in the old aesthetic (old always being
understood in its logical-historical sense, which is still tenacious of
life and reappears in our own day, where it might be least expected),
and has made an elaboration of the new theory, which conceives of art
as lyrical intuition or expression, very laborious. For many reasons
that it would occupy too much time and be out of place to detail
here, Harmony or Beauty came to be considered as the true essence of
Art; hence the impossibility of accounting, not only for many works
of art, but for art in general, and the artificial attempts made by
the upholders of this doctrine and by criticism to pervert facts in
support of a partial and incorrect principle. For the reasons given
above, it is easy for us to discern the origin of the error, which
lay in transferring one of the classes of particular contents which
Art is able to elaborate, to serve as the end and essence of Art. And
the one selected was precisely that which owing to its religious and
philosophical dignity, appeared to have the power to absorb Art into
itself together with everything else and to dissolve the whole in a
sort of mysticism. This is confirmed by the historical course of the
doctrine, the first conspicuous form of which was Neoplatonism, which
reappeared on several occasions in the Middle Ages, at the time of the
Renaissance and during the Romantic period. De Sanctis himself, owing
to the romantic origins of his thought, was never altogether free from
it; and his judgment upon Ariosto bears traces of the transcendental
conception of Art as an actualisation of pure Beauty.

Similar traces are to be found in another& doctrine to which De
Sanctis held and formulated as the distinction and opposition between
the _poet_ and the _artist:_ a doctrine which it is desirable to make
clear, not only with a view of strengthening the concept to which
we have had recourse, but also because Ariosto himself is numbered
among the poets to whom the distinction has been chiefly applied, as
he has been held to be distinct and opposed, along with Politian and
Petrarch, and perhaps others, as artists, to Dante or to Shakespeare,
as poets. The doctrine appears to be endorsed by facts, and therefore
looks plausible and is readily accepted and continually reproduced,
as on several occasions in the history of aesthetic ideas. It was
not altogether unknown in the days of Ariosto himself, if Giraldo
Cinzio can be held to have suggested it, when in his description of an
allegorical picture, in which were to be seen the two great Tuscans
"in a green and flowery meadow upon a hill of Helicon," Dante, with
his robe fastened at the knees, "manipulated the circular scythe,
cutting all the grass that his scythe met with," while Petrarch,
"robed in senatorial robe, lay there selecting among the noble
herbs and the delicate flowers." In spite of this, it is altogether
unsustainable as an exact theory, because it introduces an unjustified
and unjustifiable dualism, which it is altogether impossible to
mediate, since each of the two distinct terms contains in itself the
other and nothing else, thus demonstrating their identity: the poet
is poet because he is an artist, that is to say, he gives artistic
form to feeling, and the artist would not be an artist, if he were
not a poet, that is to say, if he had not a feeling to elaborate. The
apparent confirmation of this theory by facts arises from this, that
there are as we know, artists who have a devotion for cosmic Harmony
as their chief content, and others who have other devotions: and this
proves that it is advisable to make a very moderate and restrained
use of the distinction between poets and artists, between those who
represent the beautiful and those who represent the real, as is the
case with all empirical distinctions. Sometimes the same distinction,
taken from the bosom of poetry or of some other special art, has been
thrown into the midst of the series of the so-called arts, severing
those arts which have cosmic Harmony, absolute Beauty, ideal Beauty,
the rhythm of the Universe for their object, from others which have
for their object individual feelings and life. Among the former were
numbered (as in the school of Winckelmann) the art of sculpture and
certain sorts of painting at least, and among the latter, poetry; or
(according to Schelling and Schopenhauer) bestowing upon music alone
the whole of the first field. Music would thus be opposed to the other
arts and would possess the value of an unconscious Metaphysic, in so
far as it directly portrayed the rhythm of the Universe itself. A
clumsy doctrine, which we only mention here, because Ariosto would
furnish the best example of all among the poets, against the exclusion
of poetry from among the arts which alone were able to portray the
rhythm of the Universe or Harmony: Ariosto, who, if he had seemed to
an Italian philologist to be nothing less than "a poet who was an
excellent observer and reasoner," has yet appeared to Humboldt, whose
ear was more sensitive to the especially "musical" _musikalisch,_ and
to Vischer more especially as one who developed his fables of chivalry
41 in a melodious labyrinth of images, which produced in its sensual
serenity the same enjoyment as the rocking and dying of the Italian
"canzone," thus giving the reader "the pure pleasure of moving without
matter." When empirical classifications are not handled with caution
and with a consciousness of their limits, not only do they deprive the
principles of science of their rigour and vigour, but also carry with
them the unfortunate result of making it seem possible to distinguish
concretely what has been roughly divided for the purpose of aiding
the creation of images. The double class of poets and of artists, the
one moved by particular affections, the other by universal Harmony,
does not hold as a logical duality, because the love of Harmony is
itself one of many particular affections, and forms part of the
series comprising the comic, tragic, humorous, melancholy, jocose,
pessimistic, passionate, realistic, classicistic poets, and so on. But
even when it has been reduced to the level of the others, there is no
necessity, either in its case or in that of the others, to fall into
the illusion that there really exist poets who are only tragic or only
comic, only realistic or only classicistic, singers only of Harmony,
without the other passions, or solely passionate without the passion
for Harmony. The love of traditional forms, for example, which we have
seen to be the base of classicism, exists in a certain measure in every
poet, for the reason that every poet employs, re-lives and renews the
words of a given language, which has been historically formed, and is
therefore charged with a literary tradition and full of historical
meaning. And the love of Harmony exists also in every poet worthy of
the name, since he cannot represent his drama of the affections, save
as a particular mode of drama and of the dramatic or dialectic cosmic
Harmony, which is therefore contained and dwells in it as the universal
in the particular.

Are we ourselves overthrowing our own distinctions, immediately after
asserting them? We are not overthrowing the principles which we had
established in connection with the nature of Art, and with the nature
of Harmony and Beauty in the super-aesthetic and cosmical sense; but
it was necessary clearly to state and to overthrow the definition of
Ariosto as poet of Harmony, because in doing so, we cease to preserve
it in its abstractness, but make use of it as a living principle. In
other words, by thus defining him, we have attained the first object
of our quest, which was no longer to leave him hidden beneath the
nebulous description of a poet of art for art's sake, nor beneath
that other equally fallacious description of him as a satirical and
ironical poet, or as a poet of prudence and wisdom, and so on; and
we have pointed out _where the principal accent of his art falls._
Passing now to other determinations, in order to show in what matter
and in what way or tone that accent is realised, maintained and
developed, even when it happens that we can do this in the best
possible manner, we shall not allow ourselves to be ensnared by the
fatuous belief, in vogue with certain critics of the day, that we
have supplied an equivalent to Ariosto's poetry with our aesthetic
formulas: such an equivalent would not only be an arrogance, but it
would also be useless, because Ariosto's poetry is there, and anyone
can see it for himself. The new determinations must however also be
asserted and refuted, only the new results being preserved, analogous
to those already obtained, by means of which we shall dispose of other
false ideas circulated by the critics concerning Ariosto and point
out the salient characteristics of the material which he selected for
treatment, together with the mode and the tone of his poem. The poetry
of the _Furioso,_ as for that matter all poetry, is an _individuum
ineffabile,_ and Ariosto, the poet of Harmony, limited in this
direction and that, never at any time exactly coincides with Ariosto,
the Ariostesque poet, the poet of Harmony, and not only of Harmony as
denned in the way we have defined it, but also in other ways understood
or indefinable. We do not propose to exhaust or to take the place of
the concrete living Ariosto; he is indeed present to the imagination
of our readers as to our own and forms the perpetual criterion of
our critical explanations, which without this criterion would be
unintelligible.

CHAPTER IV

THE MATERIAL FOR THE HARMONY

Had Ariosto been a philosopher or a poet-philosopher, he would have
given us a hymn to Harmony, similar to a good many others which are to
be found in the history of literature, celebrating that lofty Idea,
which enabled him to understand the discordant concord of things and
while satisfying his intellect, filled his soul with peace and joy. But
Ariosto was the opposite of a philosopher, and certainly, were he able
to read what we are now investigating and discovering in him, first he
would be astonished, then he would smile and finally he would comment
upon our work with some good-natured jest.

