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