Love matter dominates in theFurioso,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; andFiordiligi, 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 thesearms, 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 theFuriosoitself) 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 theFurioso,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 theduties 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 knowthat 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 theFurioso.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 inthe 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 theMonarchs 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 wedo 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 theFuriosoand 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 andwithout 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 theFurioso.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 ofAriosto, prior to the composition of theFurioso,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.
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 thetoneof 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 definedironyof 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 restrictedand 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 isrevealed 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 sonnoche 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 pardeche fuor del lascio sien di pari uscite,poscia ch' i cervi o le capre gagliardeindarno aver si veggano seguite,vergognandosi quasi che fûr tarde,sdegnose se ne tornano e pentite;così tornâr le due donzelle, quandovidero 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 piedevolge 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 byothers 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 isto 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 ofnature: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 impatiencewith 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 quellafelice 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 mascelladi 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 quelleche 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 itsturn 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 examinedhistory 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 admiredby the old as well as by new and even recent critics. How could there be epicity in theFurioso,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 theFurioso,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 andcoherent 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 whichman 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 douxsourire amoureux et souffrant," which are the whole of the spiritual sister-soul of theMaison du Berger,do not belong to Ariosto, but to Leopardi and to De Vigny.
There are two ways in which theFuriososhould not be read: the first is the way in which one reads a work of rhythmic and lofty moral inspiration, like thePromessi 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 asFaust,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 theFurioso,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 thePromessi Sposi;but it lacks that particular form of passionate seriousness, to be found throughout Manzoni's work and in stray passages of Goethe's. TheFuriososhould 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 theFurioso,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 offables comiques,and Sulzer called it a "poem with thesole 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 theFurioso,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 ofAriosto. 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 theAdone,not the octave of theFurioso;and to quote Giraldi Cinzio once more, the lover of Ariosto (who gave the advice to readers not to confuse the "facility" of theFuriosowith 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 thesoil 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 theCinque Canti,which he excluded from theFuriosoand 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 thewhale, 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 theFuriosoitself 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 theCinque Canti,where he has lost his bearings and is out of tune. Here they suppose him to havebecome "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 neverdoes abandon it, because he always refrains from passing the boundary. Everyone remembers the most emotional words and passages of theFurioso: 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 timorele 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 herfor 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 visoVide 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 theFurioso: "See how much heart Ariosto had!" But he always kept tellingthem 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 theProficiscerewhich 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 spiritualfood," 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 theFuriosointo tragedy with its correspondingly tragical catharsis; for theFuriosohas 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 thePoet of Harmony,we proposed only to indicate where theaccentof 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 analtogether Ariostesque Harmony.