His love for Harmony never took the form of a concept, it was not
love of the concept and of the intelligence, that is to say of things
answering to a need which he did not experience: it was love for
Harmony directly and ingenuously perceived, for sensible Harmony: a
harmony, therefore, which did not arise from a loss of his humanity and
an abandonment of all particular sentiments, a religious mounting up
to the world of the ideas, but existed for him rather as a sentiment
among sentiments, a dominant sentiment, surrounding all the others and
assigning to each its place. In this respect, he really belonged to one
of the chief spiritual currents of the period of the Renaissance, or
more accurately, of the early Cinquecento: to the period, that is to
say, when Leonardo, Raphael, Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto, with
their beautiful, harmonious decorum and majestic forms, had succeeded
to Ghirlandaio, to Botticelli, to Lippi, when it seemed (in the words
of Wölfflin, a historian of art) "as though new bodies had suddenly
grown up in Italy," a new and magnificent population, resplendent
in painting and sculpture, which was indeed the reflection of a new
psychical attitude, of a different direction and of a new centre of
interest.

Now if we undertake to consider the sentiments which form part of the
_Furioso,_ if we disassociate them from the connection established
among them by the harmonising sentiment of Harmony, and therefore in
their particularity, disaggregation and materiality, we shall have
before us the _material_ of the _Furioso._ For the "material" of Art
is nothing but this, when ideally distinguished from the _content,_ in
which the sentiments themselves are fused in the dominant sentiment,
whether it be called the leading motive or the lyrical motive: a
content which in its turn can be only ideally distinguished from the
_form,_ in which it expresses itself or is possessed and present
in the spirit. Philological criticism, deprived of philosophical
enlightenment, philology in its bad sense or philologism, means rather
by "material" or "sources," as they are also called, external things,
such as the books which the poet had read or the stories that he had
heard told, and on the pretext of supplying in this way the genesis of
a work of art _ab ovo,_ it penetrates to the sources of the sources,
let us say to the origins of warrior women, of the ogress and the
hippogryph of Ariosto. Their procedure suggests that of one who when
asked what language a poet found in circulation in his time, should
open for that purpose an etymological dictionary of the Italian
language, or of the romance languages, or of Indo-European languages,
which expound formative ideological processes, either forgotten or
thrown into the background of the speaker's consciousness when engaged
in speaking. But even if we do not lose our way in such learned and
interminable dissertations, if we escape the error referred to above,
of forming judgments as to merit upon them, philologistic search
for sources and for material becomes capricious and ends by being
impossible; because it takes as sources only certain literary lumber
scattered here and there, and were we to unite this with the whole
of the rest of literature, with the figurative and musical arts, and
with other external things which actually surround the poet, public
and private events, scientific teachings and disputes, beliefs,
customs, and so on, we should find ourselves involved in all endless
and infinite enumeration, convincing proof of the illogical nature
of such an inquiry. Nor do we make any progress in the determination
of the material by limiting it to more modest terms, that is to say,
only to certain things which the poet had before him (even if they be
documents and information, not without use for certain ends), because
the true _material_ of art, as has been said, is not _things_ but
the _sentiments_ of the poet, which determine and explain one another,
why and for what reason he turns to certain things and not to others, to
these things rather than to those. Since we have already described
Ariosto's character and shown its reflection in his minor works, now
that we are examining the material of the _Furioso,_ we shall find the
same character, that is to say, the same complex of sentiments which
it will be desirable to illustrate and to distinguish in a somewhat
different manner, with an eye no longer directed to the psychology of
the man or to the minor works, but just to the _Furioso._

And we shall find above all _an amorous_ Ariosto, Ariosto perpetually
in love, whom we already know: an Ariosto for whom love and woman are
an important affair, a great pleasure which he is not able to renounce,
a great torment from which he cannot set himself free. That love is
always altogether sensual, love for a beautiful bodily form, shining
forth in the luminous eyes, seductive, charming; virtuous too, but
relatively virtuous, just as much as avails to prevent too much poison
entering into the delicate linked tenderness of love; and for this
reason, all ethical or speculative idealisation, in the new or Platonic
style, is excluded "Not love of a lady of theology ...": here too,
Carducci saw clearly and spoke well. Absent too or extraneous are the
consecration and purification of love in "matrimony"; the choice of a
wife, the treatment of a wife, are for Ariosto, things differing but
slightly from the choice and the breaking in of a horse, and matrimony
in its noble ethical sense belongs at the most to his intellect, and
to his intellect in so far as it is passive: in the _Furioso_ are
to be found the politics and not the poetry of matrimony, and among
innumerable ties of free love, the chaste sighing of Bradamante alone
aims at "the conjugal tie" with Ruggiero. But the love of Ariosto is
healthy and natural in its warm sensuality; it is not sophisticated
with luxurious images, it is conscious of its own limits; nor does it
suffer from mad or inextinguishable desires, but only from that which
was known in the language of the time as the "cruelty" of woman, her
refusal or her coldness; but it tortures itself yet more with jealousy
and the anxious working of the imagination. The Ferrarese Garofalo,
a contemporary biographer, bears witness to the very lively jealousy
of Ariosto, saying that since he loved "with a great vehemence," he
was "above measure jealous," and "always carried on his love affairs
in secret and with great solicitude, accompanied with much modesty";
but this is evident in the matter of the poem itself, being exhibited
in many of his personages, descriptions and situations, and finding
complete expression in the verse which closes on so pathetic a note:
"believe one who has had experience of it." Cruelty on the one side and
jealousy on the other, although they torture, do not make him sad or
cause him to give vent to desperate utterances, because, since he had
not too lofty nor too madly an intransigent idea of love, although it
greatly delighted him, he is not apt to expect too much from it, and
knowing the infidelity and the fragility of man, a sort of sense of
justice forbids him from bringing his hand down too heavily upon the
infidelity and the fragility of woman. Hence comes, not forgiveness,
but resignation and indulgence. "My lady is a lady, and every lady
is weak"; remarks Rinaldo wisely. Ariosto's is an indulgence without
moral elevation, but also without cynicism and inspired with a certain
element of goodness and humanity. Reciprocal deception and illusion
are inherent to love affairs; but how can they be done away with,
without also doing away at the same time with the charm of that bitter
but amiable sport? The lover takes care to preserve the illusion by
his very passion, which blinds him to what is visible and makes the
invisible visible, leading him to believe what he desires, to believe
the person who fascinates him, as does Brandimarte with his Fiordiligi,
wandering about the world and returning to him uncontaminated: "To
fair Fiordiligi, of whom I had believed greater things." Thus the
imagination of Ariosto, as these various equal and conflicting
sentiments wove their own images, became quite filled with marvellous
seductive beauties, perfect of limb, and with voluptuous forms and
scenes (Alcina and her arts, Angelica in the arms of Ruggiero who had
set her free, Fiordispina); of others which oscillate between the
passionate and the comic (Gicondo and Fiametta, the knight who tests
the wife he loves too much, the judge Anselmo and his Argia): of others
whose love was unworthy or criminal (Origille, whom Griffone strives
to save from the punishment that she deserves, notwithstanding her
wickedness proved on several occasions and her known treachery; the
sons of King Marganorre; Gabrina, who did receive punishment, perhaps
because her depraved old age was so repulsive); and above all of the
woman who symbolises Woman, for whom the bravest knights sustain every
sort of labour and danger, and because of whom a big strong man loses
control of himself, and who, herself slave of a love which owns no
law outside itself, ends by bestowing her hand upon a "poor servant"
(Angelica, Orlando and Medoro). These are but a few instances of the
many places in the _Furioso,_ bearing upon love in its various modes
of presentation, in addition to the introductions to the cantos and
the digressions into which Ariosto pours his whole store of feeling
or sets forth his reflections. And the love matter is of so great a
volume as to dominate all the rest, possibly in extent, certainly in
relief and intensity; so much so, that it is a marvel that among the
many attempts to establish the true motive and argument of the poem, by
abstracting it from its subject matter, and to determine its design and
unity in the same way, no one has yet insisted upon considering it, or
has been able to consider it as "the poem of love," of the casuistry
of love, to which knightly and warlike life should but provide the
decorative background. This theory would certainly seem to be less
unlikely than the other, which assigns to it as its end and unity the
war between Carlo and Agramante. In any case, this motive is placed
second in the protasis to the _Furioso,_ where the first word is not by
chance "women," and the first verse ends with "loves" (and in the first
edition we even read: "The ancient loves of ladies and of knights");
and the scene with which the poem opens is the flight of Angelica, who
is immediately met by Sacripante and Rinaldo who are in love with her,
and that with which it concludes is the marriage feast of Ruggiero and
Bradamante, disturbed yet heightened in its solemnity of celebration by
the incident of the duel with Rodomonte.

Love matter dominates in the _Furioso,_ because it dominated in the
heart of Ariosto, where it easily passed over into more noble feelings,
into piety that goes beyond the tomb, into justice rendered to
calumniated innocence, into kindness ill-recompensed, into admiration
for the sacred tie of friendship. Hence, in marked contrast to the
beautiful Doralice, so crudely sensual, that when her lover's body is
still warm, she is capable of looking with desire upon his slayer, the
valiant Ruggiero, Isabella deliberately decides upon putting herself
to death that she may keep faith with her dead lover; and Fiordiligi,
whose pretty little face, upon which still flitters something of the
impudence attributed to her by Boiardo, becomes furrowed with anguish
and sublime with sorrow, when she apprehends the loss of Brandimarte.
And Olympia stands by the side of Ginevra, trapped and drawn to the
brink of ruin by a wicked man, and is rescued by Rinaldo, the righter
of wrongs, Olympia whom Orlando twice saves, the second time not only
from death, but from desperation at the desertion of her most thankless
husband. Zerbino, brother of Ginevra and lover of Isabella, is a flower
of nobility among the knights. He alone understands and pities the
affectionate deed of Medoro, careless of his own life and absorbed in
the anxiety to obtain burial for the body of his lord. When his former
friend who has shown himself to be a most infamous traitor, is dragged
before him in chains, he cannot find it in him to inflict upon him the
death he deserves, for he remembers their long and close friendship.
Devoted to the greatness of Orlando and in gratitude for what he had
done in saving and taking care of Isabella, he collects the arms of
the Paladin, scattered at the outbreak of his madness, and sustains a
combat with Mandricardo for these arms, dying rather for sorrow at
not having been able to defend them than from his wound. Cloridano
and Medoro, Orlando and Brandimarte, are other idealisations of a
friendship which lasts beyond the tomb; and anyone searching the poem
for motives of commiseration and indignation for oppressed virtue,
for unhappy peoples trodden beneath the heel of the tyrant, robbed,
tortured and allowed to perish like cattle and goats, would find other
instances of the goodness and generosity which burned in the mild
Ariosto.

Goodness and generosity were also the substance of his political
sentiment, which was that of the honest man of all times, who laments
the misfortunes of his country, loathes the domination of foreigners,
judges the oppression of the nobles with severity, is scandalised by
the corruption and hypocrisy of the priests and of the Church, regrets
that the united arms of Europe cannot prevail against the Turks, that
barbarian "of ill omen"; but it does not go beyond this superficial
impressionability, and ends by accepting his own times and respecting
the powerful personages who have finally prevailed. For this reason
there is but slight interest in noting (and it can be noted in the
_Furioso_ itself) the variety of the political ideas of Ariosto,
first hostile to the Spaniards, as we see from several references to
them, and from certain attributes given to the Spaniard Ferraù, and
finally to the French, who had lost the game in Italy, and we find him
extolling the Spanish-Imperial Carlo V., and those who maintain his
cause in Italy, whether they were Andrea Doria or the Avalos. But on
the other hand, as Ave have already said, it is unjust to reprove him
for not having been a champion of italianity and of rebellion against
tyrants and foreigners,--such existed in those days, although they were
rare--or a passionate political thinker and prophet, like Machiavelli.
The famous invective against firearms suffices to indicate the quality
of Ariosto's politics: for him politics were morality, private
morality, a morality but little combative and very idyllic, although
not vulgar, disdainful indeed of the vulgar of all sorts, however
fortunate and highly placed. Thus it was not such as to create figures
and scenes in the poem, like love and human piety; suffice that if it
insinuated itself here and there among the reflective, exclamatory and
hortatory octaves.

His feeling towards his own sovereign lords, the Estes, has not, as
we have suggested, either in his soul or in the _Furioso,_ anything
in it of the specifically political, although he admired them for the
splendour of art and letters, which they and their predecessors had
conferred upon the country, and for the strength of their rule. And
he praised them with words and comparisons, which he introduced into
his poem on a large scale, and into the general scheme itself. These
have at times been held to be base adulation or a subtle form of irony
almost amounting to sarcasm; they were however neither, being serious
celebrations of glorious military enterprises and of magnanimous acts
(it does not matter whether they really were so or seemed so and were
bound to seem so to him); and for the rest, and especially as far as
concerned Cardinal Hippolyto, they resemble the madrigals addressed
to ladies or their attendants, which always contain a vein of mockery
mingled with the hyperbole of their compliments. In fact he treated
this material as an imaginative theme, now decorous and grave, now
elegant and polished as by a courtier; and he would have been still
more inclined to treat the Estes in this way, had they in return for
his words and "works of ink" dispensed him from the duties of his
post, and particularly from those which obliged him to run hither and
thither, to behave like a "teamster." Like many peaceful individuals,
who have no taste for finding themselves in the midst of battles, or
for changing the place of their abode, or for travelling to see foreign
races, or for voyages, or for rapid ups and downs and adventures, or
for anything of an upsetting and extraordinary nature that happens
unexpectedly, he was quite ready to accept all these things in his
imagination, where he preserved, caressed and made idols of them. His
inclination imaginatively to decorate the Estes, the nobles of Italy,
great ladies, artists, good or bad men of letters of any sort, to make
radiant statues of them, had the same root as his inclination for
stories of knightly romance.

These stories were the favourite reading, the "pleasant literature" of
good society, especially in Ferrara, where the Estes possessed a fine
collection in their library, whence had come the majority of Italian
poets, who had versified them during the previous century, setting them
free from plebeian prose and verse. Ariosto must have read very many
of these in his youth, and must have delighted in them, and we know
that he himself translated some from French and Spanish. Here were to
be found terrible and tremendous battles, duels of hard knocks and of
masterly blows, combats with giants and monsters, tragical situations,
magnanimous deeds, proofs of steadfast faith, a vying together of
loyalty and courtesy, persecutions and favours and aid afforded by
prodigious beings, by fairies and magicians, travels in distant lands,
by sea or by flight, enchanted gardens and palaces, knights of immense
strength, Christian and Saracen, warlike women and women who were
women, royally: all this gave him the desirable and agreeable pleasure
of one who looks on at a variously coloured exhibition of fireworks,
and owing to this pleasure they gave, he incorporated a great number
of them in the _Furioso._ It is superfluous to inquire whether the
material of chivalry appeared to him to be serious or burlesque, when
we have understood the feeling which led him in that direction: it
was beyond all judgment of that sort, because we do not judge rockets
or fireworks morally or economically, with approval or reproof. It
can of course be remarked that knightly tales had henceforth been
reduced to such an extent in Italy and in the spirit of Ariosto that
they were not only without the religious and national feeling of the
ancient epic, but even without what is still to be found in certain
popular Italian compilations, such as the _Monarchs of France;_ but
this observation, though correct and important enough in the history of
culture, has no meaning whatever as regards Ariosto's poetry. The fact
that Ariosto was sometimes entranced and carried away as it were by the
spectacles which his fancy presented to him, and sometimes kept aloof
from them, with a smile for commentary, or turned away towards the real
world that surrounded him, goes without saying, and does not appear to
demand the discussions and the intellectual efforts which have been
devoted to it.

His was on the other hand a distinctly jesting outlook upon religious
beliefs, God, Christ, Paradise, angels and saints; and Charlemagne's
prayer to God, the vision of the angel Michael upon earth and the
voyage of Astolfo to the world of the Moon, his conversations with John
the Evangelist, the deeds and words of the hermit with whom Angelica
and Isabella find themselves, and finally those of the saintly hermit
who baptises Ruggiero, accord with this laughing and almost mocking
spirit. Here we do not find even the seriousness of the game and in
the game, with which he treats of knightly doings; nor could there be,
because relation towards religion admits only of complete reverence
or complete irreverence. And Ariosto was irreverent, or what comes
to the same thing, indifferent; his spirit was as areligious as it
was aphilosophical, untormented with doubts, not concerned with human
destiny, incurious as to the meaning and value of this world, which he
saw and touched, and in which he loved and suffered. He was altogether
outside the philosophy of the Renaissance, whether Ficino's or
Pomponazzi's, as he was outside every sort of philosophy. This limits
and as it were deprives of importance his mockeries and to salute him
as some have done "the Voltaire of the Renaissance" or as a precursor
of Voltaire, and Voltaire himself who so much enjoyed Ariosto's
profanations of sacred things, maliciously underlining the witticism
that escapes from the lips of St. John about "my much-praised Christ"
(after having said that writers turn the true into the false, and
the false into the true, and that he also had been a "writer" in the
world), has given Ariosto a place which does not belong to him at all.
Voltaire was not areligious or indifferent, and was only irreligious in
so far as he attacked all historical religions with a religion of his
own, which was deism or the religion of the reason; and for this reason
his satires and his lampoons possess a polemical value, which is not to
be found in the jests of Ariosto.

Presented in its outstanding features, and to the extent which suits
our purpose, such is the complex of sentiments which flowed together
to form the _Furioso_ and to produce the images of which it consists.
They produced them all the same, where he seems to have taken them from
other poems or books, from Virgil or from Ovid, from French or Spanish
romances, because in the taking and with the taking of them, he made
them images of his own sentiment, that is to say, he breathed into
them a new life and poetically created them in so doing. But although
this material of the poem may seem to us who have considered it to be
anterior and external to the poem itself and owing to our analysis,
disaggregated, it must not be supposed that those sentiments ever
existed in the spirit of Ariosto as mere matter or in an amorphous
condition, because there is nothing in the spirit without some form
and without its own form. Indeed, we have seen a great part of it
take form in the minor works, while some dwelt in his mind, expressed
and realised in their own way, even if unfulfilled or if we lack
written record of their existence. But they possessed a different
aspect in this anterior form, differing therefore from that which
they assumed in the poem. In the lyrics and satires, words of love
and nostalgia, of friendship and complaint, of anger and indignation
against princes who take little interest in poets, of impatience and
contempt for the ambitious throng, and the like, are more lively and
direct; and it would be easy to find parallels for identical thoughts
appearing with different intonations in the two different places. Had
Ariosto always accorded artistic treatment to those sentiments at the
moment of experiencing them, he would have continued to write songs,
sonnets, epistles and satires, and would not have set to work upon
the _Furioso._ An examination of the poem upon Obizzo D'Este as to
the material of chivalry, or if we like the sound of it better, as to
feats of arms and of daring, will at least yield us a glimpse of what
it would have become, had it received immediate treatment, whether this
poem belongs to the early years of Ariosto, prior to the composition
of the _Furioso,_ or whether (as is more probable), it be later than
the composition of the poem and the appearance of the first edition.
The fragment is notable for its great limpidity and narrative fluency,
but one sees that if the poet had continued in this direction, the poem
would have been nothing but an elegant book of songs; Ariosto did not
wish to be a song-writer, so he ceased the work which had been begun.
Had he versified his mockeries of sacred things, he would have become a
wit, a collector of burlesque surprises, capable of arousing laughter
about friars and saints; but Ariosto disdained such a trade, Ariosto
whose many grandiose distractions are on record, but no witticisms
or smart sayings: he was too much of a dreamer, too fine an artist
to take pleasure in such things. His sentiment for Harmony aided him
to turn the pleasant stories of chivalry and capricious jesting into
poetry, and lesser erotic or narrative and argumentative poetry into
more complex poetry, to accomplish the passage and ascent from the
minor works to that which is truly great, to mediate the immediate, by
transforming his various sentiments in the manner that we are about to
consider.

CHAPTER V

THE REALISATION OF HARMONY

The first change to manifest itself in them so soon as they were
touched by the Harmony which sang at the bottom of the poet's heart,
was their loss of autonomy, their submission to a single lord, their
descent from being the whole to becoming a part, their becoming
occasions rather than motives, instruments rather than ends, their
common death for the benefit of the new life.

The magical power which accomplished this prodigy was the _tone_ of the
expression, that self-possessed, lightness of tone, capable of adopting
a thousand forms and remaining ever graceful, known to the old school
of critics as "the confidential air," and remembered among the other
"properties" of the "style" of Ariosto. But not only does his whole
style consist of this, but since style is nothing but the expression
of the poet and of his soul, this was all Ariosto himself and his
harmonious singing.

This work of disvaluation and destruction is to be detected in the
expressive tone in the proems to the separate cantos, in the digressive
argumentations, in the observations interjected, in the repetitions, in
the use of vocables, in the phrasing and the arrangement of periods,
and above all in the frequent comparisons that form pictures which
rather than intensifying the emotion, cause it to take a different
path, in the interruptions to the narrative, sometimes occurring at
their most dramatic point, in the nimble passage to other narratives of
a different and often opposite nature. Yet the palpable part of this
whole, what it is possible to segregate and to analyse as elements of
style, forms but a small part of the impalpable whole, which flows
along like a tenuous fluid, and since it is soul, we feel it with our
soul, though we cannot touch it with our hands, even though they be
armed with scholastic pincers.

And this tone is the often noted and named, but never clearly defined
_irony_ of Ariosto; it has not been well-defined, because described as
a kind of jesting or mockery, similar or coincident with what Ariosto
sometimes employed in his descriptions of knightly personages and their
adventures. It has thus been both restricted and materialised, but
what we must not lose sight of is that the irony is not restricted
to one order of sentiments, as for instance those of knighthood or
religion, and so spares the rest, but encompasses them all, and thus is
no futile jesting, but something far more lofty, more purely artistic
and poetical, the victory of the dominant sentiment over all the others.

All the sentiments, sublime and mirthful, tender and strong, the
effusions of the heart and the workings of the intellect, from the
pleadings of love to the laudatory lists of names, from representations
of battles to witticisms, are alike levelled by the irony and find
themselves uplifted in it. The marvellous Ariostesque octave rises
above them all as they fall before it, the octave which has a life of
its own. To describe the octave as smiling, would be an insufficient
qualification unless the smile be understood in the ideal sense, as
a manifestation of free and harmonious life, poised and energetic,
throbbing in veins rich with good blood and satisfied in this incessant
throbbing. The octaves sometimes have the quality of radiant maidens,
sometimes of shapely youths, with limbs lithe from exercise of the
muscles, careless of exhibiting their prowess, because it is revealed
in their every gesture and attitude.--Olympia comes ashore with her
lover on a desolate and deserted island, after many misfortunes, and a
long, tempestuous sea voyage:

    Il travaglio del mare e la paura,
    che tenuta alcun di l'aveano desta;
    Il ritrovarsi al lito ora sicura,
    lontana da rumor, nella foresta:
    e che nessun pensier, nessuna cura,
    poi che'l suo amante ha seco, la molesta;
    fûr cagion ch'ebbe Olimpia si gran sonno
    che gli orsi e i ghiri aver maggior nol ponno.[1]

Here we have the complete analysis of the reasons why Olympia fell
into the deep sleep, expressed with precision; but all this is clearly
secondary to the intimate sentiment expressed by the octave, which
seems to enjoy itself, and certainly does so in describing a motion,
a becoming, which attain completion.--Bradamante and Marfisa vainly
pursue King Agramante, to put him to death:

    Come due belle e generose parde
    che fuor del lascio sien di pari uscite,
    poscia ch' i cervi o le capre gagliarde
    indarno aver si veggano seguite,
    vergognandosi quasi che fûr tarde,
    sdegnose se ne tornano e pentite;
    così tornâr le due donzelle, quando
    videro il Pagan salvo, sospirando.[2]

Here we find a like process and a like result, but we observe a like
process and result where there appears to be nothing whatever of
intrinsic interest in the subject, that is to say, where the thought
is merely conventional, a complimentary expression of courtly homage
or an expression of friendship and esteem. To say of a fair lady: "She
seemed in every act of hers to be a Goddess descended from heaven," is
not a subtle figure, but it is so turned and so inspired with rhythm by
Ariosto that we assist at the manifestation of the Goddess as she moves
majestically along, witnessing the astonishment of those present and
seeing them kneel devoutly down, as the little drama unrolls itself:

    Julia Gonzaga, che dovunque il piede
    volge e dovunque i sereni occhi gira,
    non pur ogn' altra di beltà le cede,
    ma, come scesa dal ciel Dea, l'ammira.[3] ...

To rattle off a list of mere names with a view to affording honourable
mention, and without varying any of them beyond the addition of
some slight word-play, is an exercise even less subtle; but Ariosto
arranges the names of contemporary painters as though upon a Parnassus,
according to the greatest among them the most lofty place, in such a
manner that those bare names each of them resound (owing to the mastery
of the many stresses in the verse), so as to seem alive and endowed
with sensation:

    E quei che fùro a' nostri di, o sono ora,
    Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Gian Bellino,
    duo Dossi, e quel ch' a par sculpe e colora,
    Michel, più che mortale, Angel divino ...[4]

The "reflections" of Ariosto, which were held to be "commonplaces" by
De Sanctis, "not profound and original observations," have by others
been described as "banal" and "contradictory." But they are reflections
of Ariosto, which should not be meditated upon but sung:

    Oh gran contrasto in giovanil pensiero,
    desir di laude, ed impeto d' Amore!
    Nè, chi più vaglia, ancor si trova il vero,
    che resta or questo or quello superiore....[5]

It could be said of the irony of Ariosto, that it is like the eye of
God, who looks upon the movement of creation, of all creation, loving
all things equally, good and evil, the very great and the very small
in man and in the grain of sand, because he has made it all, and finds
in it nought but motion itself, eternal dialectic, rhythm and harmony.
From the ordinary meaning of the word "irony" has been accomplished the
passage to the metaphysical meaning assumed by it among Fichtians and
Romantics. We should be ready to apply their theory to the inspiration
of Ariosto, save that these critics and thinkers confused with irony
what is called humour, strangeness and extravagance, that is to say,
extra-aesthetic facts, which contaminate and dissolve art. Our theory
on the contrary is less pretentious and exaggerated, confining itself
rigorously within the bounds of art, as Ariosto confined himself within
the bounds of art, never diverging into the clumsy or humouristic,
which is a sign of weakness: his irony was the irony of an artist, sure
of his own strength. This perhaps is the reason or one of the reasons
why Ariosto did not suit the taste of the dishevelled Romantics, who
were inclined to prefer Rabelais to him and even Carlo Gozzi.

To weaken all orders of sentiment, to render them all equal in their
abasement, to deprive beings of their autonomy, to remove from them
their own particular soul, amounts to converting the world of spirit
into the world of _nature:_ an unreal world, which has no existence
save when we perform upon it this act of conversion, and in certain
respects, the whole world becomes nature for Ariosto, a surface
drawn and coloured, shining, but without substance. Hence his seeing
of objects in their every detail, as a naturalist making minute
observations, his description that is not satisfied with a single
trait which suffices as inspiration for other artists, hence his lack
of passionate impatience with its inherent objections to certain
material. It may seem that the figure of St. John is drawn in the way
it is, as a jest:

    Nel lucente vestibulo di quella
    felice casa un Vecchio al Duca occorre,
    Che'l manto ha rosso e bianca la gonnella,
    che l'un più al latte, l'altro al minio opporre;
    i crini ha bianchi e bianca la mascella
    di folta barba ch'al petto discorre ...[6]

But the beauty of Olympia is portrayed in a like manner, forgetful of
the chastity of the lady, which might have seemed to ask a different
sort of description or rather veiling:

    Le bellezze d' Olimpia eran di quelle
    che son più rare; e non la fronte sola,
    gli occhi e le guancie, e le chiome avea belle,
    la bocca, il naso, gli omeri e la gola....[7]

Finally, Medoro is described in the same way, Medoro whose brave and
devoted heart and youthful heroism might seem to ask in its turn a
less attentive observation of its fresh youthfulness:

    Medoro avea la guancia colorita,
    e bianca e grata ne la età novella.[8] ...

The very numerous similes between the personages and the situations in
which they find themselves and the spectacles afforded by the life of
animals or the phenomena of nature, also form an almost prehensible
and palpable part of this conversion of the human world into the world
of nature. We shall not give details of it, for this has already been
done in an irritatingly patient manner by a German philologist, whose
cumbrous compilation effectually precludes one from desiring to dwell
even for a moment upon Ariosto's similes, comparisons and metaphors.

This apparent naturalism, this objectivism, of which we have
demonstrated the profoundly subjective character, has led to the
erroneous statement, already met with, as to Ariosto's form consisting
of indifference and chilly observation, directed to the external
world. He has been coupled with his contemporary Machiavelli in this
respect. Machiavelli examined history and politics with a sagacious
eye, describing--as they say--their mode of procedure and formulating
their laws, to which he gave expression in his prose with analogously
inexorable objectivity and scientific coldness. It is true that both
did in a certain but in a very remote sense, destroy a prior spiritual
content and naturalised in different fields and with different ends
(Machiavelli destroyed the mediaeval religious conception of history
and politics). But this judgment of Machiavelli amounts to nothing more
than a brilliant or principal remark, for Machiavelli, as a thinker,
developed and explained facts with his new vigorous thought, and as a
writer gave an apparently cold form to his severe passion. Ariosto's
naturalistic and objective tendency is also to be regarded as nothing
more than a metaphor, because Ariosto reduced his material to nature,
in order to spiritualise it in a new way, by creating spiritual forms
of Harmony.

From the opposite point of view and arising out of what we have just
said, we must refrain from praising Ariosto for his "epicity," for
the epic nobility and decorum which Galilei praised so much in him,
or for the force and coherence of his personages, so much admired by
the old as well as by new and even recent critics. How could there be
epicity in the _Furioso,_ when the author not only lacked the ethical
sentiments of the epos and when even that small amount, which he might
be said to have inherited, was dissolved with all the rest in harmony
and irony? And how could there be true and proper characters in the
poem, if characters and personages in art are nothing but the notes of
the soul of the poet themselves, in their diversity and opposition?
These become embodied in beings who certainly seem to live their own
proper and particular lives, but really live, all of them, the same
life variously distributed and are sparks of the same central power.
One of the worst of critical prejudices is to suppose that characters
live on their own account and can almost continue living outside the
works of art of which they form a part and in which they in no wise
differ nor can be disassociated from the strophes, the verses and the
words. Since there is no free energy of passionate sentiments in the
_Furioso,_ we do not find there characters, but figures, drawn and
painted certainly, but without relief or density, portrayed rather as
general or typical than individual beings. The knights resemble and
mingle with one another, though differentiated by their goodness or
wickedness, their greater polish or greater rudeness, or by means of
external and accidental attributes, often by their names alone; in
like manner the women are either amorous or perfidious, virtuous and
content with one love, or dissolute and perverse, often distinguished
merely by their different adventures or the names that adorn them. The
same is to be said of the narratives and descriptions (typical and
non-individual, or but little individual, is the madness of Orlando,
to compare which with Lear's is a rhetorician's fancy), and of natural
objects, landscapes, palaces, gardens, and all else. Reserves have been
and can with justice even be made as to the coherence of the characters
taken as a whole and forming part of a general scheme, for Ariosto's
personages take many liberties with themselves, according to the course
of the events with which they find themselves connected, or rather
according to the services which the author asks of them.

Such warnings as these are indispensable, because, if some readers
realise their expectation of finding objectively described and
coherent characters in Ariosto and consequently praise him for creating
them, others with like expectations equally unfounded are disappointed
and consequently blame him. Thus for De Sanctis Ariosto's feminine
characters have seemed to be inferior to those of Dante, of Shakespeare
and of Goethe: but this is an impossible comparison, because Angelica,
Olympia, and Isabella, although they certainly lack the passionate
intensity of Francesca, Desdemona and Margaret, yet the latter for
their part lack the harmonious octaves in which the first trio lives
and has its being, consisting of just these octaves. And what is more,
neither trio suffers from the imperfections, which are imperfections
only in the light of imperfect critical knowledge and consequent
prejudice, but not real imperfections and poetical contradictions in
themselves. De Sanctis also blamed Ariosto for his lack of sentiment
for nature, as though it were a defect; but what is called sentiment
for nature (as for that matter the great master De Sanctis himself
taught) does not depend upon nature, but rather upon the attitude of
the human spirit, upon the feelings of comfort, of melancholy or of
religious terror, with which man invests nature and finds them where
he has placed them; but this attitude was foreign to the fundamental
attitude of Ariosto, and were there to be by chance some reference to
it in the poem, were some note of sentiment to sound there, we should
immediately be sensible of the discord and impropriety. To Lessing,
another objective critic, the portrayal of the beauties of Alcina
seemed to be a mistake and to exceed the limit of poetry, to which
De Sanctis replied that this materiality which Lessing blamed was
the secret of the poetry, because the beauty of the magician Alcina
required a material description, since it was fictitious in its nature.
This blame was unjust, and although the answer to it was ingenious,
yet it was perhaps not perfectly correct, for we have already seen
that Ariosto always described thus both true and imaginary beauties,
Olympias and Alcinas. The true answer seems to be the one already
given, that it would be useless to seek for features of energy in
Ariosto, lively portraits dashed off in a couple of brush strokes, for
these things presuppose a mode of feeling that he lacked altogether or,
at any rate suppressed. Those "laughing fleeting" eyes, which are all
Sylvia, "le doux sourire amoureux et souffrant," which are the whole
of the spiritual sister-soul of the _Maison du Berger,_ do not belong
to Ariosto, but to Leopardi and to De Vigny.

There are two ways in which the _Furioso_ should not be read: the
first is the way in which one reads a work of rhythmic and lofty
moral inspiration, like the _Promessi Sposi,_ tracing, that is to
say, the development of a serious human affection, which circulates
in and determines every part alike, even to the smallest detail; the
second is that suitable for such works as _Faust,_ where the general
composition, which is more or less guided by mental concepts, does not
at all coincide with the poetical inspiration of the separate parts.
Here the poetical should be separated from the unpoetical parts,
and the poetically endowed reader will neglect the one to enjoy the
other. In the _Furioso,_ this inequality of work is absent or only
present to a very slight extent (that is to say, to the extent that
imperfection must ever be present in the most perfect work of man)
and it is as equally harmonious as the _Promessi Sposi;_ but it lacks
that particular form of passionate seriousness, to be found throughout
Manzoni's work and in stray passages of Goethe's. The _Furioso_
should therefore be read in a third manner, namely by following a
content which is ever the same, yet ever expressed in new forms,
whose attraction consists in the magic of this ever-identical yet
inexhaustible variety of appearances, without paying attention to the
material element of the narratives and descriptions.

As we see, this too amounts to accepting with a rectification a common
judgment on the _Furioso,_ which may be said to have accompanied the
poem from the moment of its first appearance: namely, that it is a
work devoid of seriousness, being of a light, burlesque, pleasing
and frivolous sort. It was described as "_ludicro more_" by Cardinal
Sadoleto, when according the license for printing the edition of 1516
in the name of Leo X, although he added to this, perhaps translating
the declaration of the poet himself, "_longo tamen studio et
cogitatione, multisque vigiliis confectum."_ Bernardo Tasso, Trissino
and Speroni, and other suchlike grave pedantic personages, did not
fail to blame Ariosto for having dedicated his poem to the sole end
of pleasing. Boileau looked upon it simply as a collection of _fables
comiques,_ and Sulzer called it a "poem with the sole end of pleasing,
not directed by the reason"; and even to-day are to be found its merits
and defects noted down to credit and debit account in many a scholastic
manual; on the credit side stand the perfection of the octave, the
vivacity of the narrative, the graceful style, to the debit account
lack of profound sentiment, light which shines but does not warm and
failure to touch the heart. We accept and rectify this judgment with
the simple observation that those who regard the poem thus see clearly
enough everything that is on a level with their own eyes, but do not
raise them to regard what is above their heads and is the principal
quality of the _Furioso,_ owing to which the frivolity of Ariosto
reveals itself as profound seriousness of rare quality, profound
emotion of the heart, but of a noble and exquisite heart, equally
remote from the emotions of what is generally looked upon as life and
reality.

Apart, but not separated from, nor alien to, nor indifferent: and in
respect to this we must resume and develop the analysis already begun
by setting readers on their guard against the easy misunderstanding
of the "destruction," which we have already spoken of as brought
about by the tone and the irony of Ariosto. This must not be looked
upon as total destruction and annihilation, but as destruction in
the philosophic sense of the word, which is also conservation. Were
this otherwise, what could be the function of the varied material or
emotional content, which we have examined in the poem? Are the stars
stuck into the sky like pin-heads in a pin-cushion (Don Ferrante would
sarcastically enquire)? The eloquence of other's but not Ariosto's
poetry, arises from a total indifference of sentiment and an absence
of content: theirs is the rouge on the corpse, not the rosy cloud
that enfolds and adorns the living. Such eloquence produces soft and
superficially musical versification of the _Adone,_ not the octave of
the _Furioso;_ and to quote Giraldi Cinzio once more, the lover of
Ariosto (who gave the advice to readers not to confuse the "facility"
of the _Furioso_ with verses "of sweet sound but no feeling"), the
eight hundred "stanzas," by one of the composers of that time, which
Giraldi once had to read, "which seemed to be collections made among
the flowery gardens of poetry, so full were they of beauty from stanza
to stanza, but put together, were vain things, seeming, so far as sense
is concerned, to have been born of the soil of childishness," because
their author was "intent only upon the pleasure that comes from the
splendour and choice of words, and had altogether neglected the dignity
and assistance afforded by sensibility."

Had Ariosto while in the act of composition not been keenly stirred
in the various ways described, by the varied material employed in his
poem, he would have lacked the impetus, the vivacity, the thought,
the intonation, which were afterwards reduced and tempered by the
harmonious disposition of his soul. He would have been a cold writer of
poetry, and no one ever succeeded in writing poetry coldly. This was
the case, as it seems to me, with the _Cinque Canti,_ which he excluded
from the _Furioso_ and for which he substituted others. In them the
cunning of Ariosto's hand is everywhere to be found in the descriptive
passages and transitions, as are also all the elements of the every-day
world, stories of war, knightly adventures, tales of love (the love
of Penticone for the wife of Otto and that of Astolfo for the wife of
Gismondo), satirical tales (the foundation of the city of Medea, with
the sexual law which she imposed upon it), astonishing fancies (such
as the knights imprisoned in the body of the whale, where they have
their beds, their kitchen and their tub), copious moral and political
reflections (on jealousy, ambition, wicked men, mercenary soldiers);
yet we feel nevertheless that Ariosto wrote them in an unhappy moment,
when Minerva was reluctant or averse: the poet did not take sufficient
interest and lacked the necessary heat. And is there no part of
the _Furioso_ itself that languishes? It would seem so, not indeed
in the forty cantos of the first edition, which originated in his
twelve-year-old poetical springtime, but in the parts which were added
later, all of them (as could be shown) more or less intellectualiste
of origin, and therefore (save the episode of Olympia) not among the
most read and most popular. The most intellectualistic of all is the
long delay introduced toward the end of the poem, the double betrothal
of Bradamante and the contest in courtesy between Leone and Ruggiero,
where the tone becomes here and there altogether pedestrian. It is true
that philologists who have given themselves to art have discovered
progress in Ariosto in just these languid parts, and above all in the
_Cinque Canti,_ where he has lost his bearings and is out of tune. Here
they suppose him to have become "serious," to join hands with no less
a personage than Torquato Tasso.

The process of "destruction" effected upon the material may possibly be
rendered clear to those who do not appreciate philosophical formulas
or find them too difficult, by means of the comparison with what in
the technique of painting is called "concealing a colour," which does
not mean its cancellation, but its toning down. In such an equally
distributed toning down, all the sentiments which go to form the web of
the poem, not only preserve their own physiognomy, but their reciprocal
proportions and connections; so that although they certainly appear in
the "transparent polished glasses" and in the "smooth shining waters"
of the octaves, pale as "pearls on a white forehead" to the sight, yet
they retain their distinctness and are more or less strong according
to the greater or less strength which they possessed in the soul of
the poet. The comic, at once lowered and raised, nevertheless remains
comical, the sublime remains sublime, the voluptuous voluptuous, the
reflective reflective, and so on. And sometimes it happens that Ariosto
reaches the boundary, which if he were to pass, he would abandon his
own tone, but he never does abandon it, because he always refrains
from passing the boundary. Everyone remembers the most emotional
words and passages of the _Furioso_: Medoro, who, when surrounded and
surprised by his enemies, makes a sort of tower of himself, using the
trees as a shield, and never abandoning the body of his lord, Zerbino,
who feels penetrated with pity and stays his hand as he looks on his
beautiful countenance, when on the point of slaying him; Zerbino, who
when about to die, is desperate at leaving his Isabella alone, the prey
of unknown men, while she bursts into tears and speaks sweet words
of eternal faithfulness; Fiordiligi, who hears the news, or rather
divines the death of her husband ... We always catch our breath, and
something--I know not what--comes into our eyes, as we repeat these
and similar verses. Here is Fiordiligi, who shudders as she feels the
presentiment:

    E questa novità d' aver timore
    le fa tremar di doppia tema il core.[9]

The fatal news comes to hand: Astolfo and Sansonetto, the two friends
who happen to be where she has remained, hide it from her for an
hour or so, and then decide to betake themselves to her that they may
prepare her for the misfortune that has befallen:

    Tosto ch'entrano, e ch'ella loro il viso
    Vide di gaudio in tal vittoria privo,
    Senz' altro annunzio sa, senz' altro avviso,
    Che Brandimarte suo non è più vivo....[10]

Another moment of the same narrative, where suffering appears to resume
its strength and to grow upon itself, is that in which Orlando, who is
awaited, enters the temple where the funeral of Brandimarte is being
celebrated: Orlando, the friend, the companion, the witness of his
death:

    Levossi, al ritornar del Paladino,
    Maggiore il grido e raddoppiossi il pianto.[11]

Before such words and images as these, De Sanctis used to say to his
pupils, when explaining to them the _Furioso_: "See how much heart
Ariosto had!" But he always kept telling them this truth also:
that "Ariosto never pushes situations to the point of painfulness,"
forbidden to him by the tone of his poetry; and he used to show them
how Ariosto used sometimes to make use of interruptions, sometimes of
graceful similitudes, or reflections, or devices of style, in order to
restrain the painfulness ready to break through. Those critics who for
instance are shocked by the octaves on the name of "Isabella" are too
exigent, or ask too much, and what they ought not to ask (this name
of Isabella was destined by God to adorn beautiful, noble, courteous,
chaste and wise women from this time forth, and was originally intended
as homage from Ariosto to the Marchesana of Mantua, Isabella of Este).
With these octaves he concludes the narrative of the sacrifice of
her life made by Isabella to keep faith with Zerbino; they do not
understand that those octaves and the _Proficiscere_ which precedes
them ("Go thou in peace, thou blessed soul") and the very account of
the drunken bestiality of Rodomonte, and prior to that, the semi-comic
scene of the saintly hermit who presides over the virtue of Isabella,
"like a practised mariner and is quite prepared to offer her speedily
a sumptuous meal of spiritual food," the hermit whom Rodomonte seizes
by the neck and throws three miles into the sea, are all words and
representations so accentuated as to produce the effect of allowing
Isabella to die without plunging the _Furioso_ into tragedy with its
correspondingly tragical catharsis; for the _Furioso_ has its own
general and perpetually harmonious catharsis, which we have now made
sufficiently clear.

It is precisely owing to the action of this sentimental and passionate
material, in spite of and through its effectual surpassing, that the
varied colouring arising from it enters the poem and confers upon it
that character of humanity, which led us to declare at the outset of
our analysis that when we define Ariosto as the _Poet of Harmony,_ we
proposed only to indicate where the _accent_ of his work falls, but
that he is the poet of Harmony and also of something else, of harmony
developed in a particular world of sentiments, and in fact that the
harmony to which Ariosto attains, is not harmony in general, but an
_altogether Ariostesque Harmony._

[Footnote 1: Tempestuous seas and haunting fear which had kept her
waking for days now gave place to a feeling of security: deep in the
forest and removed from care and noise, Olympia clasped her lover to
her breast and fell into sleep as deep as that of bears and dormice.]

[Footnote 2: As two fair generous leopards issuing simultaneouly from
the slips return full of shame and repentance as though weighed down by
the disgrace of having vainly pursued the lusty goats or stags which
had tempted them to the chase: So returned the two damsels sighing when
they saw the Pagan was saved.]

[Footnote 3: Wherever Julia Gonzaga sets her foot or turns her serene
gaze, not only does she excel all in beauty but compels adoration like
a Goddess.]

[Footnote 4: And the painters who lived in former days as well as those
still with us:--Leonardo, A. Mantegna, Gian Bellino, the two Dossi and
Michael who sculptures and portrays with more than mortal skill.]

[Footnote 5: Oh powerful contrast in the breast of youth aflame with
desire for valorous renown and the passion of love; nor can one say
which is the more delectable, since each lays claim alternately to
superiority.]

[Footnote 6: An aged man goes to encounter the Duke along the bright
vestibule of that fortunate house: the sage is clad in red cloak and
white robe, the former white as milk, the latter vermilion, vivid as a
rose. His hair is white and his chin snowy with the thick beard flowing
over his chest.]

[Footnote 7: Olympia's loveliness was of rarest excellence: not only
was she fair of face with forehead, eyes, cheeks glowing amidst the
hair which waved over her shoulders: all else was perfection.]

[Footnote 8: Medoro's cheek showed white and red in the fresh flourish
of youth.]

[Footnote 9: The novel feeling of fear caused her heart to tremble,
doubly terrified.]

[Footnote 10: As she saw them enter without joyous exultation over so
great a victory, with no announcement or any direct word of it, she was
aware her Brandimarte had been slain.]

[Footnote 11: On the return of the Paladin, the cry arose more loudly
and the wail redoubled.]

CHAPTER VI

HISTORICAL DISASSOCIATIONS

From these last words, there can be no difficulty in seeing what must
be our opinion as to the confrontations and comparative judgments
instituted between Ariosto and Pulci or Boiardo, and even Cieco da
Ferrara, and all the other Italian poets of chivalry. These have
sometimes been extended so as to include poetical humourists, such
as Folengo and Rabelais, or burlesque writers like Berni, Tassoni,
Forteguerri, or neo-epical poets, like Tasso and Camoens, and finally
to Cervantes, that direct and fully conscious ironist of chivalry. This
is as perfectly admissible as it is natural that classes of "poems of
chivalry" or "narrative poems" or "romances," should be formed, when
once rhetoricians and writers of treatises have invented the genus and
that these should be disposed in a series under such headings, thus
forming a sort of artificial history, with no real foundation beyond
the accidents of certain abstract literary forms, which are really
representative of certain social tendencies and institutions. And it
is equally, indeed more admissible, because relating to more nearly
connected problems, that these documents afforded by poems of chivalry
should be made use of among other documents in the investigation
of the gradual dissolution of the ideal of chivalry in the first
period of modern society. Salvemini has not neglected to do this in a
temperate manner, in his monograph relating to "knightly dignity" in
the commune of Florence. But the aesthetic judgment, which they strive
to deduce from these comparisons, is inadmissible and illegitimate:
when for instance they bestow the palm on this or that poet for having
better observed than others the "genus" or a particular "species" and
"variety" of the genus; or because chivalry or anti-chivalry has been
better represented by one than by another. We can explain the fact that
De Sanctis was sometimes entangled in this sociological net, in spite
of his exquisite sense of individuality and poetry, when we consider
the condition of studies in his time and his philosophical origins;
but it is none the less true that the judgments which he pronounced
upon this matter, deviate from true and proper aesthetic criticism, and
carry with them the bad effects of every deviation.

Having ourselves refused to be among those whose feet are caught in
the insidious net of Caligorante, we shall have nothing further to say
as to comparisons with Ariosto, because the poet of the _Furioso_ has
always come out of those maladroit confrontations and the arbitrary
judgments of merit which result from them, crowned above all others
with the sign of victory, or at least unconquered by any other, and
admitting but a very few as his equals. The preference accorded by
romantic German men of letters to Boiardo (recently revived to some
extent in Italy, by Panzini) belongs rather to the domain of anecdote
than to the history of criticism: Boiardo is looked upon by them as
the poet of grand heroic dreams, while Ariosto is a mere citizen
poet; or Boiardo again is lauded for having better represented the
logical form of the Italian poem of chivalry, prescribed according
to a chemical combination drawn up in the philological laboratory of
the anti-Ariostesque Professor Rajna, who is in other respects a most
worthy and well-deserving person. But there is no denying that the
peculiar beauty of Ariosto has often injured Boiardo, Pulci, Tasso
and other poets, who have been illegitimately compared with him; and
therefore, without talking of Tasso--who has now won his case, although
he numbered a Galilei among the ranks of those who under-estimated
him when making the above-mentioned confrontation,--it will not be
inopportune to cast a rapid glance upon Pulci and Boiardo.

Looking at Pulci in Pulci and not at Ariosto, since to place one
physiognomy on the top of another is not a good way of seeing, what
do we find? What is the _Morgante?_ It is above all a whimsicality,
one of those works, born of a caprice or a bet, to which the author
neither devotes himself after the necessary previous meditations, nor
works at with the scrupulosity of the artist, who expends his powers
and employs his utmost endeavour to do the best he can everywhere. But
the occasion or the inspiration is never the substance of a work, which
on the contrary always consists of what the author really brings to it
in the course of his labour; and the mention of the occasional origin
of the _Morgante_ only avails here to account for its ill-digested
and undoubtedly chaotic nature. Nor is it to the purpose to recall
what certainly seems to have been Pulci's intention, namely, to
satisfy in his own way a wish of the pious Lucrezia Tornabuoni, by
composing or re-writing a Christian poem of chivalry, for this in its
turn only explains certain superficialities and extrinsicalities,
such as the general plan of the poem and the parts of it possessing
religious tone, which are successful to the extent that they could
be successful with such a brain as Pulci's. A commencement will have
been made towards a proper understanding of the substance of the
_Morgante,_ its proper and intrinsic inspiration, by referring it first
to the curiosity with which educated Florentine citizens observed and
reproduced the customs and the psychology of the people of the city and
the surrounding districts, productive of the poetry of Politian, of
Lorenzo and of Pulci himself, author of the _Beca di Dicomano,_ each
with its various popular appeal. That inspiration contains something
both of the sympathetic and of the ironical, as we observe in all
poetry based upon popular themes and use of dialect, in the German
romantic _Lieder_ and _Balladen_ and in the dialect literature of the
Italy of to-day (one feels inclined to call the _Morgante_ "dialect"
and not "Italian"): and in Pulci there vibrated a sympathetic-ironic
chord, peculiar to himself and therefore naturally not exactly the
same as in Lorenzo, or still less in Politian. But it did not vibrate
pure and clear, being prevented from doing so, not so much owing to
initial eccentricity and to the intention above-mentioned, as to the
accumulation of other inspirations, arising in the fertile spirit of
Pulci. For Pulci had in mind, in addition to the reconstruction of a
sympathetic-ironic popular poem of the popular story-tellers, something
that might be called a "Picaresque romance," understanding thereby
not only tales of the sort to be found in Spanish literature, but
also certain other tales of Boccaccio and a great part of Folengo's
_Baldus._ Picaresque romance asked in its turn sympathy and irony, but
of a different sort to the preceding, no longer sympathy for popular
ingenuity, but for cleverness, trickiness, for an irony, which should
no longer be simply that of superior culture, but also of superior
morality; and this too was in some measure and in his own way in Pulci;
but he often spoilt this disposition of mind by inadvertently passing,
like a person lacking refinement of education, from Picaresque romance
to Picaresque intonation, from the representation of a blackguard
to the blackguard himself. And there is something else also in the
_Morgante_: the imaginings and caprices of Pulci himself, his own
personal moral opinions, religious or philosophical; things that are
sometimes thought about even by those who do not think much about them,
and which, owing to this casual hasty thinking, become nevertheless
opinions or semi-opinions. Finally the _Morgante_ is a skein formed
of strands of different colour and make, some of them thicker or
thinner than others: it is a poem that is not in tune with a single
dominant inspiration, and if we take one of those elements that we
have described and transport it to the principal place, we immediately
have the feeling that we are depriving the complex nature of the work
of its vigour. Nevertheless the _Morgante_ must be looked upon as one
of the most richly endowed works of our literature, where we meet at
every step with delightful figures and traits of expression: Morgante,
Margutte, Fiorinetta, Astarotte, Farfarello, Archbishop Turpin, certain
touches of character in Orlando, and especially in Rinaldo, and also in
Antea, together with certain descriptions, anecdotes and acute remarks.
Margutte, plunged deep in vice, but quite shameless and aware that he
cannot be other than what nature made him, is also human, incapable
of treachery, capable of affection for Morgante and of enduring his
all-consuming voracity; so that when his companion dies, he never
ceases recalling him to mind, and talking about him even with Orlando:

    E conta d'ogni sua piacevolezza,
    E lacrimava ancor di tenerezza.[1]

Rinaldo, ardent and furious for revenge, seeks to slay Carlo Magno, who
has been hidden from him; but after a few days Orlando leads him to
believe that the Emperor has died of desperation, and tells him that he
has appeared to him in vision, whereupon Rinaldo changes countenance
and begins to wish him alive again, to feel pity for him, to repent him
of his fury, so that in this way peace and reconciliation are effected.
After a great battle, the conquered as they leave the field, recognise
their dead ones where they lie, and we hear them lamenting a father, a
brother or a friend:

    Eravi alcun che cavava l'elmetto
    al suo figliolo, al suo cognato, o padre;
    poi lo baciava con pietoso affetto,
    E dicea: "Lasso, fra le nostre squadre
    non tornerai in Soria più, poveretto;
    che dirén noî alla tua afflitta madre,
    o chi sarà più quel che la conforti?
    Tu ti riman cogli altri al campo morti."[2]

And this is an apology, by means of which Orlando explains to Rinaldo
that he has remarked his new affection, and that it is of no use that
he should try to deceive him with words:

    Rispose Orlando:--Noi sarem que' frati
    che mangiando il migliaccio, l'un si cosse;
    l'altro gli vede gli occhi imbambolati,
    e domando quel che la cagion fosse.
    Colui rispose: "Noi sián due restati
    a mensa, e gli altri sono or per le fosse,
    ché trentatré fummo e tu lo sia:
    Quand' io vi penso, io piango sempre mai."
    Quell' altro, che vedea che lo 'ngannava,
    finse di pianger, mostrando dolore;
    e disse a quel che di ciò domandava:
    "E anco io piango, anzi mi scoppia il core,
    che noi sián due restati"; e sospirava,
    "Ed è già l'uno all' altro traditore."
    Cosi mi par che faccian noi, Rinaldo:
    "che nol di tu che'l migliaccio era caldo?"[3]

And here is an octave in which Pulci makes it psychologically clear why
King Carlo allowed himself to be led astray and deceived by Gano:

    Molte volte, anzi spesso, c'interviene
    che tu t'arrecchi un amico e fratello,
    e ciò che fa ti par che facci bene,
    dipinto e colorito col pennallo.
    Questo primo legame tanto tiene,
    che, s' altra volta ti dispiace quello,
    e qualcha cosa ti parà molesta,
    sempre la prima impression pur resta.[4]

"These are not the octaves of Ariosto ": we have said as much.
Certainly they are not, just as the octaves of Ariosto are not those of
Pulci, and Ariosto, whatever trouble he might have taken, could never
have attained to the inventions, the emotions, the clevernesses and
the accents of the _Morgante,_ which are just as inimitable in their
way as are the graces of the _Furioso._ And it is really unjust and
almost odious that the reader, face to face with the treasures of fresh
and original poetry, which Pulci throws without counting into his lap,
should pull a wry face and ungratefully remark that Pulci's poetry
is not that other poetry which he is now thinking about, and that it
should be abolished, or made perfect by the other poetry!

Almost the same thing is to be repeated about the author of the
_Innamorato,_ who has also been tormented, condemned and executed by
means of a comparison with the author of the _Furioso,_ sometimes
conducted with such a refinement of cruelty that the strophes of the
one are printed facing the strophes of the other, and selected as
bearing upon similar situations, so that every word and syllable may
be weighed; as though the strophes of a poet are not to be considered
solely in themselves and in the poem of which they form part, and to
be condemned, if occasion arise for condemnation, within that circle
to which are confined the real conditions of judgment. Boiardo, to one
who reads him without any sort of preconception and abandons himself
to the simple impressions of reading, immediately shows himself to be
altogether different from what some critics maintain, the pedantic
singer of chivalry taken seriously, who gives way now and then to
involuntary laughter and to a harsh intonation which should be toned
down and softened by the skill of an Ariosto. He is quite other also
than the epic bard, which some people have imagined him to be; he could
not be epic, because he had no national sentiment, no feeling for
class or religion, and the marvellous in him is all fancy, a marvel
of the fairies; nor was he a pedant, for he obviously follows his own
spontaneous inclinations, without any secondary purpose. No, Boiardo
was on the contrary a soul passionately devoted to the primitive and
the energetic, his was the energy of the lance-thrust, of the brand
wielded, but also the energy of a proud will, of ferocious courage,
of intransigent honour, of marvellous devices. And it is owing just